Nadine Ziemert is a nationally and internationally recognised leader in the field of computer-based genome mining of natural products and developing computational tools for drug discovery.

She is currently a Professor at the University of Tübingen and has been awarded a fully funded research professorship by the German Centre for Infection Research. Her research group focuses on the development of new bioinformatic tools to facilitate antibiotic discovery, analysis on the evolution and distribution of secondary metabolites in bacteria, as well as wet lab studies on the biosynthesis and regulation of these chemical compounds. Professor Ziemert’s work is underpinned by key international collaborations including close productive relationships with Professor Marnix Medema in Wageningen, Professor Tilmann Weber in Copenhagen, Professor Max Cryle at Monash University, and Professor James McInerney at Nottingham University.

Professor Ziemert’s research in the field of natural products is internationally recognised with more than 50 journal articles that cover bioinformatics and wet lab studies of bacterial natural products and frequent invitations to talk at key conferences in the field. Professor Ziemert is also the speaker of the section “Biology of Natural Product Producing Bacteria” by the German Microbiology Society.

Professor Dr Jörg Stülke is a world-leading expert in systems biology and has extensive experience in working with a range of prokaryotic model organisms.

He is a Professor of Microbiology at the Institute of Microbiology and Genetics, University of Göttingen, Germany and serves as head of the Department of General Microbiology. His work focusses on the regulation of metabolism in the pathogenic bacterium Mycoplasma pneumoniae and the model organism Bacillus subtilis, in the context of gene expression. A key focus of this work is to understand mechanisms of RNA- and ribonucleotide-mediated regulation. Stülke’s experience and expertise in studying B. subtilis and Mycoplasma species is closely related to the Centre activities. Professor Stülke has published more than 230 peer-reviewed research papers that have received over 14000 citations.

Professor Joerg Stelling has expertise in the development and application of computational and experimental methods to analyse and design complex cellular networks, with a focus on large-scale mechanistic approaches.

His research specifically focuses on developing mechanistic mathematical models to probe the operating principles of cellular networks to enable their rational re-design. He is currently a Professor in Computational Systems Biology at ETH Zurich where he heads a large interdisciplinary research group comprised of biologists, mathematicians, engineers, and computer scientists. Previous appointments include the Max Planck Institute for Complex Dynamical Systems where he played a significant role in establishing Systems Biology.

Professor Stelling has published more than 200 peer-reviewed research papers that have received over 13 000 citations. His most notable work is in the field of structural analysis of metabolic networks, methods to design synthetic gene circuits, Bayesian model selection, and experiment yeast biology. The methods and computational approaches developed by the Stelling lab have resulted in successful spin-off companies who service clients in Big Pharma such as AstraZeneca, Roche and Novartis and several companies currently make use of his open-source software for metabolic pathway analysis. The Stelling group also make their biological constructs, developed in the lab, available to others via the platform Addgene.

Simon Schmidt is a biochemist and molecular biologist with expertise is in fungal physiology and genetics, particularly as these fields relate to alcoholic fermentation during the process of winemaking.

Dr Schmidt holds the position of Research Manager at the Australian Wine Research Institute. As Research Manager, he has led and participated in research relating to winemaking’s technical aspects, including understanding the effect of grape juice composition, yeast-bacterial interactions, and nutritional additives on fermentation performance. He has also investigated the effects of aeration during fermentation on wine style and managed the development of yeast strains for commercial winemaking. The latter has resulted in the licensing of yeast strains to bulk yeast producers who now make those strains available to the Australian wine industry. He has published works on systems-level characterisation of yeast during fermentation and developed methods to facilitate those analyses. Further, he has experience with recombinant protein production and characterisation. To a lesser degree Schmidt has participated in projects in the field of grapevine genomics, in which molecular markers for the identification of grapevine clones have been developed.

The current goal of Dr Schmidt’s research team is to define the physical and genetic interactions that drive fermentation performance and reliability in commercial fermentations, using that information to generate the next generation of winemaking yeasts through marker driven breeding and engineering approaches.

Yolanda Schaerli is an Associate Professor of Synthetic Biology at the University of Lausanne. She is an experimental synthetic biologist with a well-established track record of using computational approaches to inform experimental design.

