Confirmed speakers for XXVI Biotechnology Summer School:
1. Wojciech Siwy
International Centre for Cancer Vaccine Science (ICCVS)
Wojciech Siwek is an assistant professor at the International Centre for Cancer Vaccine Science (ICCVS), University of Gdańsk (PL). He holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in biotechnology from the University of Warsaw (PL) and a PhD in biochemistry from the International Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology in Warsaw (IIMCB) (PL). Later in his career, he trained at the Gulbenkian Institute (PT), University of Oxford (UK) and Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School (USA). He specializes in biomedical research with a focus on gene regulation and epigenetics. Wojciech is fascinated by how cells remember previous environmental states and is keen to translate his research into the clinic.
2. Bartłomiej Tomasik
Faculty of Medicine at the Medical University of Lodz, Poland.
Wstępny tytuł: Translating immunotherapy research into real-world applications
In 2014, Bartłomiej graduated from the Faculty of Medicine at the Medical University of Lodz. In 2019, he defended a doctorate thesis “Identification and application of circulating microRNAs in monitoring complications of radiotherapy in patients with oropharyngeal cancer” at that University. His work has been recognized by the Polish Society of Clinical Oncology as the best PhD thesis defended in 2019. Additionally, in 2020, he graduated from the Postgraduate School of Molecular Medicine at the Medical University of Warsaw. Bartlomiej continued his clinical training with his research work, leading him to become a board-certified radiation oncologist in 2020. Later, he did a short post-doc at the Dana- Farber Cancer Institute/Harvard Medical School (Boston, MA, USA) and came back to Poland in 2021 to start working as Assistant Prof. at the Department of Oncology and Radiotherapy, Medical University of Gdańsk. Here he works as a research group coordinator focused on radiotherapy’s physical and clinical aspects. In addition, Bartłomiej is on the management board of the HORIZON 2020-funded project, STOPSTORM, which is the acronym for “Standardized Treatment and Outcome Platform for Stereotactic Therapy of Re-entrant tachycardia by a Multidisciplinary consortium”.
3.Helen Wright
University of Liverpool, Institute of Life Course and Medical Sciences
Dr Helen Wright is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Liverpool, Institute of Life Course and Medical Sciences. She has a special interest in the role of neutrophils in the pathogenesis of inflammatory diseases, with a focus on the regulation of metabolism and gene expression in inflammatory neutrophils. She graduated from the University of Central Lancashire in 2005 with a BSc (Hons) in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry and obtained her PhD at the University of Liverpool in 2009. In 2010 she was awarded an Arthritis Research UK Foundation Fellowship, during which she characterized neutrophils from RA patients before and after TNF inhibitor therapy using RNA-sequencing. As part of the Fellowship, she spent time at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories in New York, undertaking state-of-the-art training in bioinformatics data analysis and computer programming. More recently she has been awarded major research grants from the Wellcome Trust, Pfizer and Versus Arthritis, through which she has developed protocols applying quantitative proteomics and 1H NMR metabolomics technologies to further define the activation of neutrophils in RA. Her research has provided unprecedented insight into the role of neutrophils in inflammatory diseases and ageing. She was awarded the British Society for Rheumatology Garrod Prize in 2017 and became a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2018. Her award of a Versus Arthritis Career Development Fellowship has enabled her to further develop skills in advanced statistics and computational biology to enable the integration of multiple–omics datasets. In her wider University roles, she is chair of the musculoskeletal biology patient involvement panel which brings together researchers and people with musculoskeletal disease to discuss research priorities and the design of research studies with a patient focus. She is a member of the ILCaMS Fellowships Panel and actively mentors ECRs through fellowship and tenure-track applications, and she also sits on the Institute of Life Course and Medical Sciences Research Ethics Committee.
4.Bożena Kamińska
Laboratory of Molecular Neurobiology at the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland
Prof. Bozena Kaminska is head of the Laboratory of Molecular Neurobiology at the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland. She obtained her PhD in biochemistry at the Nencki Institute in 1991 and after postdoctoral training at the Mc Gill University in Montreal, Canada, she become a full professor in 2003. From 2009 to 2023 she was the director of the Postgraduate School of Molecular Medicine at the Medical University of Warsaw. She was a visiting researcher at the Brain Research Institute at UCLA in Los Angeles, USA (2001-2002) and the Nanshan Scholar professor at the Medical University of Guangzhou, China (2019-2022). She is an elected member of the Polish Academy of Sciences (since 2016) and European Molecular Biology Organization (since2022).
She received a prestigious Foundation for Polish Science Award 2021 in life sciences and the Prime Minister Award for scientific achievements (2022); was nominated by NCN for AcademiaNet – Expert Database for Outstanding Female Scientists and Scholars.
4.prof. dr L. A. Trouw
Department of Immunology
Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, The Netherlands
Leendert Trouw studied Biology in Leiden and already during his PhD training, at the Department of Nephrology in the LUMC, he became fascinated by autoantibodies and complement. This research, conducted in the lab of Prof. Dr. Daha, provided the explanation as to why anti-C1q autoantibodies contributed to renal damage in patients suffering from lupus, whereas the same antibodies were not harmful for healthy individuals.
To gain more understanding of the role of complement in autoimmunity, Dr. Trouw moved to the lab of Prof. Dr. Blom, Lund University, in Malmo, Sweden. During this period Dr. Trouw focussed, now as a post-doc, especially on the role of endogenous complement inhibitors on the protection of dying and dead cells from excessive complement attack.
To further develop himself in the field of complement and autoantibodies in a more clinical setting Dr. Trouw, now as a senior post-doc, started working with Prof. Dr. Huizinga and Prof. Dr. Toes at the Department of Rheumatology in the LUMC. Next to studies on the complement activating potential of ACPA and several genetic studies Dr. Trouw and his team set up a series of experiments that led to the identification of a new autoantibody in rheumatoid arthritis, the anti-CarP antibodies. After obtaining both an NWO VENI and a VIDI grant Dr. Trouw now focussed, as associate professor, on the role of complement in autoimmunity particularly in RA and SLE and on the characterisation of the anti-CarP antibody response. After obtaining an ERC-consolidator grant he moved his lab to the Department of Immunology in the LUMC. Now as a full professor in immunology focussed on complement biology and therapy, he initiated ‘Complement Center Leiden’. With his team, he is currently studying biomarkers, complement biology and targeted antibody-based complement therapeutics.