SEB Conference Prague 2024

Dr. Tamara Lechon Gomez

Cardiff University

Tamara Lechón Gómez is a Plant Lecturer at Cardiff University in Wales, UK. She completed her PhD in the University of Salamanca in 2018, awarded for her studies on the role of nitric oxide in early plant development. She then worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Scofield lab at Cardiff University, where she studied the gene regulatory networks that control cell pluripotency. Her current research focuses on epigenetic gene regulation and chromatin accessibility in shoot architecture.

Dr. Hans-Wilhelm Nützmann

University of Exeter

Hans-Wilhelm Nützmann is group leader at the Universities of Exeter and Bath. He studied in Dresden and Jena and worked for his postdoc at the John Innes Centre in Norwich. He is currently holder of a Royal Society University Research Fellowship and has previously held an EMBO Long-Term Fellowship. His lab investigates genome organisation, epigenetic gene regulation and chromosome architecture.

Associate Prof. Miguel de Lucas

Durham University

I did my PhD in Madrid (CNB-CSIC) studying the crosstalk between environment and hormone signalling for the regulation of plant developmental adaptation. Then, I moved to Davis (CA-USA) to study how transcriptional networks and chromatin regulation co-ordinately regulate cell states and fate.

I joined Durham University (UK) in 2015. In our lab, we investigate how chromatin and gene expression are dynamically regulated to guide plant environmental adaptation. I am passionate of plant development, its genomic regulation and love working in the lab and the challenges we face every day.

Talk: Chromatin Orchestration in Plant Development: Insights from Brassinosteroid Signaling and Flowering Time Control

 

Dr. Zdravko Lorković

Gregor Mendel Institute

Dr Zdravko Lorković obtained his DI in Molecular biology at the University of Zagreb, Croatia and a PhD from Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich, Germany. Currently, he is a member of Frederic Berger Group at the Gregor Mendel Institute in Vienna, Austria. He has a background in plant RNA biology and epigenetics. His current major interests are histone variants and their role in genome organization and regulation. He contributed to several key discoveries demonstrating functional diversification of plant H2A and H2B histone variants. In particular, he demonstrated that Arabidopsis nucleosomes are homotypic concerning H2A variants. These discoveries led to the definition of Arabidopsis chromatin states demonstrating that H2A variants, rather than histone H3 modifications, are more accurate predictors of heterochromatin, euchromatin and facultative heterochromatin.

Claudia Martinho

Max Planck Institute for Biology

Phd in Plant molecular biology at the Institute Gulbenkian for Science, Lisbon, Portugal where I studied how microRNA activity was regulated in response to environmental stresses in Arabidopsis. I did a nearly 4-year postdoc at the University of Cambridge (UK) until September 2021, studying non-Mendelian epigenetic inheritance in tomato hybrids with Prof. Sir David Baulcombe. The seminar will be based on the research developed during this postdoc. Presently I am a senior postdoc in Germany at the Max Planck Institute for Biology in Tubingen and I study gene-silencing in brown algae. I am also looking to establish my laboratory in gene-silencing and epigenetic inheritance in crops.

Iva Mozgová

Czech Academy of Sciences

Iva Mozgová is a junior group leader at the Biology Centre of the Czech Academy of Sciences (BC CAS) in České Budějovice, CZ. She completed her PhD in 2011 at the Central European Institute of Technology - Masaryk University (CEITEC MU) in Brno, CZ. She then spent five years at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala (Sweden) as an EMBO Fellow and postdoc in the group of Prof. Lars Hennig, and three years as an independent researcher at the Institute of Microbiology CAS in Třeboň (CZ). Since 2019, the focus of Iva Mozgová’s group at BC CAS has been on the control of primary metabolism by PRC2 in the developmental, but also in the operational context. In addition to the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, the lab uses the model bryophyte Physcomitrium patens and chlorophyte algae to study the evolution and maintenance of PRC2 function in the green lineage.

Hana Šimková

Institute of Experimental Botany

Hana Šimková completed her master studies at the Agricultural University in Brno, Czechoslovakia, followed by a PhD in Genetics at the Czech Academy of Sciences. She started as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Experimental Botany in Olomouc, where she works to this day, as group leader since 2017. Since 2006, Hana was additionally appointed Lecturer at the Palacky University in Olomouc.

Hana’s early research focused on chromosomal genomics, a branch of genomic research involving chromosome sorting by flow cytometry, established by Prof. Jaroslav Doležel at the IEB in Olomouc. Hana was engaged in generation of chromosomal resources utilized in genome sequencing and gene cloning projects, mainly in wheat barley and rye. Her contribution to the assemblies of complex genomes was also connected with the technology of optical mapping, which her group pioneered for plants. Her current interests include studies of 3D chromatin organization by Hi-C technique, epigenetics of cereal crops and identification of cis-regulatory elements controlling transcription in barley.

