Judges for the category awards are:

Animal Science, Veterinary Research and Zoology

  • Alun Williams

    University of Cambridge, UK

    Alun qualified as a vet from Glasgow University Veterinary School in 1985. After working in general practice for a short while, he did a PhD at the University of Cambridge, investigating how pathology develops in bacterial meningitis in pigs. Subsequently, he went to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford to study whether meningitis in children develops in the same way. In 2003 he was appointed Professor of Pathology and Infectious Diseases at The Royal Veterinary College, London. He is currently Chair of Veterinary Diagnostic Pathology in the Department of Veterinary Medicine, University of Cambridge, and has been elected a Professorial Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge.

    Alun is a Section Editor for BMC Veterinary Research.

  • Angelika Stollewerk

    Queen Mary University of London, UK

    Angelika is currently Reader in Evolutionary Developmental Biology at Queen Mary University of London. She was previously an Independent Researcher with Prof Patricia Simpson at the University of Cambridge Department of Zoology, and then Principal Investigator at the Department of Genetics, University of Mainz. Her research interests include the evolutionary modifications of neural networks, working predominantly with arthropod groups.

    Angelika is an Editorial Board Member for Frontiers in Zoology.

  • Alex Kacelnik

    University of Oxford, UK

    Alex trained as a zoologist in Argentina, later working in the Zoology and Psychology Departments in Oxford, Groningen and Cambridge. He founded the Behavioural Ecology Research Group at University of Oxford in 1990, where he is also a Fellow of Pembroke College. He studies animal and human behaviour from a multidisciplinary perspective, combining experimental analysis with theoretical modelling. He received the Cogito Prize (jointly with Ernst Fehr) for his interdisciplinary work on risk-related behaviour, and the Research Award of the Society of Comparative Cognition for his life-long contributions to cognitive research. Alex was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2011 and has a strong interest in philosophical and social implications of ethology, and would engage gladly in any unsolvable argument raised in these areas.

    Alex is an Editorial Advisor for BMC Ecology.

Cancer sponsored by abcam

  • Ian Cree

    Warwick Medical School, UK

    Ian is the Yvonne Carter Professor of Pathology at Warwick Medical School, and also Director of the Efficacy and Mechanism Evaluation programme for the UK National Institute of Health Research Evaluation Trials and Studies Coordinating Centre. He also chairs the Interspeciality committee on Molecular Pathology for the Royal College of Pathologists and sits on the NICE Diagnostics Advisory Committee.

    Trained as a general pathologist with a PhD in immunology, Ian’s research career has been based on investigating disease mechanisms to improve diagnosis and treatment. This has involved him designing, conducting and leading clinical trials as well as a number of large multicentre studies.

    Ian’s current research interests are mostly cancer-related but previous studies have included infectious disease, asthma, and ophthalmology.

    He has published over 200 papers, and two books. For the last 20 years, Ian has been involved in developing predictive methods to allow individualised therapy of cancer. Ian is has recently been involved in the implementation of mutation testing services, including external quality assurance schemes, and intra-operative assessment of breast cancer sentinel nodes.

    Ian is on the Editorial Board of BMC Cancer.

  • Kevin A. Camphausen

    National Institutes of Health, USA

    Kevin received his M.D. from Georgetown University in 1996. He completed his internship at Georgetown in 1997 and a residency in radiation oncology at the Joint Center for Radiation Therapy at Harvard Medical School in 2001. Kevin spent 2 years working in the laboratory of Dr. Judah Folkman studying the interaction of angiogenesis inhibitors and radiotherapy. He joined the NCI in July of 2001 as a tenure track investigator. He served as the Deputy Branch Chief beginning in April of 2004 and was appointed Branch Chief in 2007. He is currently involved in conducting a Phase II trial in patients with Glioblastoma multiforme (GBMs) comparing the patient’s urinary VEGF and MMP-2 levels, as early biomarkers of disease progression, following the completion of radiotherapy, to the clinical parameters that comprise the recursive partition analysis (RPA) of the Radiation Therapy Oncology Group (RTOG), which are currently used to stratify patients and predict progression free survival and overall survival.

