JUDGES

Ian Cree

Warwick Medical School, Coventry UK

Ian Cree 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.

Michel Noutsias

Department of Cardiology, University Hospital of Marburg, Germany

Consultant and Assistant Professor at the department of Cardiology University Hospital of Marburg. He is on the boards of BMC Cardiology and Journal of Clinical and Experimental Cardiology.

Francesco Marincola, M.D.

Chief, Infectious Disease and Immunogenetics Section in the Department of Transfusion Medicine, Clinical Center

Dr. Marincola is Chief of the Infectious Disease and Immunogenetics Section in the Department of Transfusion Medicine at the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Heath in Bethesda, Maryland. He received his M.D., cum laude from the University of Milan, and his surgery training at Stanford University where he also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in surgical research. He joined the Surgical Oncology Branch of the National Cancer Institute, NIH, in 1990.

Dr. Marincola is a NIH tenured senior investigator, Adjunct Professor, Peking Union Medical College, Beijing, China, Adjunct Professor, First Military Medical University, Tonghe, Guangzhou – China, and a Member of the Board of Directors, International Society for Biological Therapy of Cancer. He serves at the Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Translational Medicine and ASHI Quarterly; US Senior Editor of Immunotherapy, Associate Editor for The Journal of Immunotherapy, The Journal of Immunology, Tumori, and Clinical Cancer Research; Section Editor for Expert Opinion in Biological Therapy; Editorial Board, Cancer Immunology & Immunotherapy, The Journal of Experimental and Clinical Cancer Research and Annals of Surgical Oncology.

Dr Jigisha Patel

Associate Editorial Director (Medicine)

Jigisha has editorial responsibility for the BMC-series medical journals. She has a degree in Medicine from Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry and a PhD on the post-prandial regulation of regional blood flow in humans from Queen Mary, University of London. As well as spending several years in clinical practice in general medicine and diabetes and endocrinology followed by a year at the National Institutes of Health for her PhD, Jigisha has taught on the pre-clinical Professional Development course at University College London Medical School and on the Human Biology course for the Open University. Jigisha joined BioMed Central in 2007 as Medical Editor. She has recently taken on the role of Series Editor, Medicine for the BMC series.

Sir Tim Hunt

Cancer Research UK

Tim Hunt is a 'Principal Scientist' at Cancer Research UK, Clare Hall Laboratories, in South Mimms, Hertfordshire. Dr Hunt began his education at Cambridge where he read Natural Sciences. He did his Ph.D. in the Department of Biochemistry entitled "The Synthesis of Haemoglobin". He spent almost 30 years altogether in Cambridge, mostly working on the control of protein synthesis, with spells in the USA; he was a postdoctoral Fellow at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1968-70 and he spent summers at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole from 1977 until 1985, both teaching and doing research. In 1982, he discovered cyclins, which turned out to be components of "Key Regulator(s) of the Cell Cycle", and led to a share of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2001, together with Lee Hartwell and Paul Nurse.

Dr Hunt has helped write two books: together with Andrew Murray, he wrote "The Cell Cycle: An Introduction", and with John Wilson composed "Molecular Biology of the Cell: The Problems Book" to accompany the textbook by Alberts et al. The Problems Book is now in its 4th edition.

Dr Michaela Torkar

Editorial Director, BioMed Central

Michaela has overall editorial responsibility for BioMed Central's publishing activity, including editorial oversight of the BMC-series journals. She is responsible for the in-house editorial management of a group of journals publishing broad-interest research articles and commissioned review content, including Genome Biology (of which she used to be Editor), Genome Medicine, BMC Medicine and BMC Biology. She also contributes to the acquisition of new journals, and the development and improvement of those titles. Michaela has a degree in biology from Munich University and a PhD in Immunology from Cambridge University. She joined BioMed Central in 2000 (soon after its launch) as a member of the Genome Biology team.

