Guest Plenary Lecturers
Official XXIst International Pigment Cell Conference website - 21-24 Sept 2011, Bordeaux - France | updated: September 10 2011
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Jean Marc EGLY (GL6)
Position
Research Director, IGBMC, Strasbourg-Illkirch, France
iPCC2011 Lecture
Xeroderma Pigmentosum and Trichothiodystrophy: understanding cancer and noncancer phenotypes
Biosketch
Biosketch not available
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Robert M. Hoffman (GL2)
Position
Professor of Surgery, University of California, San Diego, USA
iPCC2011 Lecture
Hair follicle pluripotent stem (hfPS) cells for regenerative medicine: An advantageous alternative to ES and iPS cells.
Biosketch
Robert Hoffman completed his Ph.D. in Biology at Harvard University in 1971. His post-doctoral training was at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston and Institutes of Bioorganic Chemistry and Molecular Biology, Moscow, Russia. He has been a member of the University of California San Diego School of Medicine faculty since 1979 and is currently Professor of Surgery. He began his cancer research career in 1973 whilst studying the altered methionine metabolism and methylation in cancer cells and in 1984 he founded AntiCancer, Inc. AntiCancer focuses on fluorescent protein-expressing mouse models of cancer; recombinant protein-based cancer drugs and diagnostics, as well as pluripotent hair follicle stem cells and tumor-targeting bacteria Among a long list of achievements he has discovered DNA hypomethylation in human cancer cells, and is originator of concept of methylation-based cancer epigenetics. He has discovered the pluripotency of hair-follicle stem cells to form neurons and other non-hair follicle cells .He has published more than 500 papers with a total of unique citations of 17,000 and a H index of 73.
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Thomas Luger (GL7)
Position
Professor and Chair of Dermatology, University of Muenster, Germany
iPCC2011 Lecture
Alpha melanocyte stimulating hormone: a major component of the skin immune system with a therapeutic potential
Biosketch
Professor Thomas Luger obtained his MD from Vienna University, where he was Resident and Assistant Professor of Dermatology. He is the Director and Chairman of the Department of Dermatology, and also the Director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Cell Biology and Immunobiology of the Skin at Münster University. His clinical interest is focused on allergic and autoimmune diseases of the skin, his main areas of research are the role of neuropeptides in mechanisms of immune tolerance, and the significance of endothelial cells in the pathogenesis of inflammatory reactions. Currently he became President of the German Society of Dermatology and Editor of the journal Experimental Dermatology. He is a former Dean of the Medical Faculty and Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Member of the German Academy of Natural Science Leopoldina, and Member of the Northrhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences.
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Yoshihide Hayashizaki (GL5)
Position
Director of the Omics Science Center, RIKEN institute, Yokohama, Japan
iPCC2011 Lecture
Availability of transcriptional regulatory network analysis by next generation sequencer
Biosketch
Yoshihide Hayashizaki received his M.D. and Ph.D. from Osaka University Medical School in 1982 and 1986, respectively. In 1992, he joined RIKEN, and was appointed Project Director for the RIKEN Genome Project in 1995. Since then he has been taken a transversal data-driven approach to analyze transcriptomes by developing unique technologies including a series of full-length cDNA technologies. With this approach, he has established large amount of full-length cDNA clone bank. This activity was followed by organization of FANTOM (Functional Annotation of Mammalian), an international consortium, originally to annotate a large number of cDNA and subsequently expanded to transcriptome and network analysis. FANTOM activities revealed that more than 63% of the genome - not just the ~1.5% fraction that are protein-coding exons - is transcribed as RNA. In 2008, he appointed to the Director of the Omics Science Center. The center was established to link a variety of omics subdisciplines to molecular networks and pathways in order to advance our understanding of biological phenomena as systems at the molecular level.