    Kevin’s laboratory actively collaborates with groups within the NCI/NIH intramural program including pre-clinical studies with the laboratory of Howard Fine and clinical studies with the NOB and Howard Fine. He also maintains an active collaboration with Marsha Moses at Harvard Medical School.

    Kevin is Deputy Editor of Radiation Oncology.

  • Edith A. Perez

    Mayo Clinic, USA

    Edith is the Deputy Director at Large for Mayo Clinic Cancer Center in Florida, Group Vice Chair of the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology, Director of the Breast Program, and the Serene M. and Frances C. Durling Professor of Medicine at Mayo Medical School. She is a cancer specialist and an internationally known translational researcher at Mayo Clinic. Her roles extend nationally, including positions within Mayo Clinic, the American Association for Cancer Research, the American Society of Clinical Oncology, and the National Cancer Institute.

    She has developed, and is involved in, a wide range of clinical trials exploring the use of new therapeutic agents for the treatment and prevention of breast cancer. She leads and has helped develop basic research studies to evaluate the role of genetic markers in the development and aggressiveness of breast cancer. She has authored more than 550 research articles in journals, books, and abstracts. Edith is invited frequently to lecture at national and international meetings and serves on the editorial boards of multiple academic journals.

    Edith is on the Editorial Board of Breast Cancer Research and the Journal of Hematology and Oncology.

Clinical Medicine

  • Yehuda Shoenfeld

    Tel-Aviv University, Israel

    Yehuda is the founder and head of the Zabludowicz Center for Autoimmune Diseases at the Sheba Medical Center, which is affiliated to the Sackler Faculty of Medicine in Tel-Aviv University, Israel. He is the Incumbent of the Laura Schwarz-Kipp Chair for Research of Autoimmune Diseases at the Tel-Aviv University.

    His clinical and scientific works focus on autoimmune and rheumatic diseases, and he has published more than 1700 papers in journals such as New Eng J Med, Nature, Lancet, Proc Nat Acad Scie, J Clin Invest, J Immunol, Blood, FASEB, J Exp Med, Circulation, Cancer and others. His articles have over 31,000 citations. He has written more than three hundred and fifty chapters in books, and has authored and edited 25 books, some of which became cornerstones in science and clinical practice, such as “The Mosaic of Autoimmunity”, “Infections and Autoimmunity” and the textbook “Autoantibodies” and “Diagnostic criteria of autoimmune diseases”, all of which were published by Elsevier and sold by the thousands.

    He is on the editorial board of 43 journals in the field of rheumatology and autoimmunity and is the founder and the editor of the IMAJ (Israel Medical Association Journal) the representative journal of science and medicine in the English language in Israel, and also is the founder and Editor of the “Autoimmunity Reviews” (Elsevier) (Impact factor 6.6) and Co-Editor of “Journal of Autoimmunity” (Impact factor 7.4). For the last twenty years Yehuda has been the Editor of “Harefuah” – The Israel journal in medicine (Hebrew) and he has edited the Israel Medical Encyclopedia (10 volumes, 5000 items). He has organized over 20 international congresses in autoimmunity.

    Yehuda received the EULAR prize in 2005, in Vienna, Austria: “The infectious etiology of anti-phospholipid syndrome,” and received a gold medal from the Slovak Society of Physicians for his contribution to Israel – Slovakia collaboration (March 2006), and is honorary member of the Hungarian Association of Rheumatology. In UC Davis, USA, Yehuda received the Nelson’s Prize for Humanity and Science for 2008. In 2009 he was honored as Doctoris Honoris Causa, from Debrecen University (Hungary), and from 2009 he is honorary member of the Slovenian National Academy of Sciences. He has recently been awarded a Life Contribution Prize in Internal Medicine in Israel, 2012.

    Yehuda has educated a long list of students (>25) being heads of departments and institutes.

    Yehuda is on the Editorial Board of BMC Medicine.

  • Lawrence Friedman

    Formerly at National Institutes of Health, USA

    Lawrence was at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health from 1972 to 2005. During that time, he served as Chief of the Clinical Trials Branch, Director of the Division of Epidemiology and Clinical Applications, and Associate Director for Ethics and Clinical Research. Since his retirement from NIH, he has been an Independent Consultant to several NIH institutes and other organizations, including serving on the National Advisory Council on Aging.

