Robert Kofler, PhD, Institut für Populationsgenetik, Vetmeduni Vienna, Austria
Robert studied agriculture and obtained a PhD in molecular plant breeding. He is currently Group leader at the Vetmeduni Vienna. Robert first came into contact with transposable elements (TEs) during his doctoral work, but as a source of frustration rather than a research focus, as TEs thwarted his efforts to develop molecular markers for the highly repetitive rye genome. Soon this frustration turned into a passion. Robert is now fascinated by the evolutionary conflict between TEs and their hosts and how this interaction shapes species genomes.
Miriam K. Konkel, MD, Center for Human Genetics, Clemson University, USA
Miriam studied medicine at the Charité in Berlin, Germany and received her medical degree from the Humboldt University. She began investigating transposable elements during her postdoc in Dr Batzer’s group at Louisiana State University. She is currently a group leader at Clemson University in South Carolina where she studies the evolution of transposable elements as well as the impact of transposable elements on genomes at the DNA and RNA level. She has performed mobilome and phylogenetic analyses for a number of genome projects and is a contributing member of the Human Genome Structural Variation and the Telomere-to-Telomere Primate consortia.
Leandro Quadrana, PhD, CNRS, University of Paris-Saclay, France
Leandro received his PhD in Biology from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. His research focuses on understanding how genetic diversity within species is shaped, particularly looking at the role of transposable elements and their regulation. Using recent advancements in population genomics, he has explored how these genetic elements vary in different plant species and their effects. Currently, he leads the Quantitative Genomics and Epigenomics team at the University of Paris-Saclay, France, where they study how genetic and epigenetic factors influence transposition activity in nature and their implications for the adaptation of plants to drastic environmental changes.
Jürgen Schmitz, PD PhD, Institute of Experimental Pathology, University of Münster, Germany
Jürgen Schmitz received his PhD in evolutionary zoology on social insects in 1997 at the University of Berlin. For five years, he led a primate genetics and evolution group at the German Primate Center in Göttingen and established retrotransposons as molecular markers. In 2003, he moved to the University of Münster as a group leader in the evolution of mammalian small RNAs, exonization of transposons, and retrotransposons as significant phylogenetic markers. He contributed to many vertebrate genome sequencing projects. His group developed user-friendly bioinformatic tools to screen and analyze genomes for evolutionary diagnostic transposons, statistics, and parallelized selection analyses.
