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First Round of Abstract Submission Ends: Jul 30, 2025
Extended Early Bird Ends: Dec 28, 2024

Keynote Speakers

Prof. Ilana Kolodkin-Gal
Imperial College London, UK
Title: Will update soon.
Dr. Ilana Kolodkin-Gal is an independent principal investigator with proven expertise in microbial genetics and biotechnology (H-index = 33, with over 9,800 citations, including 13 papers cited more than 100 times). The IKG lab aims to understand and control microbial functional behaviors by utilizing methods from chemistry, life sciences, biotechnology, and modeling. This multidisciplinary approach was recognized by the prestigious journal Nature Biotechnology in 20211. IKG earned my undergraduate degree at Tel Aviv University and completed a direct Ph.D. at the Hebrew University under the guidance of Prof. Hanna Engelberg-Kulka. During her Ph.D. studies, IKG was awarded the Dean's Award for Excellence and the national Katzir prize for an outstanding thesis and for unravelling a novel signaling mechanism activating programmed cell death in bacteria2. Afterward, IKG held a post-doctoral fellowship to study biofilm formation as a European Molecular Biology Organization and Human Frontiers in Science Fellow at Harvard University (Cambridge, MA, USA)3. In 2013, IKG joined the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot as a senior researcher and received the Alon Fellowship for outstanding young scientists. IKG served for four years (2017-2021) as an elected board member of the Israel Society for Microbiology and currently serves on the Israel Society for Synthetic Biology board. Since 2021, IKG has been an editor for the Microbiology Spectrum journal published by the American Society for Microbiology and an Executive Editor for the Cambridge University Press Journal Research Directions: Biotechnology Design. IKG has been an editorial board member of npj Biofilms and Microbiomes since 2016 (Springer-Nature) and an advisory board member of Trends in Biotechnolog, Cell press. IKG's lab significantly contributed to the comprehension of the genetic base of microbial multicellularity and development4-7
Prof. Bernd Blobel
University of Regensburg, Germany
Title: Will update soon.
Will update soon.
Prof. Yibo Li
Huazhong Agricultural University, China
Title: Will update soon.
Will update soon.
Prof. Slavica Pavlovic-Djuranovic
Washington University School of Medicine, USA
Title: Complicated life cycle of malaria parasites and gene regulation
Will update soon.
Prof. Shouhong Guang
University of Science & Technology of China, China
Title: Compartmentalized piRNA biogenesis in C.elegans
Shouhong Guang is a chair professor at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). He graduated from USTC with bachelor and master degrees and then a Ph.D. degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with Professor Janet Mertz. He did his postdoc training with Professor Scott Kennedy and came back to USTC to set up his own lab in 2010. His research has been focusing on the mechanism and function of small regulatory RNAs in C. elegans and has discovered the nuclear RNAi defective pathway, a new class of siRNAs and nucleolar RNAi, and the protein machineries for piRNA transcription and processing. Meanwhile, he investigated the mechanism of transgenerational inheritance of RNAi. He was awarded the one hundred talents and one thousand young elite programs.

Research Achievements:

I am very interested in how small RNAs are generated, transported and regulated, and how they function in the nucleus in metazoan, especially in the model organism C. elegans. To address these questions, our lab applied forward and reverse genetics, in addition to proteomic approaches, to identify factors required for nuclear and nucleolar RNAi, and the biogenesis of small regulatory RNAs. We have discovered the nuclear RNAi defective (NRDE) pathway (Science 2008; Nature 2010; PLoS Genetics 2011; Genetics 2014; Current Biology 2015), a class of antisense ribosomal siRNAs (risiRNAs) and nucleolar RNAi (Nature Structural & Molecular biology 2017; PNAS 2018; Nucleic Acids Research 2021a), the protein machineries for piRNA transcription and processing (USTC complex, UAD-2, PICS complex) (Genes & Development 2019; Cell Reports 2019; PNAS 2021; Nature Communications 2021; Journal of Genetics and Genomics 2022). Meanwhile, we found that both nuclear and cytoplasmic machineries are required for transgenerational inheritance of RNAi (Nature Genetics 2012; Cell Reports 2018). We have also developed the gene editing method in C. elegans (Scientific Reports 2014; Genetics 2015; G3 2018).
Prof. Francesco Neri
Leibniz-Institute on Ageing - Fritz-Lipmann-Institute (FLI), Germany
Title: To be confirmed.
Prof. Neri obtained PhD in Biotechnology in Siena (Italy) working on embryonic stem cells epigenetics. Then he worked as postdoc between Human Genetics Foundation (HuGeF) in Torino (Italy) and the Radboud University Medical Centre, Nijmegen (Netherlands) where specialized his research on the DNA methylation specific epigenetic mark on stem cell, differentiation and colon cancer. During this period, he characterized new mechanisms of gene transcriptional regulation, developed new epigenomic genome-wide methods and identified the role of the intragenic methylation. In 2015, Prof. Neri was appointed as Group Leader of the “Epigenetics research group” at the Fritz Lipmann Leibniz Institute on Aging (FLI) in Jena (Germany). His research was supported by the Sofja Kovalevskaja starting grant of the von Humboldt foundation, and it was focused on the aging-dependent epigenetic aberrations occurring in adult stem cells promoting colon cancer. In 2021, Prof. Neri moved his laboratory at the University of Torino, where he is Full Professor of Molecular Biology and is leading the research group of Epigenetics of Aging & Cancer at the Molecular Biotechnology Center (MBC) in Torino. The current research of Prof. Neri focuses on inflammaging, intestinal aging, epigenetic drifts and how aging functionally impacts on colon cancer initiation.