    Laurence has been involved in, overseen, consulted on, and been a reviewer for many clinical trials, including serving on safety committees and data monitoring committees. He has written numerous articles, co-authored books, and taught courses on clinical trials.

    Laurence is on the Editorial Board of Trials.

  • Trisha Greenhalgh

    Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, UK

    Trisha has a special interest in the philosophical aspects of evidence-based medicine, in particular the tension between ‘rational’ scientific evidence and the messy practicalities of real-world medicine and policymaking. She is concerned with the limitations of the fundamentally linear and reductionist paradigm of evidence based medicine to the highly complex and relentlessly contextual problems encountered in the clinic, at the bedside, and around the policymaking table. In past research projects, she has explored the mismatch between the evidence we need and what is actually available, especially in relation to ‘hard to research’ groups such as ethnic minorities, those with multiple and complex illnesses, and the socially excluded. She has developed a particular interest in the use of storytelling (illness narratives, life narratives, organisational narratives) to capture and address the complexities of these challenging areas of enquiry. Trisha is a member of a number of groups working to develop and implement evidence-based health policy, including the National Institute for Clinical Excellence and the Health Development Agency. She was an active member of the Department of Health’s Expert Reference Group, which produced the National Service Framework for Diabetes in 2002, and chaired two subcommittees (women’s health and inequalities). She is an honorary Consultant at Barnet Primary Care Trust.

    Trisha is on the Editorial Boards of BMC Health Services Research, BMC Family Practice and BMC Medical Education.

Computational and high-throughput studies in genomics and systems biology

  • Laurence D. Hurst

    University of Bath, UK

    Laurence is a Professor of Evolutionary Genetics in the Department of Biology and Biochemistry at The University of Bath. He completed his Bachelor of Arts in Zoology at Churchill College, Cambridge in 1987. After a year at Harvard University he returned to the UK, obtaining a D.Phil at the University of Oxford in 1991 under the supervision of W. D. Hamilton and Alan Grafen. He was a Royal Society Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge from 1993 to 1996 and has been a Professor at the University of Bath since 1997. His research interests cover a broad span of evolution, genetics and genomics. His group dominantly use computational and mathematical techniques to understand the way genes and genomes evolve.

    Laurence is an Editorial Board member for a number of BioMed Central journals, including Genome Biology, BMC Biology, BMC Evolutionary Biology, BMC Systems Biology and BMC Proceedings.

  • Timothy R. Hughes

    University of Toronto, Canada

    Tim is a Professor at the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research at the University of Toronto. He obtained his PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. As a postdoctoral researcher at Rosetta Inpharmatics, he played a key role in developing a new microarray technology that enabled researchers to simultaneously probe tens of thousands of genes in cell samples and tissues. He also published one of the first manuscripts demonstrating that microarray expression patterns can be used to distinguish hundreds of cellular states, facilitating characterization of novel genes and motivating exploration of the underlying regulatory mechanisms. Tim has received awards including the Ontario Premier’s Research Excellence Award (2001); the Terry Fox Young Investigator Award (2005), a Howard Hughes Medical Institute International Research Scholars Award (2006-2010) and a Canada Research Chair in Genome Biology (2002-2012). He has authored over 100 manuscripts in topics including genome sequencing, gene regulation, functional genomics, and systems biology. A major focus of his laboratory is the large-scale analysis of the sequence preferences of RNA and DNA binding proteins.

    Tim is an Editorial Board member for Genome Biology and an Editorial Advisor for BMC Genomics.

  • James A. Timmons

    Loughborough University, UK

    Jamie is Chair of Systems Biology at Loughborough University and has a particular interest in exercise and skeletal and adipocyte biology. A graduate of the University of Glasgow in 1993, Jamie completed a PhD in muscle physiology and metabolism at the University of Nottingham in 1996. He spent 8 years working within the Pharmaceutical industry and was involved with the nomination of drug candidates for the treatment of cardiovascular disease. In 2003 he moved to the Karolinska Institute, and worked at the Centre for Genomics and Bioinformatics as a team leader where he developed an interest in non-coding RNA molecules and linking gene regulation to physiological heterogeneity in humans. In 2006 he was appointed Chair of Exercise Biology at Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh. While acting as Director of Research and over-seeing the restructuring of the University Biology activities, Jamie expanded his translational medicine projects to cover diabetes, cancer-cachexia and develop novel approaches to studying human ‘exercise resistance’. He successfully led an EU FP7 bid called ‘Metapredict’ and currently holds EU, MRC and Charity funding for his research.