Prof. Jurriaan Ton

University of Sheffield

I am a plant pathologist at the University of Sheffield (UoS). My lab explores how plants adapt to recurrent stress from pests and diseases. Apart from our long-standing interests in the molecular perception and signalling of chemicals that prime plant immunity (‘plant vaccines’), our current research mostly focuses on the epigenetic pathways by which plants memorise environmental stress and acquire long-term resistance. My lab also studies the functional relationship between root exudation chemistry and root-associated microbial communities, to gain a better understanding of how such rhizosphere interactions boost plant resilience against environmental stresses. Outside the lab, I co-direct the P3 Centre for Plant and Soil Biology of the Sheffield Institute for Sustainable Food. In this role, I work closely with agricultural stakeholders to facilitate the translation of fundamental research on model systems into sustainable solutions for crop protection.

Dr Edward Ivimey-Cook

University of Glasgow

No bio provided

Dr Pat Monaghan

University of Glasgow

Pat Monaghan is an evolutionary ecologist, based at the University of Glasgow, where she holds the Regius Chair in Zoology.  She did her PhD at Durham University on seabird ecology, followed by work on the interactions between seabirds and fisheries management.  She then began research on the effect of early life conditions in shaping individual life histories, involving studies in the field and the lab, at many different biological levels from physiology and molecular biology to ecology and behavioural biology. Her work is mainly on birds, with related work in other taxa. A current major focus is on the effects of maternal state, such as environmentally generated stress exposure and maternal age, on subsequent generations. This includes studies of mechanistic processes such as telomere dynamics and mitochondrial function.

Dr. Sophie Dupont

CNRS

Deputy Convenor for the Conservation Physiology Group

Associate Prof. Johan Dahlgren

University of Southern Denmark

Johan Dahlgren is an Associate Professor at the University of Southern Denmark. Johan is curious about drivers of species distributions, population dynamics and life histories. He collects field data (mainly in his native country Sweden) and uses this and collaborators’ data to build demographic models incorporating environmental drivers and life history differences. This work has been funded by national science foundations in Denmark and Sweden, and the Max Planck Society. Recently Johan has focused on ageing in plants and has documented a striking diversity in how plants grow old, from a demographic perspective. Moving forward, he aims to gain a better understanding of what causes this diversity, within and among species.

Jean-Michel Gaillard

University of Lyon

No bio provided

Prof. Simone Immler

University of East Anglia

Simone Immler is Professor of Genetics and Reproduction at the University of East Anglia, UK. Her research focuses on the genetics and genomics of reproduction, fertility and ageing  and her lab works on zebrafish and humans. Prof. Immler earned her MSc from the University of Basel, Switzerland and her PhD from the University of Sheffield, UK. She spent time as a Research Fellow and Associate Professor at Uppsala University, Sweden before returning to the UK in 2017. She was awarded both an European Research Council Starting Grant and an European Research Council Consolidator Grant and received a prestigious Wallenberg Academy Fellowship. In 2022, she founded her company Virilitas Labs Ltd developing tests and services around male reproductive health.

Prof. Robert Laird

University of Lethbridge

Robert Laird is a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. His research group uses a combination of lab, field, and theoretical approaches to study biodemography and the evolution of senescence, with a particular focus on parental age effects and the effects of environmental variation on aging rates.

Dr. Jose C. Noguera

University of Vigo

Jose C. Noguera is an evolutionary ecologist who combines behavioural and functional studies to understand phenotypic variation in animals. Much of his research has focused on the physiological and molecular processes underlying variation in life-history traits (e.g. oxidative stress, telomere length, telomerase activity or gene expression, etc.) and their consequences for offspring life-history trajectories, including somatic and germline ageing. His research is multidisciplinary, involving field and laboratory studies in birds and, more recently, in insects.

Dr. Irem Sepil

University of Oxford

Irem is an evolutionary biologist broadly interested in reproductive ageing, nongenetic parental effects, sexual selection, and life-history theory. Her postdoc work addressed an important but understudied aspect of reproductive ageing: declining ejaculate performance with male age. Now, as a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow, Irem is interested in understanding how paternal age and paternal diet influence the fitness of their offspring. Emerging literature suggests paternal effects are likely to be powerful determinants of offspring fitness, yet many important questions in the study of paternal effects remain unanswered, such as why and how they occur. Using fruit flies, Irem’s group are working to establish the causal relationship between paternal age, diet, and offspring fitness, and to uncover the ejaculate-mediated mechanisms driving these relationships.