Scientific Director and CEO, CeMM Research Center for Molecuar Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Science, visiting professor at the Medical University of Vienna.

Giulio Superti-Furga, Ph.D. performed his undergraduate and graduate studies in molecular biology at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, at Genentech Inc., South San Francisco, USA, and at the Institute for Molecular Pathology in Vienna (I.M.P.), Austria. He has been a post-doctoral fellow and Team Leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) until 2004. For several years he has served as professor of Biotechnology at the University of Bologna. In 2000, he co-founded the biotech company Cellzome Inc., where he has been Scientific Director and responsible for the Heidelberg research site.

His most significant scientific contributions are the elucidation of basic regulatory mechanisms of tyrosine kinases in human cancers and the discovery of fundamental organization principles of the proteome of higher organisms. Giulio Superti-Furga is a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. An Italian national born 1962, Giulio Superti-Furga has an Austrian wife and two children.

The research interests of Le Novère revolve around the modelling of signal transduction in neurons, ranging from the molecular structure of proteins involved in neurotransmission, to signalling pathways in relation with synaptic plasticity.

Using different modelling approaches at different levels, his group provided new insights on mechanisms leading to cooperativity, integration, and decoding of intracellular signals. Along with the modelling activity, the group develops services for the community such as data resources or modelling software. Le Novère is one of the creators of the Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML), and has been involved in it development since 2000.

Along with the tools and resources developed for computational systems biology (e.g., BioModels Database, the reference for exchanging models), Le Novère initiated a coherent set of standards and ontologies in systems biology modeling, such as the Minimum Information Required In the Annotation of Models (MIRIAM), the Minimum Information About a Simulation Experiment (MIASE), the Simulation Experiment Description Markup Language (SED-ML) and the Systems Biology Ontology (SBO), that together aim to facilitate the exchange and reuse of models, as well as their integration with other types of biological data.

Over the last few years, he coordinated the development of the Systems Biology Graphical Notation (SBGN), the equivalent for biochemistry of the circuit diagrams for engineering.

Dr. Monga is associate professor of Pathology and division director of Experimental Pathology, at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also associate professor of Medicine in the division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition. His laboratory has made seminal contributions in the field of Wnt/-catenin and associated signaling in liver patho- biology demonstrating its critical roles in development, stem cell biology, hepatocarcinogenesis, regeneration, metabolism and injury. His research has focused on novel cellular and molecular events that entail hepatocyte and biliary differentiation of hepatoblasts and oval cells. His research continues to divulge novel mechanisms of liver cancer focusing on commonalities between developmental and oncogenic mechanisms. His recent work has revealed a paradox in Wnt signaling where -catenin rather than having an oncogenic function, demonstrated tumor suppressive activity through its anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant properties. The pleiotropic roles of -catenin in liver biology may be a result of its diverse interactions with other transcription factors, ensuing differential target gene expression and functions and this aspect remains under active investigation.

Dr. Monga’s research is funded by the National Institutes of Health. He is a regular member of the Hepatobiliary Pathophysiology study section at the NIH. He is also an associate editor for the American Journal of Pathology and BMC-Cancer and on editorial boards of many journals such as Hepatology, American Journal of Physiology and others. He was recently inducted in the American Society for Clinical Investigations and PLUTO and has received several mentoring awards for his contributions to the graduate program at the University of Pittsburgh, School of Medicine.

Roel van Driel (1945) studied chemistry and got his Ph.D. at the University of Groningen. Following this he has worked as a postdoc at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel and at the Max-Planck Institut für Biochemie in Martinsried. In 1980 he came to the University of Amsterdam, where he was appointed full professor of Biochemistry in 1992. He is responsible for a research group that wants to unravel how two meters of human DNA are folded inside the cell nucleus, which has a diameter of about 1/100 millimetre. DNA folding is a key element in the use of genetic information by the cell. He has published over 175 scientific papers about this and other topics. During six years Roel van Driel has been scientific director of one of the research institutes of the University of Amsterdam. He has founded the Netherlands Institute for Systems Biology (NISB) in which biologists, physicists, chemists and mathematicians cooperate, of which he was director until 2010. In 2008 he became director of the Netherlands Consortium for Systems Biology (NCSB), a 30 M€ Dutch research program that aims at implementing systems biology in biomedical, agricultural and biotechnological research.

Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board

Professor of Engineering Science
Director, Auckland Bioengineering Institute, University of Auckland, New Zealand

Prof Hunter completed an engineering degree in 1971 in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (now Engineering Science) at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, a Master of Engineering degree in 1972 (Auckland) on solving the equations of arterial blood flow and a DPhil (PhD) in Physiology at the University of Oxford in 1975 on finite element modeling of ventricular mechanics.
His major research interests since then have been modelling many aspects of the human body using specially developed computational algorithms and an anatomically and biophysically based approach which incorporates detailed anatomical and microstructural measurements and material properties into the continuum models. The interrelated electrical, mechanical and biochemical functions of the heart, for example, have been modelled in the first ‘physiome’ model of an organ. As the current co-Chair of the Physiome Committee of the International Union of Physiological Sciences he is helping to lead the international Physiome Project which aims to use computational methods for understanding the integrated physiological function of the body in terms of the structure and function of tissues, cells and proteins.