    Jamie is an Associate Editor for BMC Systems Biology and also an Editorial Advisor for BMC Physiology.

Microbiology, Immunology, Infection and Inflammation

  • Frank Cox

    London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK

    Francis Edmund Gabriel (Frank) Cox is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Disease Control in the Faculty of Infectious and Tropical Diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He was previously Professor of Parasite Immunology at King’s College London. His research interests are focussed on the cellular aspects of the immunology of malaria and oriental sore. He has published over 100 original papers, reviews and book chapters in these fields and has edited or co-edited a number of books including Infection and Immunity (with D H Davies, M A Halablab, J. Clarke and TW K Young) and Immunology of Intracellular Parasitism (with F Y Liew). He has edited the journals Parasitology Today (now Trends in Parasitology), Parasitology and the Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene and serves on a number of editorial boards. He is also the external expert on infectious diseases on the Open University‘s Life and Biomolecular Sciences Research Management Committee. His other interests include the history of parasitology and tropical medicine and he edited the Wellcome Trust Illustrated History of Tropical Diseases and the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene’s Interactive CD, Six Thousand Years of Tropical Medicine, and has published a number of papers in this field.

    Frank is an Editorial Board Member for Parasites & Vectors.

  • Susanna Esposito

    University of Milan, Italy

    Susanna is the Director of the Paediatric Clinic 1 and the Paediatric Infectious Diseases Unit at the Fondazione IRCCS Ca’ Granda Ospedale Maggiore Policlinico in Milan, Italy, where she is also Chief of the outpatient clinic for travel medicine and head of the Lompardy Region’s Lyme Disease Centre. She is also Chief of one of the paediatric HIV clinics in the Regione Lombardia, coordinator of the Epidermolysis Bullosa Centre and an Associate Professor in paediatrics at the Department of Maternal and Paediatric Sciences, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy. Susanna is currently President of the Italian Society of Paediatric Infectious Diseases; she is also a member of the Steering committee on vaccines of the Italian Society of Paediatrics and the Italian Society of Allergy and Immunology, President of the WHO Committee for measles and rubella eradication, and serves on the secretariat of the steering committee of the Italian Society of Preventive and Social Paediatrics. She has been a member of the Steering Committee of the European Society of Paediatric Infectious Diseases (ESPID) (2004-2007) and a member of the Committees for Training and Research of ESPID since 2007. Susanna’s research has focused on respiratory tract infections, vaccines and preventive paediatrics, antibiotic therapy and emerging infections. Her research activities has led to the publication of more than 200 articles in international journals reported by PubMed with an overall impact factor >1,000 and h-index >30. She has won several postgraduate awards and served on the Editorial Boards of various journals including The Paediatric Infectious Disease Journal (since 2005) and Human Vaccines (since 2010).

    Susanna is a Section Editor for BMC Infectious Diseases.

Molecular and Cellular Science

  • Rocky S. Tuan

    University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, USA

    Rocky is the Director of the Center for Cellular and Molecular Engineering, Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He also serves as the Executive Vice Chairman for Orthopaedic Research at the University of Pittsburgh, and the Associate Director of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

    Rocky earned his BA in Chemistry from Berea University, where he was a member of Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society and the recipient of the Austin Scholar Award. From there he went to Rockefeller University in New York, where he earned his PhD in Life Sciences (Biochemistry and Cell Biology). He continued his postdoctoral research at Rockefeller until he won a Research Fellow from first the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery and then the Department of Medicine, both at Harvard Medical School. Rocky served as a professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was awarded an honorary MA in 1987. He was also a professor at Thomas Jefferson University, where he became the Director of the Orthopaedic Research Laboratory (1988-2001), the Academic Director of the MD-PhD Program (1992-1995), and the Vice Chairman of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery (1996-2001). In 2001, Rocky became the Chief of Cartilage Biology and Orthopaedics Branch of the National Institute of Arthritis, Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases. In both 2006 and 2007 he was given the Special Recognition Award, NIH Undergraduate Scholars Program.