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Tatjana Sauka-Spengler (GL1)
Position
Group Leader at Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Oxford, UK
iPCC2011 Lecture
Deciphering gene regulatory interactions controlling neural crest formation
Biosketch
Dr. Tatjana Sauka-Spengler is a Group leader and MRC Senior Research Fellow at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Oxford. Prior to that, Dr. Sauka-Spengler was a CIRM Foundation fellow and Senior Research Associate at Caltech, working in the laboratory of Prof. Marianne Bronner. She received an interdisciplinary training in the physical and biological sciences and earned undergraduate degree in Theoretical Physics and graduate degrees in Physics of Solid State and Evolutionary Developmental Biology at the University of Paris 7, Paris, France. Dr. Sauka-Spengler’s research focuses on deciphering and profiling gene regulatory network underlying early steps of neural crest formation in vertebrates. To this end, Dr Sauka-Spengler has been developing, refining and applying advanced technologies for genetic, genomic, epigenomic and transcriptional analyses of neural crest in the embryonic context, with the aim of reconstituting the endogenous developmental program of neural crest induction/initial specification in stem cells.
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Villy Sundstrom (GL3)
Position
Professor and Head of the Chemical Physics Department, Lund University, Sweden
iPCC2011 Lecture
Photochemistry and excited state dynamics of eumelanin building blocks
Biosketch
PhD at Umea University Sweden, 1977, after studies at Bell Labs under the guidance of prof. Peter Rentzepis. Following receipt of PhD, the first ultrafast laboratory in Scandinavia was established in Umea. Presently Sundstrom is professor and Head of the Chemical Physics Department, Lund University. Received the ERC Advanced Investigator Award 2008. Editor of Chemical Physics Letters. Research interests include:
- Femtobiology. Ultrafast spectroscopy applied to various biological systems.
- Photosynthetic light-harvesting. The energy flow pathways and energy transfer mechanisms in photosynthesis have been studied in great detail.
- Interfacial electron transfer in dye-sensitized nanostructured semiconductors.
- Excited state and charge carrier dynamics in organic semiconductors. Chemical reaction dynamics in solution. A large number of photoisomerization and photodissociation reactions have been studied.
- Ultrafast structural dynamics in chemical and biological systems, studied with time resolved X-ray spectroscopy.
- Photophysics and photochemistry of melanin pigments and its building blocks.
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Eli Sprecher (GL4)
Position
Professor and Chair of Dermatology at the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, Tel Aviv, Israel
iPCC2011 Lecture
Keratin disorders associated with abnormal pigmentation: clinical and molecular insights.
Biosketch
Prof. Eli Sprecher serves as chair of Dermatology at the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, Tel Aviv, Israel. He is also Associate Professor of Dermatology at the Faculty of Medicine, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel as well as Visiting Associate Professor at the Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel. He received his MD degree from Hadassah Medical School, completed a PhD thesis in molecular virology at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel and trained in dermatology at the Rambam Medical Center, Haifa, Israel. He spent a post-doctoral fellowship at Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, PA and moved back to the department of Dermatology at the Rambam Medical Center where he directed the Laboratory of Molecular Dermatology until 2008. In 2007, he was appointed deputy director of the Rappaport Institute for Medical Sciences, Technion, Haifa, Israel and in 2007 he established within the same institute the Rappaport-Rambam Center for Translational Genetics. In 2008, he moved to Tel Aviv to head the Department of Dermatology at the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, Tel Aviv, Israel. His research deals with the molecular genetics of inherited and acquired skin diseases. His group has uncovered the genetic basis of 12 different diseases over the years, he has co-authored more than 120 scientific publications and he is the recipient of numerous international awards including the Everett C. Fox Award of the American Academy of Dermatology and the Alfred Marchionini Award.
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Luigi Zecca (GL8)
Position
Director of the Institute of Biomedical Technologies of Italian National Research Council, Milan, Italy
iPCC2011 Lecture
Neuromelanins in brain aging and Parkinson's disease.
Biosketch
Luigi Zecca M.D. is Director of the Institute of Biomedical Technologies of Italian National Research Council in Milan. His research interests are on brain aging and neurodegenerative mechanisms of Parkinson's disease with particular emphasis on the role of neuromelanin and metals. He has shown the main structural aspects of neuromelanin and its interaction with metals in human brain. He has described key features of neuromelanin synthesis and its accumulation in lysosomal organelles during brain aging. He has demonstrated that intraneuronal neuromelanin is protective while extraneuronal neuromelanin can activate microglia and induce neuronal degeneration. He has shown that neuromelanin organelles and related phenomena are present in all neurons of human brain and are not limited to catecholaminergic neurons.
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