Robert Gerszten

Robert E. Gerszten, MD serves as Chief of Cardiology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and a Senior Associate Member of the Broad Institute. Dr. Gerszten graduated from the University of Virginia as an Echols Scholar and President’s Distinguished Scholar, then entered medical school at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Following his residency at the University of Pennsylvania, he performed cardiovascular research and clinical fellowships at the Cardiovascular Research Institute at UCSF, and the Cardiovascular Research Center (CVRC), MGH. He joined the MGH as a faculty member in 1997. From 2006-2015 he served as Director of Clinical and Translational Research in the MGH Heart Center.

Dr. Gerszten’s investigative career focuses on the nexus of cardiac and metabolic diseases. His translational research program is a national leader in the use of metabolomics and proteomic technologies for the discovery of new biomarkers and pathways contributing to atherogenesis and its complications. His group has identified novel biomarkers that identify those destined to develop diabetes over a decade before disease onset. An area of particular focus is the application of these tools to identify those most likely to benefit from clinical interventions. His highly interactive program collaborates across a spectrum of institutions, from the Broad Institute to the Framingham Heart Study, the Jackson Heart Study, the Diabetes Prevention Program, and the TIMI Study Group.

Elaine Holmes

Prof. Holmes is the Head of the Division of Computational and Systems Medicine and a Professor of Chemical Biology in the Department of Surgery and Cancer at Imperial College, in London, UK. She has over 20 years experience in metabonomic technology and its applications. Her focus is on the discovery and development of metabolic biomarkers of disease in personalised healthcare and population studies with significant contributions to cardiovascular, neuroscience and infectious disease research. Recently Prof. Holmes has driven large-scale profiling efforts defining the concept of the metabolome-wide association study (MWAS) in molecular epidemiology, specifically exploring the link between hypertension, diet and metabolic profiles. She has also developed methods for characterizing gut microbiome host metabolic interactions and has applied these to the study of gastrointestinal related diseases including colorectal cancer, obesity and IBD.

Leroy Hood

Dr. Leroy E. Hood graduated from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1964 with an MD and from Caltech with a PhD in biochemistry in 1968. After three years as a Senior Investigator at NIH, his academic career began at Caltech, where he and his colleagues developed the DNA gene sequencer and synthesizer, and the protein synthesizer and sequencer–four instruments that paved the way for the successful mapping and understanding of the human genome. A pillar in the biotechnology field, Dr. Hood has played a role in founding fifteen biotechnology companies including Amgen, Applied Biosystems, Integrated Diagnostics and Arivale. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine. Of the more than 6,000 scientists world-wide who belong to one or more of these academies, Dr. Hood is one of only fifteen people nominated to all three. Dr. Hood has co-authored numerous textbooks in biochemistry, immunology, molecular biology and genetics, as well as a popular book on the human genome project, The Code of Codes and he is just finishing up a text on systems biology. He is the recipient of numerous national and international awards, including the Lasker Award for Studies of Immune Diversity (1987), the Kyoto Prize in advanced technology (2002), the Heinz Award for pioneering work in Systems Biology (2006), and the coveted NAE 2011 Fritz J. and Delores H. Russ Prize for developing automated DNA sequencing. In addition to having received 17 honorary degrees from prestigious universities in the U.S. and abroad, Dr. Hood has published over 750 peer-reviewed articles and currently holds 36 patents. In 2013, he received the National Medal of Science from President Obama. Hood has been named by The Best Schools as one of the 50 Most Influential Scientists in the World Today (2014) http://isb.io/top50. Scientific American has named Hood as one of the top 6 in their selection of 100 biotech visionaries world-wide (2015) http://isb.io/visionary.

Jean‐Luc Wolfender

Jean‐Luc Wolfender is a chemist, who completed a PhD in pharmacognosy with Prof. Kurt Hostettmann (University of Lausanne, Switzerland, 1993). After being responsible of the analytical services of this laboratory, he performed his postdoc with Prof. Al Burlingame on Conus venom profiling (UCSF, San Francisco). He is now full Professor at the Phytochemistry and Bioactive Natural Product research unit of the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences of the University of Geneva (Switzerland), where is presently the president of the School. He has been strongly involved in the 90s in the introduction of LC‐MS and LCNMR for the profiling of crude plants extracts for dereplication purposes in natural product based drug discovery research programs. He is currently developing innovative MS‐ and NMRbased metabolomics strategies in the frame of projects related to phytochemistry, microbial interactions and phytotherapy. He is specialised in the de novo structure identification of biomarkers at the microgram scale and is using a miniaturised approach that combines activity‐based HPLC profiling and high content information bioassays such as those involving zebrafish. His main research interests are focused on the search of novel inducible bioactive natural products in response to various biotic and abiotic stimuli as well for the study of the mode of action of phytopharmaceuticals from a systems biology perspective. He has many collaborations with South America and Asia mainly in relation with bioactivity guided isolation studies for the discovery of novel natural products of therapeutic interest and his involved in the organisation of workshops for the promoting metabolomics with the natural product community.

Guowang Xu

Prof. Dr. Guowang Xu received his Ph.D in Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP), Chinese Academy of Sciences in Jun., 1991. Now he is the administrative vice-director of Biotechnology Division, director of Metabonomics Research Center and director of CAS Key Laboratory of Separation Science for Analytical Chemistry in DICP.

Prof. Xu has co-written 5 books and published more than 370 peer-reviewed papers in the ‘Web of Science Core Collection’ (WoS) indexed journals including PNAS, Hepatology, Clin. Chem., Cancer Res., Diabetes Care, Diabetologia, Anal. Chem., TrAC, J. Chromatogr. A, J. Proteome Res. and Mol. Cell Proteome (WoS H-index = 48, Google H-index =62) and holds more than 40 China patents. He is a member of permanent scientific committee of HPLC.

His main research fields are in the chromatography-related research and the MS-based metabolomics applications in disease biomarker discovery, traditional Chinese medicines and food safety.