    Rocky’s research focuses on the development, growth, function, and health of the musculoskeletal system, the biology of adult stem cells, and the utilization of this knowledge to develop technologies that will regenerate and/or restore function to diseased and damaged musculoskeletal tissues. He is a member of several professional societies, including the Society for Physical Regulation in Biology and Medicine, the Osteoarthritis Research Society International, and the Tissue Engineering Regenerative Medicine International Society.

    Rocky is the Editor-in-Chief of Birth Defects Research Part C – Embryo Today and Stem Cell Research and Therapy.

  • John Rossi

    Beckman Research Institute,City of Hope, California, USA

    John received his doctorate in microbial genetics from the University of Connecticut in Storrs. For his postdoctoral training he went to Brown University Medical School in Providence, Rhode Island where he trained under Dr. Arthur Landy studying the genomic structure, organization and expression of two gene clusters encoding tRNA-tyrosine in E. coli. In 1980 John moved to the Department of Molecular Genetics at the City of Hope in Duarte, California. His laboratory there began to develop and test the idea of utilizing catalytic RNAs or ribozymes for inhibition of HIV infection. This research program has led to two clinical trials in which ribozyme genes have been transduced into hematopoietic stem cells for autologous transplant in HIV infected individuals. Work in the laboratory continues to focus upon enhancing the intracellular efficacy of ribozymes and RNA decoys via RNA trafficking and target co-localization approaches. This program has led to a first of its kind hematopoietic stem cell clinical trial using a triple gene therapy approach in AIDS/lymphoma patients. At present a large percentage of the research effort of the lab is focused upon the biology and utilization of small interfering RNAs, or siRNA and the evolution of aptamers for targeted siRNA delivery.

    John is a Section Editor for BMC Biotechnology.

  • Yun-Bo Shi

    Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Bethesda, USA

    Yun-Bo is a senior investigator and the head of Section on Molecular Morphogenesis, Program on Cell Regulation and Metabolism, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), NIH, Bethesda, MD. He received his B. S. degree from the Department of Chemistry, Wuhan University, China, in 1982 and his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley, CA, in 1988. After postdoctoral training at the Carnegie Institution, Baltimore, MD, Yun-Bo established his own research group within the intramural research program of NICHD, NIH, in 1992.

    Yun-Bo is interested in the molecular basis of thyroid hormone regulation of vertebrate development and uses Xenopus metamorphosis as a model system. He has published over 120 research papers and 50 reviews/book chapters, edited two books and written a monograph on amphibian metamorphosis. He has received the 2009 NIH APAO (Asian & Pacific Islander American Organization) Award for outstanding accomplishments in biomedical research and the 2008 Van Meter Award by the American Thyroid Association, which honors an investigator who has made outstanding contributions to research on the thyroid gland. In 2012, Yun-Bo was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has also served on many domestic and international grant review panels, including NIH study sections, and organized a number of international symposia.

    Yun-Bo was an Editor of Cell Research from 2007 to 2010 and is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Cell & Bioscience and a board member of several journals including Thyroid and Journal of Biological Chemistry.

Neuroscience, Neurology and Psychiatry

  • Guojun Bu

    Mayo Clinic, USA

    Guojun is a Professor of Neuroscience at the Mayo Clinic. His primary research interest is to understand why APOE4 is a strong risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease and how this pathway can be targeted for therapy. Guojun received his undergraduate degree from Beijing Normal University and his Ph.D. degree from Virginia Tech. He completed his postdoctoral training at Washington University and served as a Professor of Cell Biology and Neuroscience there until 2010 when he moved his research laboratory to Mayo Clinic. Guojun has been an organizer for the International Conference on Molecular Neurodegeneration and serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief for Molecular Neurodegeneration.

