Speakers
Catherine Lozupone
Plenary Speaker in Human Microbiome - USA
Dr. Lozupone is as Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. Her research focuses on the complex community of microorganisms that inhabit the gastrointestinal tract. She has been heavily involved in the development of popular computational tools for microbial community analysis, such as the UniFrac algorithm for comparing microbial diversity among many samples using phylogenetic information. Dr. Lozupone currently runs an NIH funded research group that integrates integrative bioinformatics analysis of multi‘omic data with experimental confirmation. Her lab is currently working to understand microbiome composition and function in a variety of disease contexts, with an emphasis on the interaction between the gut microbiome, local and systemic immune phenotypes, and metabolic co-morbidity in HIV-infected individuals.
Chris Rinke
Invited Speaker in Microbial Genomics - Australia
Chris Rinke is a Senior Lecturer at the Australian Centre for Ecogenomics (ACE), University of Queensland, Australia.
His research interests include the phylogeny, taxonomy and ecology of free living and symbiotic Bacteria and Archaea. He focuses on the majority of microbes which elude current culturing efforts. This so-called “Microbial Dark Matter” can only be explored with culture-independent approaches, and Chris has pioneered methods in high throughput single-cell genomics, the separation and sequencing of single bacterial and archaeal cells, and metagenomics, the direct sequencing of DNA from environmental samples.
Currently, the Rinke lab uses a range of "omics" techniques to study the phylogenetic and metabolic diversity of uncultured microbes. The lab focuses on investigating bacterial plastic degradation (including the gut microbiomes of polystyrene eating superworms), describing microbial and viral communities in coastal waterways, exploring microbial compositions in deep-sea subsurface sediments, characterising insect microbiomes, and identifying the main players in terrestrial hot springs. More details are available at the Rinke Lab website: http://rinkelab.org/
Chris is also a member of the Genome Taxonomy Database (GTBD; gtdb.ecogenomic.org) curation team. GTDB is an initiative to establish a standardised microbial taxonomy based on genome phylogeny.
Holger Daims
Invited Speaker in Environmental Biotechnology - Austria
Holger Daims is Professor at the Centre for Microbiology and Environmental Systems Science, University of Vienna, Austria. He was trained in Microbiology at the Universities of Cologne and Aachen (Germany) and received his PhD from the Technical University of Munich (Germany). After post-doctoral training in Munich and a research visit to the University of Queensland, he became a founding member of the Department of Microbial Ecology at the University of Vienna in 2003. He started his research group as Assistant Professor, achieved tenure in 2007 and was subsequently promoted to Associate and Full Professor.
Holger has a long-standing interest in microorganisms that drive the biogeochemical nitrogen cycle, especially nitrite-oxidizing bacteria, in natural and engineered ecosystems. He and his team were involved in the discovery of complete ammonia oxidizers (comammox), which carry out nitrification completely on their own, and found unexpected alternative energy metabolisms in nitrifying microbes. Another focus of Holger’s work is the development and application of single-cell imaging techniques and image analysis tools for studying the structure and functions of complex microbiota in environmental and medical microbiology.
Jennifer Pett-Ridge
Plenary Speaker in Microbial Ecology - USA
| Dr. Jennifer Pett-Ridge is a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at LLNL, Adjunct Professor at UC Merced and a principal investigator of the UC Berkeley Innovative Genomics Institute. Dr. Pett-Ridge studies linkages between microbial ecophysiology and biogeochemical processes (particularly soil carbon cycling), and uses the tools of systems biology and biogeochemistry (stable isotope probing, NanoSIMS imaging, molecular microbial ecology, and computational modeling) to make quantitative estimates of microbiome interactions and their ecosystem effects. She leads multiple team projects for the US Department of Energy, including the Microbes Persist Soil Microbiome Scientific Focus Area, the Roads to Removal assessment of carbon dioxide removal options in the USA, and the LLNL Carbon Initiative. Dr. Pett-Ridge has co-authored over 150 peer-reviewed technical publications that have collectively received over 9,000 total citations. Pett-Ridge is a recipient of a DOE Early Career award (2014), Geochemical Society Endowed Biogeochemistry Medal (2019), Secretary of Energy Achievement Award (2021), the DOE Office of Science Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award (2022), and the 2023 Deborah A Neher Career Award from the Ecological Society of America Soil Ecology Section. |
Justin M. O'Sullivan
Invited Speaker in Human Microbiome - New Zealand
| Justin M. O’Sullivan PhD is a Professor and Director of the Liggins Institute at the University of Auckland. Justin was awarded the 2010 Life Technologies Life Science Award: for Emerging Excellence in Molecular biology in New Zealand. Justin has published >130 peer reviewed articles and four book chapters. He has honorary appointments at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research (Australia), The University of Southampton (UK) and A*STAR Singapore Institute for Clinical Sciences (Singapore). Justin has diverse interests and collaborates with groups in New Zealand and across the world (Sydney, Singapore, Southampton; Jamaica, USA, and Bangladesh).
