Dr. Arkin is Associate Professor of Bioengineering at the University of California , Berkeley; Adjunct Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California , San Francisco. He received his Ph.D. degree in physical chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He then pursued postdoctoral studies at Stanford University in chemistry with John Ross and in developmental biology with Harley McAdams and Lucy Shapiro.
Talk: Building a New Biology
biographyDrew Endy earned degrees in civil, environmental, and biochemical engineering at Lehigh and Dartmouth . He studied genetics & microbiology as a postdoc at UT Austin and UW Madison. From 1998 through 2001 he helped to start the Molecular Sciences Institute, an independent not-for-profit biological research lab in Berkeley , CA .
In 2004 Endy co-founded Codon Devices, Inc., a venture-funded startup that is working to develop next-generation DNA synthesis technology. In 2005 Endy co-founded the BioBricks Foundation, a not-for-profit organization that is working to develop legal and economic strategies needed to support open biotechnology. Drew's research interests are the engineering of integrated biological systems and error detection & correction in reproducing machines.
Talk: Analyzing Genome-Scale Metabolic Networks
biographySynopsis: Annotated genomes can be the starting point for constructing metabolic models that should encompass the total metabolic phenotype of the organism. However, analyzing models of this size and assessing whether the results are biologically meaningful is challenging. I will describe computational approaches we have used in building models of bacterial and plant metabolism.
Synopsis: Stems biology aims at taking a more synthetic or holistic approach to deciphering the workings of living organisms. Although the ultimate aim is to construct mathematical models of complete cells or organisms that have both explanatory and predictive power, we are some way from achieving such global syntheses and we need a principled way of reducing the complexity of the problem. Accordingly, we require a top-down strategy to provide an initial coarse-grained model of the cell, and a bottom-up strategy in which individual sub-systems are modelled.
Steve Oliver is Professor of Systems Biology & Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge and Director of the Cambridge Centre for Systems Biology. His research involves both experimental and bioinformatics approaches to understanding the workings of the eukaryotic cell, mainly using the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae as his experimental system. Steve Oliver led the European team that sequenced the first chromosome, from any organism, yeast chromosome III.
He continued to play a major role in the Yeast Genome Sequencing Project, and went on to become Scientific Coordinator of EUROFAN, which pioneered a wide range of approaches to the systematic analysis of gene function, using S. cerevisiae. His current work employs a range of high-throughput analytical techniques – transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and rapid phenotyping. He is exploiting genome-wide metabolic models to identify functional modules within the yeast metabolic network and predict epistatic interactions between genes.
He collaborated with Ross King to develop the Robot Scientist system for automated functional genomic hypothesis generation and experimentation, and re-engineered the genome configuration of yeast to provide a direct test of the chromosomal theory of evolution. Steve Oliver is Editor-in-Chief of Yeast, a member of EMBO, a Fellow of both the American Academy of Microbiology, and the Academy of Medical Sciences. He was recently made an Honorary Member of the British Mycological Society, Fellow of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science and Professorial Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge.
Christina is a Professor in the Chemical Engineering Department at Caltech. She graduated from USC with a B.S. degree in Chemical Engineering with an emphasis in Biology in 1997. She then attended the University of California at Berkeley and earned her Ph.D. in 2001 in Chemical Engineering under Professor Jay D. Keasling. Before starting her position at Caltech, Christina conducted a two year postdoctoral fellowship in the Cell Biology Department at UC Berkeley under the guidance of Professor Karsten Weis.
Michael holds the Chair of Theoretical Systems Biology, and works on a range of topics in Theoretical Biology, Genomics and Systems Biology. Michael originally studied theoretical physics in Tübingen, Göttingen and Oxford . Michael moved into Biology in 1999, after his DPhil in Statistical Physics, and spent three years at the Department of Zoology in Oxford before moving to Department of Biology at UCL in London . Since October 2003 Michael has been at the Centre for Bioinformatics at Imperial College London.
Talk: Data - Knowledge - Application – Governance
biographySynopsis: New interdisciplinary developments in life sciences are leading to increasingly rapid emergence of new knowledge and ideas with potential commercial application. In life sciences there is an automatic presumption of regulation for any new development and this has in the past led to an increasingly expensive and lengthy development stage, ensuring that " only major multinationals can play " eventually, as in drug development today, stultifying the entire innovation system. Public and stakeholder pressures tend to reinforce demands for more regulation and stricter governance, in the case of synthetic biology related to bio-safety, bio-security, trade and global justice, and the morality of creating novel life forms. However, the policy makers' responses to these pressures can have counter-intuitive implications for innovation. Comparing synthetic biology with, for example nanotechnology and GM crops, can provide some insights into the nature and impacts of future pressures on synthetic biology governance and could contribute to better decision making in future. Concerted international dialogue will be needed that takes account of the interplay between: scientists, medical professionals and engineers; policy makers and regulators; and citizens and advocacy groups of all shades of opinion.
Professor Joyce Tait is Director of the ESRC's Innogen Centre (Innovation in Genomics) which is a partnership between the University of Edinburgh and the Open University. This is an interdisciplinary programme which brings together social scientists, technology and policy analysts, economists and lawyers to study the far-reaching social and economic implications of advances in the life sciences.