Professor Wah Chiu, BCM, Houston, Texas, USA.

Prof. Chiu is Elected Member United States National Academy of Sciences (01/2012), a distinguished service professor and Alvin Romansky professor in department of biochemistry and molecular biology and also holds distinguished service professor in other departments of Baylor College of Medicine, USA. He is also the director of the National Center for Macromolecular Imaging, BCM. He obtained his BA, PhD and Advanced Training from University of California, Berkeley. He has more than 10 honours and awards to his credit. His professional interests are Bioinformatics, Nano Medicine and Drug Design, Cryo-Electron Microscopy and Tomography, Biophysics and Computational Biology, Protein Structure-Function and Protein Folding, Structural Biology and Macromolecular Assemblies, Membranes and Membrane Proteins, Molecular Basis of Human Disease and Behaviour.

Professor Wolfgang Baumeister, Scientific Member and Director Max Planck Institut (MPI) für Biochemie, Martinsried, Germany.

Prof. Baumeister is an EMBO member, foreign associate member of US National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He studied biology, chemistry and physics at the Universities of Muenster and Bonn, Germany, and he obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Dusseldorf in 1973. From 1973-1980 he was Research Associate in the Department of Biophysics at the University of Duesseldorf. He held a Heisenberg Fellowship spending time at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England (1980-1981). In 1982 he became a Group Leader at the Max-Planck-Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany and in 1988 Director and Head of the Department of Structural Biology. He is also an Honorary Professor (Physics Faculty) at the Technical University in Munich. In 2000 he was named Moore Distinguished Scholar at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, USA.

Prof. Baumeister made seminal contributions to our understanding of the structure and function of the cellular machinery of protein degradation, in particular the proteasome. Moreover, he pioneered the development of cryo-electron tomography. His contributions to science were recognized by numerous awards including the Otto Warburg Medal, the Schleiden Medal, the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine, the Stein and Moore Award, the Harvey Prize in Science and Technology, the Ernst Schering Prize and many more.

Prof. Steven J Ludtke, BCM, Houston, Texas, USA.

Steve is a professor of Biochemistry at Baylor College of Medicine 2015. PhD from Rice University. His Honours & Awards include: HAMBP (Houston Area Molecular Biophysics Program) Fellow (01/1992 - 01/1996); NRSA (Institutional) Fellow, NRSA (01/1996 - 01/1997); NRSA (Individual) Fellow, NRSA (01/1998 - 01/1999); Burton Medal, Microscopy Society of America (01/2008). His professional interests are Antibiotic Resistance, Cryo-electron Microscopy and Tomography, Protein Structure-Function and Protein Folding, Structural Biology and Macromolecular Assemblies, Membranes and Membrane Proteins, Fatty Acids and Lipid Metabolism. His work primarily focuses on electron cryomicroscopy and its application to important problems in structural biology. His major contribution to the field includes the development of EMAN, a software suite for processing images of individual molecules and producing 3D structures at subnanometer resolution

Dr. Kutti Raghunath Vinothkumar, MRC, LMB, UK.

Vinoth did his BSc in microbiology and MSc in Biotechnology from Madurai Kamaraj University, India. He did his PhD in Biochemistry and Biophysics in Prof. Werner Kühlbrandt lab at Max-Planck Institute of Biophysics, Frankfurt. During this period he gained experience in the field of membrane protein structural biology with larger emphasis on electron microscopy and subsequently on X-ray crystallography. In the year 2006, he joined as a Marie-Curie postdoctoral fellow in the group of Professor Richard Henderson at MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK and in his current position he is working as a Group Member in the same lab. In recent years, a second aspect of his research interest has been to visualise membrane proteins as single particles in particular those that have been difficult to crystallise. Some of the proteins that he works include ion-channels and multi-subunit membrane protein complexes. Together with Richard Henderson and Greg McMullan at the LMB, he is also trying different approaches to obtain better images by electron cryomicroscopy such that high-resolution structures of macromolecules can be obtained with less number of particles than what is achievable today.