He is currently a Professor of Engineering Science and Director of the Bioengineering Institute at the University of Auckland, Director of Computational Physiology at Oxford University and holds honorary or visiting Professorships at a number of Universities around the world. He is on the scientific advisory boards of a number of Research Institutes in Europe, the US and the Asia-Pacific region. He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society (London and NZ), the World Council for Biomechanics, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and the International Academy of Medical & Biological Engineering. He is currently Chair of the Marsden Fund, Secretary-General of the World Council for Biomechanics and President of the Physiological Society of New Zealand.

Recent awards:
(2009) Honorary Doctorate from University of Nottingham; KEA (Kiwi Expats Abroad) ‘World Class NZ’ award in Research, Science, Technology & Academia category; Rutherford medal;
(2010) Elected an Honorary Fellow of the Institution of Professional Engineers of New Zealand (IPENZ).

Prof. Dr. Siegfried Neumann (born 1941) studied biology and got a PhD degree in biochemistry at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum in 1971. From 1975 until 2004 he was engaged in various research positions within the chemical-pharmaceutical international company Merck KGaA, Darmstadt,Germany. He started on benchwork for development of immunochemical assays for inflammation diagnosis. From1985 until 1989 he headed projects for development of antibodies against tumour –associated antigens like the EGFR, as new biological entities for therapy of solid tumours. In 1989 he was appointed as director of diagnostic research at Merck. From 1992 to 2004 he headed the Office of Technology in the Chemical Section of the company, with the objectives to validate emergent technologies and to organize their transfer into the company.

After his retirement in October 2004 until end of 2009, he was engaged as a freelance consultant for R&D directors in Merck KGaA and Merck Serono. His focus was on evaluation of new technologies and search for their implementation by intelligent R&D alliances. This search was on international scale. It covered identification of excellent centers with competence on preclinical research and of key enabling biotechnology platforms, either with a high fit to the company´s strategy.

In parallel to his business-related activities, from 1988 Prof. Neumann has been teaching immunochemistry in the Faculties for Chemistry and Biology of Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. In 1998 he was appointed Honorary Professor at the Faculty of Chemistry of TU Darmstadt. His main teaching subjects were and still are new methods in immunochemistry, protein chemistry of novel biopharmaceuticals, and molecular diagnostics in oncology.

Prof.Neumann was invited to work in expert panels for planning and/or evaluation of research programmes to be funded by the German Federal Ministery for Education and Research (BMBF). This includes the national research programmes entitled Deutsche Humangenomforschung, National Genome Research Initiatives (NGFN) 1 and 2, NGFN Plus, NGFN Transfer, Quantative Proteomics (QuantPro), Molecular Diagnostics, and Validation of Innovative Projects of Scientific Research (VIP). He was appointed to be the speaker of the expert panel for the BMBF programmes BioFuture (a special multi-years programme for funding young talents in interdisciplinary research projects in biotechnology) and the expert panel for Molecular Diagnostics.

Prof.Neumann was one of the members in the initial planning committee working for for BMBF on a proposal for funding systems biology research in Germany as a strategic measure of BMBF. Planning for a SB research network on the liver cell was from 2001 to 2004. From 2004 on for the following six years he was active in the scientific steering committee on the BMBF network for SB on the hepatocyte (HepatoSys 1 and 2), as the deputy head of this panel. Next he was a member of the committee for planning of the Virtual Liver Network (VLN) in 2009 and was invited to become a member of the Scientific Advisory Board to Dr. Adriano Henney, who is the responsible research director of VLN.

Prof.Neumann takes a still wider personal engagement for the advancement of systems biology by a) his participation in evaluation panels for projects in the BMBF programme of systems biology research, such as by evaluation work on the FORSYS centers and in the BMBF programme on systems biology in ageing (GerontoSys 1 and 2), and b) by work in the scientific advisory boards for the DFG excellence cluster CellNetworks, for BioQuant and the FORSYS Cluster ViroQuant (all with their centers at University of Heidelberg).

Prof.Neumann is member of the scientific advisory boards of some large research organisations in Germany. He also works as a consultant for research project evaluations upon appointment by various German state ministeries for research and education. On the international scale, he was appointed as a member of the advisory board for the Austrian National Genome Research network (GEN-AU III) and of the scientific advisory boards for the multinational research EU networks Growthstop (Tumour Research) and Predict IV (Toxicology). In July 2008 the German federal president Dr. Koehler distinguished Prof.Neumann by the degree “Officer of the award for national merits “ (Bundesverdienstkreuz 1.Klasse) for his commitments in public organs for research planning, project evaluation and network steering.