LUDWIG-MAXIMILIANS-UNIVERSITY

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After hypothesis-driven research on chaperones with Ulrich Hartl at the Max-Planck-Institute of Biochemistry as PhD student and explorative screening on autophagy with Wade Harper at Harvard Medical School in Boston as post-doc, Christian sought to combine these two approaches when he started his own group in 2010 in the Institute of Biochemistry II (IBC2) at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. After setting up proteomics and high-content imaging platforms at IBC2, he focused on exploring cellular components that regulate autophagy or that are subject to autophagosomal degradation. Within this framework, the ubiquitin system gained particular attention. In 2016, Christian joined the Munich Cluster of Systems Neurology (SyNergy) at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) as professor where he continued his research on autophagy and ubiquitin.

ACADEMIA SINICA & NATIONAL TAIWAN UNIVERSITY

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Dr. Chen received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin and completed postdoctoral training at the MGH Cancer Center, Harvard Medical School. He is currently a Research Fellow at the Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica, and Professor at the Institute of Biological Sciences, National Taiwan University. The Chen lab investigates the molecular regulation of autophagy and protein tyrosine phosphatase (PTP) signaling in development and disease. Using Drosophila and mammalian models, the lab has defined key roles for ATG9A in autophagy, stress responses, and gut homeostasis, and uncovered novel functions of autophagy-related deubiquitinating enzymes (DUBs) in development and pathology. The lab also demonstrated tumor-suppressive activities of PTPs in regulating cell proliferation and invasion. These studies have contributed to a deeper understanding of autophagy, ubiquitin signaling, and phosphatase-mediated pathways in tissue homeostasis. Ongoing work focuses on delineating the molecular networks that govern these processes and identifying therapeutic targets in cancer, metabolic syndromes, and neurodegenerative diseases.

WEIZMANN INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE

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Zvulun earned his PhD in Neurobiochemistry from the Weizmann Institute of Science. He conducted his postdoctoral research at Princeton University and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in the lab of Jim Rothman, where he investigated the formation of COPI vesicles and their role in intra-Golgi transport. Upon returning to the Weizmann Institute as a group leader, Zevi focused on identifying factors involved in vesicle trafficking, particularly on autophagy. He was the first to identify, isolate, and determine the structure of GATE-16, a member of the Atg8 protein family. His lab also provided the first characterization of Atg4A. Through studies on Atg4A regulation, he uncovered a complex connection between autophagy and reactive oxygen species (ROS). Currently, his research centers on autophagosome biogenesis, focusing on how novel functions of the Atg2 and Atg24 complexes regulate the autophagic isolation membrane rim.

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

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Dr. Congcong He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. Her lab studies how the autophagy machinery, such as Beclin/BECN family proteins, regulates metabolism and behaviors in mouse models, and how autophagy mediates exercise-induced benefits against metabolic and neurological diseases including diabetes and neurodegeneration. Dr. He serves as an Associate Editor for the Autophagy journal and a Consulting Editor for JCI Insight. She is a founding member of the Women In Autophagy (WIA) network, and the co-organizer and chair of the inaugural WIA annual symposium in 2020.

NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES

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Dr. Hui Jiang received his PhD from Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and conducted postdoc research with Dr. Xiaodong Wang at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.

The Jiang lab focus on mitochondrial homeostatic mechanisms and their roles in degenerative and metabolic diseases. Recent findings from the lab discovered a PPTC7-SCFFBXL4 pathway that represses basal mitophagy by degrading the mitophagy receptors BNIP3 and NIX. Dysfunction of this pathway leads to excessive mitophagy, which causes intolerable mitochondrial loss and multi-system degeneration in MTDPS13, a devastating disease caused by FBXL4 mutations. In the meeting, Dr. Jiang will introduce published and unpublished work on the role of BNIP3 and NIX in mitochondrial quantity control and its implications in physiology and diseases.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA

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Sharad is a Bradley Distinguished Professor at University of South Australia. He co-founded Centre for Cancer Biology (CCB), which he co-directed for 11 years. His research interests include cell death and ubiquitin signalling in health and disease. His laboratory was one of the first to discover mammalian caspases, the NEDD4 E3 ligase family and NEDD8, and now investigates how ubiquitination regulates membrane proteins, autophagy-dependent cell death and the biogenesis of extracellular vesicles. He is  a Member of the Order of Australia, holds Fellowships of the Australian Academy of Science and Australian Academy of Health & Medical Sciences, and the 2020 South Australian Scientist of the Year.     