Dr. Lu Gan, NUS, Singapore.

He obtained his B.Sc. degree in Physics from California Institute of Technology and Ph.D. from Jack Johnson’s lab at The Scripps Research Institute. He worked as a Postdoc fellow with Grant Jensen’s at Caltech. He is currently an Assistant Professor at NUS, Singapore. He uses state-of-the-art electron tomography to generate “tomograms” to map out how key protein complexes are organized in their native context inside a cell. His research interests include applications of electron tomography to cell biology, Electron cryotomographic analysis of picoplankton and other single-celled eukaryotes.

Professor Elena Orlova, Birkbeck College & ISMB, UK

Elena is a Professor and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology and Senior member of the Royal Society of Medicine. She works on macromolecular systems. She has been elected to be a chair of Commission on Electron Crystallography (IUCr) in 2014 and now involved actively in organization of the Twenty-Fourth Congress and General Assembly of the International Union of Crystallography (2017) in Hyderabad, India. She is an editor for the Journal of Biological Chemistry and the Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology (area of Molecular Biology), and the Open Access journal AIMS Biophysics. She organises biannual International EMBO courses on Image processing for Cryo EM at Birkbeck. Her main professional interests are Cryo-Electron Microscopy, structural analysis of biocomplexes using single particle analysis and tomography..

Dr. Garib N Murshodov, MRC, LMB, Cambridge, UK

Garib is a leader of Computational Crystallography group. His group is developing mathematical and computational methods for analysis of experimental data produced by experimental structural biology, namely Macromolecular Crystallography and Single Particle CryoEM. He obtained his BA and MA in Baku State University and his PhD in the Institute of Crystallography of the Academy of Sciences, Moscow, USSR. He is the principal author of the program refmac that is used to produce 44% of all macromolecular structures in the PDB. His main focus is in development and implementation of advanced statistical tools to derive as accurate as possible atomic models from crystallographic diffraction data and single particle cryoEM reconstruction maps.

Dr. Ardan Patwardhan EMBL-EBI, Cambridge, UK

Ardan was a lecturer in computational structural biology at Imperial College London for 11 years focusing on single-particle electron microscopy and its application to the study of the 3D structure of biologically relevant macromolecules. His work focused on developing image processing techniques and gaining a better understanding of factors limiting the achievable resolution with the technique. Ardhan moved to EBI in January 2011 to take up the position of the EM project leader. This marks a shift in his career in that it focuses on issues concerned with the collective results of the 3DEM community. He is particularly interested in providing “added-value” services that can be uniquely provided from the vantage point of an organization like the PDBe. As a first step, he has developed a statistical service that mines the EMDB database and presents the results as interactive charts (pde.org/emstats). He has also recently developed an advanced search tool for the EMDB (pde.org/emsearch).

Dr. Ramanathan Natesh, IISER Thiruvananthapuram, India.

Natesh obtained his Bachelors degree in Electronics from St Josephs college, and Masters degree in Physics from Christ University, Bangalore, but switched into structural molecular biology at age 22. He went as a research student to the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. As a Wellcome Trust postdoctoral fellow at University of Bath he solved the first crystal structure of human Angiotensin Converting Enzyme, subsequently published in Nature, Jan 2003. He won two prestigious fellowship competitions to learn molecular biology and cryo electron microscopy techniques. He went as a HFSP fellow to University of Toronto to learn molecular biology. Subsequently he worked as a Wellcome Trust Academic Fellow at Birkbeck College, London with Professor Helen Sabil FRS FMedSci as his host. Here he learned single particle electron microscopy where more advanced electron cryomicroscopy now offers the promise of being able to determine atomic structures of large protein assemblies without the need first to make crystals. Here he has succeeded in obtaining the structure of various states of a non-native protein in complex with GroEL/GroES, by using single particle cryo electron microscopy. Subsequently he moved as a DBT Ramalingaswami Fellow and Assistant Professor to the School of Biology at IISER Thiruvananthapuram (in 2010).