  • Amos Korczyn

    Tel-Aviv University, Israel

    Amos graduated from the Hebrew University–Hadassah Medical School in Jerusalem in 1966 (MD), where he also received an MSc degree in pharmacology (cum laude) in 1966. He trained in neurology at Beilinson Hospital and at the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases, Queen Square, London. He was the Chairman of the Department of Neurology at the Tel-Aviv Medical Center since 1981 until 2002.He was the Sieratzki Professor of Neurology at Tel-Aviv University from 1995 until 2011.

    Amos has a particular interest in movement disorders, neurodegenerative diseases and dementia. He has authored or co-authored over 600 articles in peer-reviewed journals, as well as chapters in books, with an H-index of 39. He is, or has been, an Editorial Board member of 15 international journals, and organized several neurological conferences, mainly in the field of dementia, Parkinson’s disease and other degenerative brain disorders, as well as CONy – the International Congress on Controversies in Neurology. He is an honorary member of the neurological societies of Israel, Serbia, Poland and Russia.

    Amos is on the Editorial Boards of BMC Neurology, BMC Medicine and Translational Neurodegeneration.

  • Robert Zivadinov

    University of Buffalo, USA

    Robert, is a professor of neurology with tenure at University of Buffalo, State University of New York (SUNY) and clinical professor of neurology at the Florida International University, College of Medicine. He is also the Director of the Buffalo Neuroimaging Analysis Center and the Director of Resident and Fellowship Research program at the Department of Neurology at University of Buffalo. He has staff privileges at the Jacobs Neurological Institute, Baird MS Research Center and Kaleida Health. Robert has acquired extensive research experience in multiple sclerosis. His accomplishments in this field include numerous awards from European and national neurological societies for his published articles, research studies and research fellowships. He has authored more than 200 publications, including print and online articles and 400 abstracts. His work has appeared in journals such as Neurology, Brain, Neuroimage, Annals of Neurology, Archives of Neurology, the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, Journal of Neurology, Multiple Sclerosis, Neuroepidemiology, BMC Med, PLoS One, J Neuroinflamm etc. He is currently pursuing research studies of quantitative magnetic resonance imaging findings and venous function in neurological disorders and aging, and therapeutic interventions including strategies towards assessing neuroprotective efforts in multiple sclerosis, but his current interests are also concentrated on genetic and neuroepidemiology fields of the same disease.

    Robert is on the Editorial Board of BMC Medicine.

Plant Biology, Environmental Biology and Ecology

  • Elliot Meyerowitz

    California Institute of Technology, USA

    Elliot did his undergraduate work at Columbia University (A.B. in Biology, 1973), where he worked part-time in the laboratory of Cyrus Levinthal on combined microscopic and computational methods for tracing axons and dendritic trees in the nervous systems of fish. His graduate work was in the Department of Biology at Yale University (Ph.D. 1977), where he worked in the laboratory of Douglas Kankel on the interaction of eye and brain development in Drosophila, by use of genetic mosaics. From 1977 to 1979 he was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of David Hogness in the Biochemistry Department at the Stanford University School of Medicine, developing methods for the molecular cloning of genes in the early days of gene cloning and genomics. Since 1980 he has been a faculty member in the Division of Biology at the California Institute of Technology, where he served as Division Chair from 2000 to 2010, and where he is now George W. Beadle Professor of Biology and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In 2011 and 2012 he was, while on leave from Caltech, the Inaugural Director of the new Sainsbury Laboratory at Cambridge University.

    Elliot is an Editorial Board Member for Genome Biology and BMC Biology.

  • Jane Langdale

    University of Oxford, UK

    Jane is a plant biologist with over 25 years’ research experience in both UK and US universities. Although she obtained her PhD in Human Genetics at the University of London she went on to postdoctural research at Yale with Tim Nelson. Working in a building with Tim, Ian Sussex and Steve Dellaporta led to an almost inevitable interest in the molecular and genetic basis of plant development. Understanding the genetic basis of plant developmental processes and elucidating how those processes evolved has remained the focus of her research.

    Jane was appointed as a University academic in 1994 and most recently been Head of the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Oxford. She was elected a member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) in 2007.

    Jane is an Editorial Board Member for BMC Plant Biology and EvoDevo.