UNIVERSITY OF VIENNA

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Sascha Martens earned his PhD in Genetics from the University of Cologne before completing postdoctoral training at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Since 2009, he has led a research group at the Max Perutz Labs in Vienna, where is now a Full Professor. His lab focusses on selective autophagy. He reconstituted much of the core autophagy machinery and uncovered how autophagosome formation is coupled to cargo recognition. He also discovered that cargo receptors condense ubiquitinated proteins for autophagic degradation—a process that fails for pathological protein aggregates.

MONASH UNIVERSITY

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Meagan McGrath is a senior postdoctoral research fellow at the Biomedicine Discovery Instutite, Monash University, Australia. She is head of the skeletal muscle research group in the laboratory of Professor Christina Mitchell. Meagan completed her PhD in 2004 and undertook postdoctoral work at Monash University characterizing the function of a newly identified family of proteins, called four and a half LIM proteins, in the transcriptional regulation of skeletal muscle cytoarchitecture, fibre-type specification and growth.

Meagan’s research combines use of knockout, transgenic and mutant knock-in mouse models with cell biology to characterize pathways required for maintaining normal skeletal muscle homeostasis including myoblast fusion, muscle repair and autophagy. This also includes understanding of disease process that underlie the genetically and clinically heterogeneous inherited disorders affecting skeletal muscle, called dystrophies and myopathies. She has made key discoveries in this area including the identification of FHL1 gene mutations as causative for the muscle disease Reducing body myopathy. Her recent work has established how mutations in an inositol polyphosphate 5-phosphatase enzyme cause congential muscular dystrophy due to a failure to maintain lysosome repopulation during autophagy. This work provided key understanding of how lysosome homeostasis is maintained in muscle in vivo for continued autophagic function.

THE UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO

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Noboru Mizushima has studied intracellular degradation systems, focusing on autophagy and related pathways, for 28 years since joining Dr. Yoshinori Ohsumi’s lab in 1997. His group has identified key molecules involved in autophagy, developed monitoring methods, and uncovered the pathophysiological roles of autophagy and other degradation pathways in vertebrates. He received the Medal with Purple Ribbon of Japan in 2021 and the inaugural Beth Levine Prize in Autophagy Research in 2023. He is a former President of the Japanese Biochemical Society and currently serves as the President of the Japan Society for Cell Biology.

UNIVERSITY OF LAUSANNE

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Vassiliki obtained her Ph.D. in Neurosciences from the University of Basel, in the lab of Yves-Alain Barde, studying instructive functions of neurotrophin receptors during CNS and PNS development. She then joined the lab of Nektarios Tavernarakis at the IMBB in Greece, where she investigated conserved cellular mechanisms of stress-response and hormesis in neurons, combining C. elegans and mouse genetics. Funded by a Marie-Curie career restart grant, she studied the regulation of autophagy in the mammalian brain and in 2017 she established her lab with an ERC starting grant. She joined the DNF in 2019, where she's currently an Associate Professor.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

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Rushika M. Perera PhD is the Deborah Cowan Endowed Associate Professor in the School of Medicine and the Vice Chair of the Dept. of Anatomy at the University of California, San Francisco. She also holds appointments in the Dept. of Pathology and the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center and is the Chief Scientific Officer of the UCSF Pancreas Center.

 Dr. Perera received her PhD from the University of Melbourne in Australia and trained at Yale University and the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston before joining the faculty at UCSF in 2015.