Dr Mike Clarke

All Ireland Hub for Trials Methodology Research, Queen's University, Belfast, UK

Mike has followed a degree in Chemistry and a PhD on the history of suicide with 20 years of work in healthcare research. He is Director of the UK Cochrane Centre, part of the international Cochrane Collaboration and an Adjunct Professor at the School of Nursing and Midwifery. He works on several large and influential randomised trials and systematic reviews. These include reviews of treatments for women with breast cancer, which bring together the individual patient data from hundreds of trials with hundreds of thousands of women, and influence care throughout the world. He has a keen interest in teaching people about the importance and fun of research, and in improving access to reliable knowledge for everyone involved in healthcare decision making.

Trisha Greenhalgh

Global Health, Biology and Innovation Unit, Centre for Primary Care and Public Health, Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, London, 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 EBM 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.

Steven Salzberg

Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, USA

Steven Salzberg is an American Biologist and Computer Scientist who since 2011 has been a Professor of Medicine and Biostatistics in the Institute of Genetic Medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. From 2005-2011 he was the Director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he was also the Horvitz Professor of Computer Science. He was previously the head of the Bioinformatics department at The Institute for Genomic Research, one of the world's largest genome sequencing centers, and prior to that he was a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University. He graduated from Yale University in 1980 and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1989.

Dr. Salzberg together with David Lipman started the Influenza Genome Sequencing Project in 2003, a project to sequence and make available the genomes of thousands of influenza virus isolates. He has been a leader in the field of gene finding and created the GLIMMER program for bacterial gene finding as well as several programs for finding genes in animals, plants, and other organisms. He has also been a leader in genome assembly research and is one of the initiators of the open source AMOS project. He was a participant in the human genome project as well as many other genome projects, including the malaria genome (Plasmodium falciparum) and the genome of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. In 2001-2002, he and his colleagues sequenced the anthrax that was used in the 2001 anthrax attacks. They published their results in the journal Science in 2002. These findings helped the FBI track the source of the attacks to a single vial at Ft. Detrick in Frederick, Maryland.

Laurence Hurst

University of Bath, UK

Laurence D. Hurst is a Professor of Evolutionary Genetics in the Department of Biology and Biochemistry at The University of Bath. Hurst 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.

Kuan Teh Jeang

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIH, USA

Dr. Jeang was born in Taiwan, spent his early childhood in Libya, and arrived in the United States in 1970 to complete his elementary, junior and senior high schooling. He attended MIT for his undergraduate university education, and then went to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine finishing MD and PhD (Medical Scientist Training Program) degrees in 1984. Since 1985, Dr. Jeang has been at the National Institutes of Health. He is currently the Chief of the Molecular Virology Section in the Laboratory of Molecular Microbiology at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Has published over 200 peer reviewed articles and book chapters, and is a founding editor for the journals, Journal of Biomedical Science and Retrovirology. He serves on the editorial boards for the Journal of Biological Chemistry, the Journal of Virology, Cancer Research, amongst others. He has been the Editor-In-Chief of the Retrovirology journal since 2004. His research interests are on the gene regulation of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV-1) and the human T-cell leukemia virus (HTLV-I); and how these two viruses cause human diseases.

John Rossi

Dr. Rossi received his doctorate in microbial genetics from the University of Connecticut in Storrs. For postdoctoral training Dr. Rossi 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 Dr. Rossi moved to the Department of Molecular Genetics at the City of Hope in Duarte, California. Dr. Rossi’s laboratory 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.

Sean Munro

MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK

Sean Munro did a PhD on heat shock proteins with Hugh Pelham at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Following a postdoc studying interferon receptors with Tom Maniatis, he returned to the MRC-LMB to start his own group. He found that the transmembrane domains of Golgi enzymes act as Golgi localization signals, and proposed that this reflects post-Golgi membranes being thicker due to their high content of cholesterol and sphingolipids. After detours through cannabinoid receptors and yeast glycosylation enzymes, his group has been focused for the last decade on how small GTPases determine the specificity of membrane traffic.

