CONFIRMED SPEAKERS

Dr Jane Khawaja is Interim Director of GW4 (a research alliance of four of the most research-intensive and innovative universities in the UK: Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and Exeter), with responsibility for leading and managing the GW4 Alliance, and developing and delivering its overall strategy. Prior to taking on the role of GW4 Interim Director, Jane was Head of Research Development (UK) at the University of Bristol where she developed and delivered a strategic and innovative agenda for research funding and facilitated a growth in research volume for the University. She also provided national and international thought leadership on research development and research funding strategy and its synergies with other areas of research and engagement. Prior to working at the University of Bristol, Jane spent over eight years at the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and before that worked at Applied Materials, a global leader in the semiconductor industry. Jane has a BSc (Hons) in Physics, and a PhD in Plasma Physics from the University of Surrey. Jane has a keen interest in equality, diversity and inclusion being a member of several groups including co-chairing the University of Bristol’s Anti-Racism Steering Group. She is also a commissioner for Bristol City Council’s Commission on Race Equality and is a member of Bristol City Funds Investment Advisory Committee. Jane is also a member of the University of Bristol’s Board of Trustees.

Presentation Title: Introduction to GW4 and our collaborative research strengths

Frank Vollmer obtained his PhD in ‘Physics & Biology’ from the Rockefeller University NYC, USA, in 2004. He then became leader of an independent research group at the Rowland Institute at Harvard University where he was appointed Rowland Fellow from 2004 to 2009. From 2010 to 2011 he joined the Wyss Institute for Bio-Inspired Engineering at Harvard University as a Scholar-in-Residence. In 2011 he was appointed group leader (untenured associate professor) at the newly established Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen, Germany. Since 2011 he was also appointed as Instructor in Medicine and Associate Bioengineer at Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA, where he directed a satellite laboratory until 2016. Since 2016 he is Professor in Biophysics at the School of Physics, University of Exeter, UK. His laboratory is part of the newly established Living Systems Institute.

Presentation Title: The Molecular Mechanics Initiative at the Living Systems Institute and the centres for Bio-Catalysis and Mycology Research, and Quantum Exeter

Prof. Jennifer Littlechild is Professor of Biological Chemistry and has established the Henry Wellcome Centre for Biocatalysis at Exeter University in 2003. She carried out her PhD in Biophysics at Kings College, London University followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University, USA. This was followed by a Max-Planck position in Berlin Germany before she returned to the UK to Bristol University and then to Exeter University in 1991. Her research studies involve the structural and mechanistic characterisation of a range of enzymes from thermophilic bacteria and Archaea that have industrial applications. She has published over 200 publications in refereed high impact journals and presented her research work internationally. She has coordinated the EU project THERMOGENE and was a partner in a consortium grant HOTZYME. The ERA-CoBiotech project HOTSOLUTE has started in 2018. In the UK she is funded from BBSRC, EPSRC and Innovate UK. These grants involve both large industrial companies and SME enterprises. She has supervised over 40 PhD students and acts as external examiner for other PhD and Masters students in the UK and Internationally. She is the UK representative and vice chair of the European Section of Applied Biocatalysis and a member of EU advisory committees for industrial biotechnology.

Presentation Title: The Molecular Mechanics Initiative at the Living Systems Institute and the centres for Bio-Catalysis and Mycology Research, and Quantum Exeter

Professor Neil Gow is Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Impact and Professor of Microbiology at the University of Exeter. Professor Gow was appointed in September 2018. His research speciality is in medical mycology and in particular the study of the structure and immunology of fungi that cause life-threatening infections. He is a graduate of the University of Edinburgh where he obtained his Bachelors degree in Microbiology. Professor Gow went on to receive his PhD in 1982 from the University of Aberdeen, followed by a period of postdoctoral research at the National Jewish Hospital for Immunology and Respiratory Medicine and University of Colorado, Denver, USA. He was appointed as a lecturer to the University of Aberdeen and received a personal Chair in 1995. At the University of Aberdeen Professor Gow held various senior positions including Head of Microbiology Research Programme, 2002-2011, Director of Research and Commercialisation, College of Life Sciences and Medicine, 2011-2015, Director of the Wellcome Trust Strategic Award in Medical Mycology and Fungal Immunology and Co-Director, MRC Centre for Medical Mycology, 2017-2018. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences, Royal Society of Edinburgh and American Academy of Microbiology and has acted as President of four major international societies of mycology and microbiology.
As Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Impact, Professor Gow oversees a total research portfolio of £360 million and leads the research and business engagement strategies for the University. His overarching responsibilities include our preparation and submission for the Research Excellence Framework in 2021; interdisciplinary institutes, engagement with non-academic organisations; strategic leadership of our Doctoral College, the University Ethics Committee and the Research and Impact Strategy Management Group; and ensuring our research is utilised and impacts positively on the wider world. Professor Gow represents the University externally via a number of research-related groups including the EU Advisory Group for the Russell Group of Universities and GW4, our regional alliance of the Universities of Bristol, Bath, Cardiff and Exeter.