Research in the Perera lab focuses on understanding how fundamental cell biological processes that regulate metabolism, protein trafficking and quality control are dysregulated in pancreatic cancer, with the aim of identifying new cancer specific vulnerabilities that can be targeted clinically.

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

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David Rubinsztein is Professor of Molecular Neurogenetics and a UK Dementia Research Institute Group Leader at the University of Cambridge. His laboratory is based in the  Cambridge Institute for Medical Research. Dr. Rubinsztein earned his medical and PhD degrees from University of Cape Town. He came to Cambridge in 1993 as a Senior Registrar in genetic pathology and was the first person to complete formal training in this field in the UK. His research is focused on autophagy, particularly in the context of neurodegenerative diseases. Rubinsztein was elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, EMBO member, and Fellow of the Royal Society.

SOUTH AUSTRALIAN HEALTH AND MEDICAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE

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Associate Professor Timothy Sargeant leads the Lysosomal Health in Ageing laboratory at SAHMRI. A cell biologist by training, his research focuses on how cells recycle their contents, with particular interest in measuring autophagy in humans. His team is developing direct measures of autophagic flux, identifying autophagy biomarkers, and exploring nutritional strategies to augment autophagy in people. His work bridges discovery science and clinical translation to better understand how autophagy can delay the onset of age-related diseases such as dementia and heart disease. This research has received NHMRC funding and led to multiple patent applications.

BUCHMANN INSTITUTE FOR MOLECULAR LIFE SCIENCES

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Alexandra Stolz studied Biochemistry in Regensburg, Germany followed by a PhD in yeast genetics and molecular biology in Stuttgart, Germany. After a postdoc (2012-2013) working on ER associated protein degradation (ERAD) – a proteasome dependent pathway, Alexandra joined the groups of Andreas Ernst and Ivan Dikic at IBC2 in Frankfurt, Germany (2013-2016) to work on autophagy. Besides contributing to the characterization of the first autophagy receptor for ER-phagy FAM134B and elaborating the role of the kinase TBK1 in mitophagy, she utilized phage display and protein engineering to develop fluorescent sensors for the central autophagy components LC3/GABARAPs. In January 2017, she joined Genentech in South San Francisco, USA as a visiting scientist where she studied the impact of oncogene-induced secretion during cancer pathogenesis. Since February 2018, Alexandra is heading the phenotypic screening platform of the Frankfurt Competence Center of Emerging Therapeutics (FCET) and since January 2021 as well the ER quality control group located at the Buchman Institute for Molecular Life Sciences (BMLS) as an indipendent group leader. Alexandra is associated with EUbOPEN, where her group aims to identify chemical inducers and inhibitors of selective autophagy pathways. 

THE FRANCIS CRICK INSTITUTE

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Sharon A. Tooze has a long-standing interest in molecular cell biology, starting with her PhD work at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany. Her work at EMBL during her PhD and post-doc helped define the current view of how post-Golgi vesicular pathways are initiated. Sharon maintained her interest in the biogenesis of organelles when she moved to the London Research Institute (now the Francis Crick Institute), and in 2006 began work on the biogenesis of autophagosomes.

Since then, at the Francis Crick Institute, she has contributed to the current knowledge of the function of the mammalian autophagy (ATG) proteins she first identified, including ULK1/2, ATG9A/B, and WIPI2, and non-ATG trafficking proteins regulating autophagosome formation and an understanding of the initiation of autophagy at the molecular level.

Sharon was elected to EMBO in 2010, AcademiaNet Fellow 2014, Fellow of the Academy of Medicine 2018, European Academy of Sciences 2020, and to the Academia Europaea in 2024.

SOUTHERN UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

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Yan Zhao is an Associate Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at Southern University of Science and Technology. She received her BS and PhD from the School of Public Heath in Peking University Health Science Center. She then conducted postdoctoral research at the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and UMass Medical School. In 2020, she established her own lab, and her group is dedicated to studying the intricate mechanisms of neural autophagy and its regulation and function within the central nervous system, using a combination of cell biology, biochemistry, and mouse genetics approaches.

And please find my photo attached.