Dr. Manidipa Banerjee, IIT Delhi, India.

Manidipa obtained her PhD from University of California, San Diego, USA, in 2005 and carried out postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Professor John E Johnson, The Scripps Research Institute, California, from 2005-2010 in the area of non-enveloped virus structure and function. She received the DBT -Ramalingaswami re-entry fellowship and joined the Kusuma School of Biological Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 2010, as Assistant Professor, where she is working to-date. Her professional interests are in the fields of virus-host interaction, virus capsid disassembly and membrane penetration and virus-based drug design. She is attempting to answer fundamental questions in these fields by utilizing molecular virology and biophysical techniques, electron microscopy and cryo-electron microscopy and molecular dynamics simulation studies. She was instrumental in setting up one of the two first cryoEM facilities within India for high-resolution structural analysis of macromolecular assemblies.

Dr. Jayati Sengupta, IICB Kolkata, India.

Jayati obtained her B.Sc. and M.Sc. in chemistry, and Ph.D. from NEHU, Shillong. Her doctoral work was to understand modifications of DNA bases by polycyclic aromatic amines and the role of modified DNA for carcinogenesis, using computational chemistry. She worked as a DBT postdoctoral trainee at Bose Institute, Kolkata, on molecular modelling and structural analysis of peptides using NMR for a short period of time. On her second postdoctoral training in Professor Joachim Frank’s laboratory at Wadsworth Center, Albany, New York, USA she worked for eight years on structural elucidation of ribosomal complexes by using cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) in conjunction with single particle 3D reconstruction techniques. Currently working as a Senior Scientist at IICB Kolkota, her research combines structural biology with functional studies of higher order complexes to understand their roles in health and disease. Recently, on a ‘ICMR International Fellowship’ she visited Dr. Sriram Subramaniam’s lab at NIH, Bethesda, USA, where she acquainted herself with other cryo-EM techniques (particularly Tomography). She was instrumental in setting up one of the two first cryoEM facilities within India for high-resolution structural analysis of macromolecular assemblies.

Dr. Chris Booth, GATAN

Chris is the Product Manager for Life Sciences at Gatan Inc. He studied biochemistry and computer science at the University of Victoria in Canada and went on to earn is Ph.D. with Wah Chu at the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas. Following his Ph.D. he went on to work with Gatan Inc. on all areas of 3D Imaging including TEM tomography, X-ray tomography, serial block face imaging and cryo-EM. He is now responsible for the range of products serving life science customers from Gatan including the revolutionary K2 Summit direct electron camera.

Dr. Rishi Matadeen, FEI

Rishi did his Ph. D. at Imperial College London on the structure of Ribosomes by Cryo-EM. He then joined Professor Steve Fuller’s group at Oxford University as a Senior Staff Scientist working on Virus and Immunological Receptor structures. After 10 years at Oxford, he joined the NIMR in London as a Senior Investigator Scientist before becoming the Facility Manager at NeCEN in the Netherlands, one of the first international cryo EM facilities. Rishi then joined FEI as a Senior Applications Engineer and is currently involved in the setup and operation of FEI Cambridge Pharma Consortium.

Ian Lamswood, Leica

Ian is Global Director of Marketing for the Leica Nanotechnology business of Leica Microsystems. He is responsible for the electron microscopy sample preparation product portfolio. His background is biology, having a degree in Biological Sciences and working previously in histology and electron microscopy at the University of Liverpool in the UK before moving into the commercial world when he joined Reichert-Jung and then Cambridge Instruments and Leica Microsystems. Based in Vienna, Austria, with over thirty years experience, he works with a team of Product Managers and R&D to develop and launch the next generation instruments, based on the needs of their customers. The main focus currently is around cryo techniques and ion beam milling.