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

Professor Wendy Bickmore

Wendy Bickmore is Director of the MRC Human Genetics Unit, at the University of Edinburgh. Her undergraduate degree is in Biochemistry from the University of Oxford and she then completed a PhD in molecular biology at the University of Edinburgh. Following a postdoc in human genetics, Wendy started her independent research group as a fellow of the Lister Institute for Preventive Medicine. She is fascinated by the three-dimensional organization of the human genome in cells and how that influences genome function in health and disease. Her current research explores how the non-coding genome regulates gene expression including how distant enhancers communicate with their target gene promoters. Wendy is a Fellow of: the Royal Society, the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the Academy of Medical Sciences and is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization. She was awarded a CBE for services to science and to women in science

Professor Elizabeth Brainerd

Elizabeth L. Brainerd is the Robert P. Brown Professor of Biology at Brown University. She received her doctorate from Harvard University in 1991 studying the functional morphology of fishes with Prof. Karel Liem, and then was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows for postdoctoral work in biomechanics with Prof. Tom McMahon. She was Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 1994 to 2005 and then Full Professor at Brown University. She has broad research interests in the biomechanics and evolution of movement in vertebrate animals, including work on all major groups of extant vertebrates and feeding, breathing, and locomotor behaviors. At Brown she has worked with Prof. Stephen Gatesy and other colleagues and students to develop X-ray Reconstruction of Moving Morphology (XROMM), which is a set of methods for visualizing and quantifying the movements of 3D bones in 3D space. XROMM has been adopted by many research groups around the world and is yielding new insights into musculoskeletal structure, function, and evolution.

Dr Lisa Ainsworth

Lisa Ainsworth is the Research Leader of the USDA ARS Global Change and Photosynthesis Research Unit and Professor of Plant Biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She received her BS in Biology at UCLA and PhD in Crop Sciences from UIUC. Her research addresses crop responses to global atmospheric change and potential solutions to mitigate climate change through agriculture. She has long studied photosynthetic responses of plants to climate change, and her research is broadly integrative, from genetic to agronomic scales. In 2011, she was awarded the President’s Medal from the SEB. In 2019, she was awarded the National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food and Agricultural Sciences and was an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020.