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Karen Fleming
Johns Hopkins University Group website Karen Fleming is a professor in the TC Jenkins Department of Biophysics. She earned her PhD at Georgetown and completed postdoctoral work at Yale. She focuses on discovery science, and her research concerns the forces stabilizing membrane protein folds, including transmembrane helix-helix interactions and outer membrane beta-barrel folding. She is also a vocal advocate for equity in STEM and runs workshops and gives seminars on this topic. Both her research and inclusive excellence efforts have been recognized by numerous awards including the 2019 JHU Provost’s Prize for Faculty Excellence in Diversity and the 2023 Avanti Award from the Biophysical Society. When she is not doing science, she enjoys traveling, knitting, restoring vintage sewing machines, researching her family roots, and Pilates. |
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Leyla Soleymani
McMaster University Group website Dr. Leyla Soleymani received her PhD from University of Toronto in 2010 in Electrical and Computer Engineering and joined McMaster University in 2011 as an Assistant Professor. Dr. Soleymani is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Physics and School of Biomedical Engineering at McMaster and is a University Scholar and the Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Miniaturized Biomedical Devices. Dr. Soleymani was inducted to the Royal Society of Canada, College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists in 2022. Dr. Soleymani’s research is focused on developing biomedical technologies for rapid disease diagnostics and health monitoring, as well as solutions for reducing the spread of infectious diseases. Dr. Soleymani was awarded the Ontario Early Researcher Award in 2016, the Engineering Innovation of the Year Award by the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers in 2020, and the grand prize for Tech Brief’s Create the Future Contest in 2020 for her work on biosensors and biointerfaces. Dr. Soleymani has over 75 high-impact publications and holds several patents in the areas of biosensing and biointerfaces with multiple technologies licensed to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Dr. Soleymani’s research has been covered in mainstream media and she frequently appears on media outlets promoting the Biomedical Engineering research field. |
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Kevin Gardner
City University of New York (CUNY) Group website Following Ph.D. studies at Yale with Joe Coleman, Kevin Gardner postdoc’ed with Lewis Kay at U of T before establishing his independent lab at UT Southwestern Medical Center in 1998. In 2013, he moved to New York to found the Structural Biology Initiative of the new CUNY Advanced Science Research Center and serve as the Einstein Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry at the City College of New York. Combining techniques ranging from biophysics to drug discovery, his group has solved atomic-level pictures and mechanisms of proteins used by cells to sense and respond to changes in the environment around them. These studies have not only led to better understanding of fundamental biology, but also established novel routes to artificially control protein activity. Practical applications of this through two companies spun out of his group, Peloton Therapeutics, Inc. and Optologix, Inc., have led to new clinically-approved cancer therapies (belzutifan, Merck) and novel optogenetic tools used in academic and industrial settings. When not in the lab, Kevin can ideally be found exploring the waters and foods of some corner of the world as an aspiring SCUBA diver and cook – |
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Haissi Cui
University of Toronto Group website Haissi was born in China and grew up in Germany, where she obtained her B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Biochemistry from the Technical University of Munich and continued with a PhD at the University Hospital MRI TUM in cancer research. She then characterized small molecule inhibitors, which are potential therapeutics in cancer and autoimmune disorders, during a first postdoc at the Technical University of Munich. Afterward, Haissi joined the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, USA, as a postdoctoral fellow and later staff scientist, where she studied aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases and their regulatory functions in mammalian cell biology. Since July 2022, the Cui lab is working towards elucidating how the first step of protein synthesis, which constitutes the interpretation of the genetic code, is spatially regulated in human cells, and how nuclear organization can be disrupted by disease-causing mutations. |
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Anna Taubenberger
Technische Universität Dresden Group website Dr. Anna Taubenberger is a group leader at the Biotechnology Center of the Technische Universität (TU) Dresden, Germany. She received her Ph.D. degree from TU Dresden in Biophysics and underwent postdoctoral training at Queensland University of Technology and TU Dresden. Over the past years, Dr. Taubenberger has contributed to a better understanding of cell and tissue mechanics and changes associated with diseases. Her group currently focuses on mechanical cancer cell-microenvironment interactions. To study the role of microenvironment mechanics on cancer cell growth, invasion, and metastasis, her group employ different tools in the lab, e.g. atomic force microscopy (AFM), real-time deformability cytometry (RT-DC), and Brillouin microscopy. Besides the mechanical characterization of patient tumor samples, Dr. Taubenberger and her group are also interested in developing 3D in vitro models to systematically study the influence of microenvironment stiffness on cancer cell behavior. In particular, mechanisms by which cells sense and adapt to their mechanical environment in 3D are explored. So far, Dr. Taubenberger has (co-)authored more than 50 publications in peer-reviewed (h-index = 32) with over 3,500 citations. |
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Christine Mayr
Memorial Sloan Kettering Group website Dr. Mayr received her M.D. from Free University in Berlin and her Ph.D. in Immunology from Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. For her postdoc, she joined David Bartel’s lab at the Whitehead Institute. During her postdoc, she found that oncogenes can get activated through 3′UTR shortening. In 2009, she started her own laboratory in the Cancer Biology and Genetics Program of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. She is a full member of Sloan Kettering Institute and a Full Professor at the Gerstner Sloan Kettering Graduate School of Biomedical Science and at the Weill Cornell Medical College. Her lab studies the functions of mRNAs that go beyond their roles as templates for protein synthesis. Her lab discovered that 3′UTRs can regulate protein function by mediating protein-protein interactions. In 2016, she was awarded the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award to study this topic. More recently, her lab found a cytoplasmic membraneless compartment, called TIS granule network, that forms through the assembly of the RNA-binding protein TIS11B together with its bound mRNAs. The compartment-enriched mRNAs play important functional roles for the TIS granule-translated proteins as they are necessary for protein complex assembly and protein functions. This shows that mRNAs, in addition to acting as templates for protein synthesis, play additional regulatory roles in the cytoplasm. |