  • Rob Marrs

    University of Liverpool, UK

    Rob is currently the Bulley Professor of Applied Plant Biology within the University of Liverpool’s School of Environmental Sciences, and works in the Ecology and Marine Biology group. Rob is a conservation biologist, with broad ranging interests across many different ecosystems and investigating numerous environmental issues and solutions. He has worked in ecosystems from the sub-tundra through to tropical rain forests but his main passion is in semi-natural, cultural landscapes of the British uplands.

    His research has involved research covering structured surveys of vegetation communities, often at the national-scale; long-term, designed experiments designed to test the effects of applied interventions of plant and soil communities, and ecological modelling. Much of this work involves fairly complex statistical analysis. He has published over 200 papers covering both theoretical and practical research.

    Rob is an Editorial Board Member for Environmental Evidence, as well as a founding member of the board for the Collaboration for Environmental Evidence.

Public Health and Health Services Research

  • Lea Maes

    Ghent University, Belgium

    Lea is doctor in the medical sciences (public health). She is full professor in the Department of Public Health, Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, University of Ghent, Belgium. She is coordinating the master of health promotion and leading the research group on health promotion. The team focuses on the health behaviour of young people and on development and evaluation of health promotion interventions. The research group published articles on the influence of proximal (social class, education, social networking) and distal (welfare indicators, policy) social factors on the eating habits and tobacco use of young people. Also several evaluation studies of interventions has been published.

    Lea is on the Editorial Board of BMC Public Health.

  • Miguel Angel Gonzalez Block

    National Institutes of Public Health, Mexico

    Miguel is Executive Director of the Centre for Research in Health Systems (CISS) at the National Institute of Public Health (INSP), Mexico. His work encompasses research, education and service as regards social protection in health, information systems and knowledge management. In addition, he is in charge of the Mesoamerican Institute of Public Health as well, an initiative aimed at providing technical support and strengthening the Mesoamerican Public Health System.

    He was founding director of Health Policy Research at the National Institute of Public Health, concentrating on the analysis of Ministry of Health descentralization and, in 2000, he became the Director of the Alliance for Health Policies and Systems Research, at the World Health Organization.He enjoys 28 years of research experience in executive positions within leading research institutions. He has published over 80 texts on social epidemiology as well as health policy and systems, in addition to authoring works on the strategic development of public health research. He has been credited as a Fulbright scholar, and is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, the Mexican Public Health Society, and the National Researchers System of Mexico.

    Miguel is Editor-in-Chief of Health Research Policy and Systems.

  • Michel Wensing

    Radbound University, Netherlands

    Michel is medical care researcher and professor of Implementation Science at Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre, the Netherlands. He is also affiliated with Heidelberg University Hospital, Department of General Practice and Health Services Research. With a background in the social sciences, he did a Ph.D. and an Habilitation in the medical sciences. His research aims to identify how healthcare practice and outcomes can be improved, particularly in primary care. He has been involved as coordinator or participant in many international studies concerning quality of primary care. He has (co-)authored about 250 scientific papers, including about 30 large trials of implementation strategies. He is co-editor of the book ‘Implementation of innovations’, which provides an evidence-based and comprehensive overview of the field. Since 2012, he has been Editor in Chief of the journal Implementation Science.

  • Omar Khan

    Jefferson Medical College & Christiana Care Health System, USA

    Omar is the Medical Director for the Center for Community Health, and the Eugene duPont Preventive Medicine & Rehabilitation Institute [www.christianacare.org/pmri], at the Christiana Care Health System. He is affiliated with the Dept. of Family & Community Medicine and serves as Director of the Global Health Track. He is trained in family medicine & in public health, with active interests in global health and medical education. He received his BA and MA from the University of Pennsylvania, medical degree and residency from the University of Vermont College of Medicine, and MHS in public health from the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health.

    Omar’s experience includes working with USAID and serving as faculty at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and the University of Vermont. He is presently Clinical Assistant Professor, Depts. of Family Medicine at Jefferson Medical College, University of Pennsylvania & the University of Vermont. He serves as Chair of the Global Health Working Group for the Delaware Health Sciences Alliance [http://www.delawarehsa.org/education/global_health.html], Past-President of the Delaware Academy of Family Physicians, and Chair of the Science Board for the American Public Health Association (APHA).

