SEB Centenary Conference 2023

Dr. Cosima Porteus

Assistant Professor, University of Toronto Scarborough

Cosima Porteus received her BSc from the University of Guelph, Canada, majoring in Marine and Freshwater Biology. Early during her undergraduate degree, Cosima became involved in research on freshwater mussels, fish and salamanders and became fascinated by how aquatic animals cope with various environmental challenges. She stayed at the University of Guelph, where she earned her MSc in Integrative Biology under the supervision of Dr. Pat Wright, studying the parameters affecting the boundry layers and oxygen supply to developing fish. She then moved to the University of British Columbia, to start her PhD under the supervision of Dr Bill Milsom in the Department of Zoology. Her PhD thesis characterized time dependent changes that take place in the response to low oxygen in fish, highlighting the importance of peripheral oxygen chemoreceptors in establishing these time domains.   

As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Exeter under the supervision of Prof Rod Wilson, Cosima determined why fish exposed to ocean acidification lose their ability to respond appropriately to olfactory cues that are vital for their survival in the wild. The results of this research combined behaviour, electrophysiology and transcriptomics to show a novel mechanism for how ocean acidification affects the behaviour of fish through the olfactory system.  

She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough, where her lab is continuing to study the effects and physiological mechanisms of anthropogenic stressors on aquatic animals. Her group have recently shown that ocean acidification negatively affects olfaction in Dungeness crabs, an economically important crustacean, in a similar way as in fish. These findings have wide implications for issues ranging from global food security, marine conservation to recreational and commercially-important fisheries. 

Dr Yangnan Gu

Assistant Professor , University of California

Yangnan Gu is an Assistant Professor of the Department of Plant & Microbial Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his BS degree in Bioengineering from Xi’an Jiaotong University, China and earned a PhD degree in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and an MS degree in Applied Statistics from Indiana University Bloomington. He undertook postdoctoral training at Duke University/Howard Hughes Medical Institute, where he explored the role of a novel nuclear pore complex component in plant immune activation. His Lab currently emphasizes the discovery of novel nuclear membrane proteins and investigating their functional importance in different aspects of plant physiology and cell biology. His group is also interested in exploring the specialization of nuclear transport receptors in mediating nuclear shuttling of signaling cargos across the nuclear envelope under various environmental conditions and its significance in determining distinct stress responses in plant cells. He is the winner of Molecular Plant Rising Stars in Plant Sciences and currently serving as Reviewing Editor for The Plant Cell.

https://plantandmicrobiology.berkeley.edu/users/yangnan-gu

Dr Yasin Dagdas

I am from Turkey, where I completed my bachelor's and master's degrees in molecular biology and genetics at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara. I then pursued my PhD at the University of Exeter, where I studied plant-microbe interactions with Nick Talbot. My research focused on the development of the rice blast fungus during infection. After earning my PhD, I moved to the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, UK to work in Sophien Kamoun's lab as a postdoc. There, I studied how effectors from the Irish potato famine pathogen subvert plant membrane trafficking pathways, including autophagy. In 2017, I became a group leader at the Gregor Mendel Institute in Vienna, where I have been exploring autophagy-mediated cellular quality control mechanisms in plants.

Lab website: https://www.oeaw.ac.at/gmi/research/research-groups/yasin-dagdas