Professor Schaerli is an aspiring researcher with a track record of research publications as senior author in leading journals of the field, several invitations to international conferences, invited reviews, invitations to give seminars around the world and securing external funding. From 2019-21 she served as vice-president to the Swiss Systems Biology society and is currently serving as president.

Schaerli’s research involves building, characterising, and modelling synthetic gene regulatory networks in bacteria, with a strong focus on circuits involved in spatial and temporal pattern formation. In particular, against the prevalent view, her group was able to demonstrate that CRISPR interference can be used to build dynamic and multistable synthetic gene circuits.

Elizabeth Read has built a research program at the intersection of mathematical biology and scientific computing, incorporating theoretical and algorithmic approaches from the field of chemical physics. She is currently an Associate Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Irvine.

Read’s research group specializes in stochastic modelling and has developed new theoretical and computational approaches to study complex system dynamics, including rare event simulation methods and methods for analysing metastability in nonlinear biochemical networks. Her group has also introduced new approaches for integrating data-driven (statistical) and hypothesis-driven (mechanistic) modelling approaches, including in applications to inferring enzymatic mechanisms from cell-based genome-wide data. She was named a Scialog fellow in Chemical Machinery of the Cell from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. Read has been active in building interdisciplinary research centres and collaborative teams funded by US funding agencies and centred at the University of California, Irvine.

Professor Dr Jan Hasenauer’s research focuses on the development and application of novel mathematical and computational methods for data-driven modelling and analysis of biological processes. He is leading the Interdisciplinary Research Unit Mathematics and Life Sciences at the University of Bonn and an independent young investigator group at the Helmholtz Center Munich.

Jan Hasenauer is the chair of Computational Biology at the University of Bonn. His research group currently consists of 15 PhD students and 5 postdoctoral fellows. Jan Hasenauer has published over 130 peer-reviewed research papers that were cited in total more than 4,500 times. His most notable work is in the field of computational systems and cell biology where he has contributed to the development of efficient simulation and inference methods as well as toolboxes that are widely used by the scientific community. Jan Hasenauer is a member of the International Society of Computational Biology and of the editorial board of Cell Systems. He has strong collaborations with national and international researchers via several collaborative research projects and networks, e.g., the Single Cell Omics Germany network and the European Horizon2020 project ORCHESTRA.

Professor Heather Harrington develops mathematical methods to study signalling pathways involved in systems and cancer biology. She is currently a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford.

Her research focuses on the problem of reconciling models and data by extracting information about the structure of mathematical models and the shape of data. To develop these methods, Harrington integrates techniques from a variety of disciplines such as computational algebraic geometry and topology, statistics, optimization, network theory, and dynamical systems. She has mentored over 60 early career researchers. She has active collaborations with many experimentalists and industry partners, including three pharmaceutical companies.

Harrington has been awarded a number of prestigious prizes including an LMS Whitehead Prize ‘for her outstanding contributions to mathematical biology which have generated new biological insights using novel applications of topological and algebraic techniques’ (2018), The Adams Prize awarded by the University of Cambridge for ‘distinguished research in the Mathematical Sciences’ (2019), and the Philip Leverhulme prize for ‘early career researchers whose work has had international impact and whose future research career is exceptionally promising’.

Professor Ruth Baker is a world-leader in biological mathematics. She is a Professor in Applied Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute of University of Oxford.

Professor Baker’s research sits at the interface of applied mathematics and statistics and the biomedical sciences. She develops and uses powerful and versatile mathematical, computational, and statistical tools to tackle some of the biggest challenges in the field. The innovative tools she develops draw upon ideas from a diverse range of subfields of mathematics, and they aim to enable full exploitation of the quantitative data now routinely collected in the field by transforming our ability to analyse, simulate, and calibrate mathematical models. Professor Baker’s experience in developing new theoretical methodologies and subsequently deploying them to provide new biological insights has led to the publication of over 180 articles in high-quality, peer-reviewed journals, including Nature and Science.

She has been elected Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (2020) and Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology (2019). Nationally, she has held several prestigious fellowships, including from the Royal Society (Wolfson Research Merit Award 2017-22), the Leverhulme Trust (2017-19), and she has been awarded the Whitehead Prize of the London Mathematical Society (2014).