Justin trained as a molecular microbiologist, before completing postdocs on the genetic code in Candida albicans (University of Kent) and transcription control in Saccharomyces cerevisiae (Oxford university). Over the course of his career, Justin has developed expertise that allows him to follow structural clues to understand how the spatial organization of a genome adds to the information that is hard-coded in the linear sequence of DNA bases. He has also developed interests in the microbiome, its role and functions in the human gut and how it can be manipulated. As part of his on-going interests in the microbiome, Justin co-leads the Gut Bugs trail and M4EFaD clinical trials. In these trials, the teams are integrating approaches to understand the relationships between the human microbiome, genetics, human brain development and disease. The Gut Bugs trial is also testing if microbial restoration can alter human phenotypes and complications associated with these conditions? |
Mark Walker
Invited Speaker in Clinical Microbiology - Australia
Mark’s visit is sponsored by the Maurice Wilkins Centre
My research focuses on the mechanism by which the group A streptococcus (referred to as Streptococcus pyogenes; GAS or simply Strep A) causes invasive disease as well as the development of a vaccine. This bacterium is the cause of numerous suppurative diseases, ranging from mild skin infections such as pharyngitis, scarlet fever, impetigo and cellulitis, to more severe invasive diseases such as septicemia, streptococcal toxic shock syndrome and necrotizing fasciitis. Strep A is placed within the “top 10″ infectious disease causes of human deaths worldwide with Indigenous Australians suffering the highest rates of affliction in the world.
There are over 200 serotypes of Strep A with the most dominant, the M1T1 clone that emerged in the mid 1980's, historically causing the most infections and deaths. A new M1T1 variant has emerged around the world, designated M1uk, that is contributing to the recent upsurge in scarlet fever and Strep A invasive disease. It is imperative that we understand the mechanisms by which Strep A cause disease and develop new and effective treatment methods as well as a vaccine to prevent illness.
Peter Fineran
Plenary Speaker in Phage-Bacteria Interactions - New Zealand
Peter Fineran is a Professor at the University of Otago, New Zealand and leads the Phage-host interactions (Phi) laboratory. He obtained a BSc (Hons) in Biochemistry from the University of Canterbury, NZ, then completed his PhD and post-doctoral training at the University of Cambridge, UK. Peter’s group researches the interactions between bacteriophages, other mobile elements and their bacterial hosts – in particular in the area of CRISPR-Cas and phage defence. Peter has received many awards in recognition of his research, including the Fleming Prize from the Microbiology Society, UK and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.
Richard Cannon
Plenary Speaker in Molecular Microbiology - New Zealand
NZMS Distinguished Orator 2023
Richard Cannon is Professor of Molecular Microbiology at the University of Otago Faculty of Dentistry. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge for the study of yeast/mycelial dimorphism in the human fungal pathogen Candida albicans. He has continued this research at the University of Otago focusing on how yeast adhere to oral surfaces, antifungal drug discovery, and mechanisms of fungal drug resistance. His laboratory has developed a system for the heterologous expression of membrane proteins in the model yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and they have used this system to study the structure and function of fungal ATP-binding cassette efflux pumps.
Robert Park
Invited Speaker in Plant Pathology - Australia
Robert’s visit is sponsored by the Beyond Myrtle Rust Programme
Professor Robert Park completed a PhD in plant pathology at La Trobe University in 1984 and for the past 38 years has conducted research in the pathology and genetics of cereal rust diseases.