Presentation Title: The physics of mycological life (and death)

Janet is an Assoc Prof in quantum theory and leads the Quantum Non-equilibrium Group at the University of Exeter.
Her research interests lie in the wider area of quantum and nanoscale thermodynamics, including the concept of work in quantum mechanics, strong coupling thermodynamics, properties of open quantum and classical systems, classical Brownian motion and stochastic thermodynamics for biophysics applications.
http://quantum-exeter.co.uk/

Presentation Title: Fluctuation relations and their use in single-molecule experiments

Adrian Mulholland is a Professor of Chemistry and School Research Director in the School of Chemistry at the University of Bristol. His research focuses on the investigation of mechanisms of enzyme catalysis, and biomolecular structure and function more generally, by computational modelling and simulation. He works on the development and application of multiscale techniques for modelling enzyme catalytic mechanisms. He has interests in biomolecular simulation applied to problems in antimicrobial resistance, drug metabolism, biocatalysis and enzyme thermoadaptation and evolution. His work has shown how simulations can be used as computational ‘assays’ e.g. of drug resistance. He also works on interactive simulation tools using virtual reality. He collaborates with experimental research groups worldwide. He has a strong interest in the application of high performance computing (HPC) for biomolecular simulations: e.g., he established and led the UK High End Computing Consortium for Biomolecular Simulation (HECBioSim.ac.uk). He has published over 200 papers, attracting over 5,000 citations. 

Mulholland has held Fellowships from EPSRC and the Wellcome Trust. He was Chair (2010-2020) of CCP-BioSim (the UK Collaborative Computational Project for Biomolecular Simulation, ccpbiosim.ac.uk); the Molecular Graphics and Modelling Society (mgms.org, 2004-08); and Chair of the UK CCP Steering Panel (2016-2020). He is Chair of the Steering Group of the UK Catalysis Hub. He was elected Chair of the 2016 Gordon Research Conference in Computational Chemistry and was the inaugural Lakshmi Raman Lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh (2019). He was awarded the 2020 John Meurig Thomas Medal ‘for outstanding and innovative work in catalytic science’.

Presentation Title: Multiscale simulations for enzyme catalysis, design and evolution

Presentation Title: Experimental tracking of protein conformational dynamics via a simple fluorescence assay

Dafydd Jones is PI of a protein structure and engineering group in the Molecular Biosciences division of Cardiff’s School of Biosciences. He obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge under the supervision the late Prof Richard Perham followed by a postdoc (MRC CPE/Chemistry Department, Cambridge) and industrial Marie Curie fellowship (Novozymes, DK) before coming Cardiff to start his own research group. His research is highly interdisciplinary, with projects that tests the limits of protein structural and functional plasticity through incorporating abiological chemistry to the construction of functional bionanohybrids. This includes single protein molecule conductance, bottom-up assembly of functional protein-nano carbon systems and the generation of novel protein scaffolds. He also likes to tinker with fluorescent proteins and help to solve the structure of various random proteins.

Presentation Title: Designed interfacing of proteins with nano-carbon and how one can influence the other