Amos Korczyn

Tel Aviv University, Israel

Professor Amos D. Korczyn is the Sieratzki Professor of Neurology at Tel-Aviv University. Professor Korczyn 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. Professor Korczyn has a particular interest in neurodegenerative diseases and dementia. He has authored or co-authored over 600 articles in peer-reviewed journals, as well as chapters in books, with a H-index of 39. Professor Korczyn 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.
Professor Korczyn is an honorary member of the neurological societies of Serbia, Poland and Russia.

Charles Stevens

Salk Institute, USA

Charles F. "Chuck" Stevens is an American neurobiologist at the Salk Institute in La Jolla. He is currently the Vincent J. Coates Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and adjunct Professor of Pharmacology and Neuroscience at UCSD's School of Medicine. He is also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute

He is credited with several seminal discoveries regarding the molecular basis of synaptic transmission. In 2002, together with Dmitri Chklovskii, Stevens described the "3/5 Power Scaling law of neural circuits."

Stevens' work on ion channel conductance is regarded as having paved the way for Nobel laureate Erwin Neher's patch clamping techniques. Neher was a postdoctoral associate with Stevens at the University of Washington and then Yale University.

Stevens has a B.A. in psychology from Harvard University, where he began his education hoping to be a physician. He then received an M.D. degree at Yale University, and a Ph.D. in biophysics from Rockefeller University with Keffer Harline. He was a member of the faculties at the University of Washington Medical School and at Yale Medical School before joining the Salk Institute.

Stevens has been an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1982, and he was formerly an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In 2000 he was awarded the NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing from the National Academy of Sciences.

Andrew Lumsden

King's College London, UK

Andrew Lumsden graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1968 with First Class Honours in Natural Sciences. After visiting Yale University for two years as a Fulbright Scholar, he returned to England to complete his PhD in Developmental Biology at the University of London. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1994 and since 2000 has been Director of the MRC Centre for Developmental Neurobiology at King's College London.

Virginia Walbot

Stanford University, USA

Virginia Walbot is a fifth generation Californian and now Professor of Biology at Stanford University. For her Ph.D. from Yale University she investigated RNA synthesis. For her postdoctoral research and most of her career, she worked on maize genome organization (nuclear, plastid, mitochondrial) and the role(s) of Mutator transposable elements; her lab also developed many molecular tools (electroporation, luciferase vectors, DEX-dependent protein activation, Mu gene tagging). Because the host controls key Mutator properties, her laboratory now analyzes anther development to learn how differentiation contributing to germ cell identity activates Mutator. Professor Walbot teaches genetics and biotechnology courses.

Alun Williams

The Royal Veterinary College, 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 1990 he joined the Institute for Animal Health in Edinburgh. Alun returned to Glasgow University in 1997, as a member of the Department of Veterinary Pathology. In 2003 he was appointed Professor of Pathology and Infectious Diseases at The Royal Veterinary College, London. He is currently Professor of Veterinary Diagnostic Pathology at the University of Cambridge. Alun became Diplomate of the European College of Veterinary Pathology in 1999 and Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2009.

Elliot Meyerowitz

Cambridge University, UK

Elliot Meyerowitz 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 using 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. In 2011 he became, while on leave from Caltech, the Inaugural Director of the new Sainsbury Laboratory at Cambridge University.

Omar Khan

University of Vermont, USA

Omar is a board-certified family physician 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.

His experience includes working with USAID and serving as faculty at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and the University of Vermont where he directed the Global Health Program. He is presently the Medical Director of Community Health, and the Eugene duPont Preventive Medicine & Rehabilitation Institute, at the Christiana Care Health System. He is also Clinical Assistant Professor, Depts. of Family Medicine at Jefferson Medical College and the University of Vermont. He serves as Chair of the Global Health Working Group, Delaware Health Sciences Alliance and President of the Delaware Academy of Family Physicians.

Lea Maes

Department of Public Health, Ghent University, Belgium

Lea Maes 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.