In 1995, he was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt research award in Germany, and in 2010, a Fulbright Senior Scholarship to the USA. In recognition of his extensive work in China, he was awarded the Friendship Award of China in 2009 - the highest honour the Chinese Government bestows on foreign experts who have made outstanding contributions to China. He was awarded the NSW Science and Engineering Award for Excellence in Biological Sciences in 2013, both the Clarke Medal (2015) and Poggendorf Medal (2018) by the Royal Society of NSW, and the Australian Museum Eureka Prize for Leadership and Innovation in Science (2020).
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales and the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (2015), a Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales (2019), and a Fellow of the Australasian Plant Pathology Society (2019).
Robert holds the Judith and David Coffey Chair of Sustainable Agriculture at the University of Sydney. He is Director of the Australian Cereal Rust Control Program, the world’s largest research group targeting genetic solutions to rust diseases of plants. He has worked extensively in international agriculture and has published two books, written 11 book chapters and more than 200 scholarly research papers.
Shiranee Sriskandan
Plenary Speaker in Biomedical Microbiology - UK
Shiranee Sriskandan is Professor of Infectious Diseases at Imperial College London and a Clinical Infectious Diseases consultant at Hammersmith and St Mary’s Hospitals. She leads the Gram Positive Pathogenesis research group within the Department of Infectious Disease, where she is section head of Adult Infectious Diseases, and clinical director of Imperial’s new Centre for Bacteriology Resistance Biology.
Her group works on the mechanisms that allow Streptococcus pyogenes to cause extreme clinical phenotypes in individuals and populations. The work ranges from pathogen molecular microbiology to host immune response and vaccines, working in collaboration with colleagues in the UK Health Security Agency.
Shiranee trained in medicine at Cambridge and Barts, then specialised in Infectious Diseases in London where she obtained her PhD, and two postdoctoral research fellowships. She has held expert advisory roles in relation to sepsis, maternal sepsis, intravenous immunoglobulin, streptococcal vaccines, and outbreak prevention..
Sinisa
Vidovic
Invited Speaker in Food Microbiology - New Zealand
Sinisa Vidovic is a scientist at the Plant & Food Research, located in Auckland, New Zealand. He obtained his PhD degree in Microbiology in 2008 at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, working on the role of the RpoS sigma factor during the stress response of enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli. His research is focused on three major themes: i) Vibrio parahaemolyticus genomics and virulence ii) mechanisms and diagnostics of antibiotic resistance iii) use of nanotechnology for developing anti-infective molecules or anti-adhesive surfaces against major foodborne pathogens. The long-term objective of his research programme is to gain an understanding of the mechanisms used by highly virulent or antibiotic resistant strains to outcompete their counterparts and cause outbreaks worldwide. The findings from these studies can lead to the implementation of mitigation measures designed to reduce the frequencies and severity of outbreaks caused by major foodborne pathogens such as V. parahaemolyticus and Listeria monocytogenes.
Susie Wood
Invited Speaker in Water Microbiology - New Zealand
Tom Ross
Plenary Speaker in Food Microbiology - Australia
Tom Ross is a Professor in food microbiology and and the inaugural Director of the ARC Training Centre for Innovative Horticultural Products at the University of Tasmania, Australia. His research involves the development of mathematical models and computer software to describe and predict the growth and death of bacteria in foods. These technologies are widely used by the Australian food industry and Australian and New Zealand government agencies to improve microbial food safety and shelf life.
Tom has written over 160 refereed scientific papers and book chapters on microbial behaviour in foods, with particular emphasis on application of predictive modelling and quantitative risk assessment to support food safety and shelf life management.
Tom has been a member of numerous expert consultations on food safety risk assessment and risk management convened by the Australian government and industry organisations and the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization and World Health Organization. He was appointed to permanent membership of the International Commission on Microbiological Specifications for Foods in 2007 and to the Executive Board of the International Committee on Food Microbiology and Hygiene (ICMFH) in 2017.
He has (co)supervised 40 PhD students to successful completion.