Igor Polikarpov is a Full Professor of the Institute of Physics in Sao Carlos (IFSC), The University of São Paulo (USP) and coordinator of the Center for Renewable Energies and Environment (poloTErRA/USP-São Carlos). His main scientific interests are centered at Structural Biology and Molecular Biophysics and their applications in Biotechnology. Igor Polikarpov graduated in Physics (Byelorussian State University, 1983), did his PhD at the same University (1989), and post-docs at the Latvian Academy of Science (1991), Max-Planck Gesselschaft (Hamburg, c/o DESY, 1993) and the University of Edinburgh (1995). Published over 300 scientific papers, which were cited more than 10,500 times, resulting in h-factor of 54 (Google Scholar). Igor Polikarpov coordinated joint scientific projects between Brazil and European Union (FP7); Brazil and UK (FAPESP-RCUK); Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay (CBAB/CNPq), Brazil and India (CNPq/DBT) and is coordinating collaborative project with Belgium (FAPESP-FNRS). He also developed scientific collaborations with biotechnological and pharmaceutical companies and was responsible for construction, installation and operation of large-scale scientific installations (protein crystallography beamlines MX-1 & MX-2 at the Brazilian National Synchrotron Laboratory/LNLS, Campinas, Brazil). He is an Honorary Professor of the University of Bath and an Honorary Visiting Professor of the University of York. Prof. Polikarpov is a member of the Editorial Board of Biotechnology Letters (Springer) and one of the proponents of the Integrated PhD Program in Bioenergy (joint graduate course of three São Paulo State Universities: USP, UNESP and UNICAMP). Igor Polikarpov is a Commander of the Brazilian National Order of Scientific Merit and a Member of São Paulo State Academy of Sciences.

Presentation Title: CAZymes: Structural and enzymatic studies and potential biotechnological applications

Imre Berger was trained as a biochemist at Leibniz University and Medical School (MHH) in Hannover (Germany), MIT (Cambridge, USA), and ETH Zurich (Switzerland). His team develops synthetic vaccines and genome engineering tools and researches protein complexes in human health and disease. After group leader posts at ETH (2005) and EMBL (2007), Imre joined University of Bristol in 2014 as Professor of Biochemistry and Chemistry. In 2017, Imre became director of the Bristol Synthetic Biology Centre. Since 2019 he is Founding and Managing Director of the Max Planck Bristol Centre for Minimal Biology.

Imre Berger has pioneered synthetic viral nanosystems for DNA delivery and complex biologics production. The tools he developed are accelerating research and development in academia and industry world-wide. He holds international patents for DNA and protein technologies, co-founded four biotech start-up companies and received numerous distinctions, including the Swiss Technology Award, the W.A. DeVigier Foundation Award and a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award for his innovative research. Since 2019, Imre is Investigator of the European Research Council (ERC). In 2020, Imre Berger’s team discovered a druggable pocket in the Spike glycoprotein of SASR-CoV-2, the virus causing the COVID-19 pandemic.

Presentation Title: Synthetic Biology Research in Bristol and in the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Dr Pedro Estrela is the Director of the Centre for Biosensors, Bioelectronics and Biodevices (C3Bio) and an Associate Professor in the Department of Electronic & Electrical Engineering at the University of Bath. He has 20 years research experience in the area of biosensors. His research focuses on the development of label-free electrical, electrochemical and plasmonic biosensors for a wide range of applications such as medical diagnostics and environmental monitoring; microfluidic sample processing; biodevice integration. He is member of the Executive Team of the Centre for Therapeutic Innovation, Theme Leader (Healthcare Technologies) at the Centre for Sustainable Circular Technologies, Theme Leader (Sensors & Data) at the Water Innovation & Research Centre. He has over 140 publications (Scopus h-index 28) and is Associate Editor for the journals Biosensors & Bioelectronics, Scientific Reports, Sensors, and Frontiers in Sensors.

Presentation Title: The Centre for Biosensors, Bioelectronics and Biodevices (C3Bio) at the University of Bath, and the GW4 Biosensor Network

Jim Naismith is the first Director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute, the theme lead for Structural Biology at the Institute and Professor at University of Oxford.

Jim grew up in Hamilton, in the west of Scotland attending local state schools. He graduated from Edinburgh in 1989 with a BSc in Chemistry and with PhD from Manchester.

He has been a Carnegie Scholar, a NATO fellow and a BBSRC fellow. His lab have won numerous awards including most recently the Tilden Medal.

He has spun out GyreOx from his academic lab, been the expert witness in the most consequential ($10bn) biosimiliar patent case in the USA and has been elected to the Council of the Royal Society.
Until 2017 he was the Bishop Wardlaw Professor Chemical Biology at St Andrews.
He leads the Franklin team who reported the breakthrough in July in using Llama nanobodies to neutralise the COVID19 virus. The team are focussed on getting these agents into the clinic.

Presentation Title: Structural biology at the Rosalind Franklin Institute during the pandemic