    Omar on the Editorial boards of BMC Public Health and BMC International Health and Human Rights.

  • Martin McKee

    London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, UK

    Martin is Professor of European Public Health at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and a visiting professor at the Universities of Belgrade and Zagreb, the London School of Economics, and Taipei Medical University. He co-directs the European Centre on Health of Societies in Transition (ECOHOST) and is also research director of the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies. He chairs the WHO’s European Advisory Committee on Health Research and the Global Health Advisory Committee of George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and has previously been a trustee of the UK Public Health Association. He has published over 650 papers in peer-reviewed journals and is author or editor of almost 40 books. In 2005 Martin was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) by HM Queen Elizabeth II.

    Martin is on the Editorial Board of the Israel Journal of Health Policy Research, Population Health Metrics and BMC International Health and Human Rights.

Translational Medicine

  • Xiangdong Wang

    Fudan University, China

    Xiangdong is a distinguished professor of Respiratory Medicine at Fudan University, China, and adjunct professor of Clinical Bioinformatics at Lund University. He serves as a Director of Biomedical Research Center, Fudan University Zhongshan Hospital, and Deputy Director of Shanghai Respiratory Research Institute. Xiangdong serves as the Executive Vice President of International Society for Translational Medicine, Chairman of Executive Committee of International Society for Translational Medicine, Deputy President of Chinese National Professional Society of Insurance & Health and a senior advisor of Chinese Medical Doctor Association, and Director of National Program of Doctor-Pharmaceutist communication. Xiangdong was appointed as the principal scientist, global disease advisor, Medical Monitor and Director, and Chairman of Director Board in a number of pharmaceutical companies, e.g. Astra Draco, AstraZeneca, PPT and CatheWill.

    He has worked on pharmacology profiles of target identification and validation, drug screening and optimization, drug PK and PD profile, and translation between drug discovery and development in areas of respiratory diseases, inflammation and cancer. He has acted as the adjunct professor of Molecular Bioscience at North Carolina State University, and the member of American Thoracic Society International Health Committee, USA. His main research is focused on clinical bioinformatics, disease-specific biomarkers, cancer immunology, and potential therapies.

  • Adrian Bot

    Kite Pharma Inc, USA

    Adrian is currently Chief Scientific Officer at Kite Pharma Inc. He received his M.D. degree from the University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Timisoara, Romania, and his Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. He conducted his post-graduate training as a Guest Scientist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA. Adrian has over 15 years of experience in the biopharmaceutical industry and expertise in discovery, research and development of active immunotherapies in oncology. Before joining Kite, he served as Vice President of Research at MannKind Corp, where he led the efforts to discover and advance through development a number of immunotherapies and targeted therapies for different cancer indications, such as MKC1106-MT for melanoma and MKC1106-PP for various solid tumors. Prior to joining MannKind, he served as Director of Immunology at Allecure Corp. and Director of Immunology at Alliance Pharmaceutical Corp., where he led the research and development of novel vaccine adjuvants and immunotherapies.

    Adrian has authored more than 80 scientific publications in basic and applied immunology and is an inventor on more than 10 patents on immune therapeutic approaches and innovative drugs for autoimmune diseases and oncology. He is presently a member of the Medical and Scientific Review Committee of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and a Section Editor of the Journal of Translational Medicine and the Editor-in-Chief of the International Reviews of Immunology.

  • Martin R Wilkins

    Imperial College London, UK

    Martin is Professor of Clinical Pharmacology and Head of the Division of Experimental Medicine, Imperial College London. As Director of Clinical and Investigative Sciences, he has responsibility for Imaging, Pathology and Pharmacy services within Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. He is the Director of the Imperial NIHR-Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Facility at Hammersmith Hospital and is the academic lead for the Wellcome Trust – GSK Translational Medicine Fellowship programme at Imperial College.

    He is a physician-scientist and his primary interest is in proof-of-concept studies in humans. He uses pulmonary hypertension as a paradigm for developing novel therapies from the laboratory to patients. His research is supported by the British Heart Foundation, Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust. He is president of the Pulmonary Vascular Research Institute (www.pvri.info), a charity dedicated to advancing knowledge and treatment of pulmonary vascular disease worldwide.