These are the biographies of some of our accepted speakers. Not all our speakers are listed here

Bob G Blasdel, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

Bob Blasdel is a PhD student supervised by Rob Lavigne in the Laboratory of Gene Technology at KU Leuven studying the transcriptomes of bacteriophage infected Pseudomonas aeruginosa cells through RNA-Seq analysis. He has worked in phage for the last eight years, having gotten his masters at The Ohio State University with Steve Abedon and his Bachelors from The Evergreen State College with Betty Kutter. Bob currently sits on the boards of the PhageBiotics Foundation as well as P.H.A.G.E. and have been active in coordinating the biannual Evergreen International Phage Conference since 2009.

Kristin N. Parent, Michigan State University, East Lansing, United States

Dr. Kristin Parent is a structural biologist, who joined the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology as an Assistant Professor in January, 2013. She is mainly interested in the processes of virus assembly and infection mechanisms. Her work has recently been funded through the National Institutes of Health, as well as through a AAAS award for women in the chemical sciences. Dr. Parent was also the recipient of the College of Natural Sciences outstanding mentor award from Michigan State in 2015.

Mark J van Raaij, Centro Nacional de Biotecnologia (CNB-CSIC), Spanish National Research Council, Madrid, Spain

Mark J. van Raaij is Group Leader in the Department of Macromolecular Structures at CNB. His group research focuses on structural biology of the tail fibres of viruses and bacteriophages. Knowledge of the structures of viral and bacteriophage fibre proteins could lead to a variety of biotechnological applications. Modification of the bacteriophage fibre receptor binding specificities could permit improved detection and elimination of specific bacteria. The skills and expertise of the group cover construction of bacterial expression vectors, protein expression, purification, characterization and crystallisation and crystallographic structure determination by de novo or molecular replacement phasing.

Philippos Tsourkas, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada, United States

Dr. Philippos Tsourkas is from Athens, Greece. He obtained his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2004. He worked as a post-doc in the Department of Biomedical Engieering at the University of California, Davis between 2005 and 2011, and at the Curie Institute in Paris in 2012. Since 2013 Dr. Tsourkas is Assistant Professor in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Nevada Las Vegas since 2013, where he works in bioinformatics. Since 2014 he has been active in the area of Paenibacillus larvae bacteriophages, on which he has currently published 4 papers.

Stephen T. Abedon, The Ohio State University, Mansfield, United States

BS, University of Massachusetts, in Biochemistry; Ph.D., University of Arizona, in Microbiology, concentration in Molecular Genetics, minor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; Dissertation title (1990): The Ecology of Bacteriophage T4; Postdoc, University of Pennsylvania. Ive been at the Ohio State University since 1995, tenured there in 2001. My interests are in especially the organismal ecology of phages, the applied ecology and, indeed, pharmacology of phage-mediated biocontrol of bacteria, a.k.a., phage therapy, and also issues of phage history. Im closing in on 100 publications including ~5 monographs and the two most cited and three most read articles in the journal, Bacteriophage.

Abram Aertsen, Laboratory of Food Microbiology, Department of Microbial and Molecular Systems (M S), Faculty of Bioscience Engineering, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

Heather E. Allison, University of Liverpool, Merseyside, Liverpool, United Kingdom

Hany Anany, Canadian Research Institute for Food Safety, University of Guelph, Guelph, Canada

Joana Azeredo, Universidade do Minho, Campus de Gualtar, Braga, Portugal

Joana Azeredo is an Associate Professor with habilitation at the Department of Biological Engineering of the University of Minho and develops her research activity at Centre of Biological Engineering (CEB). She belongs to the direction board of CEB and is the head of the Phage Biotechnology Research Group. Her main research interests are biofilm science and technology and bacteriophage biotechnology.Joana Azeredo obtained her PhD in Chemical and Biological Engineering from the University of Minho (1998) on Biofilm Science and Technology. She has been responsible for several national and European projects related to the areas previously mentioned. She is/was responsible for the supervision of 14 PhD students and 25 MSc students and has published more than 120 international refereed papers, 10 international book chapters, 2 books and 2 patents. Her H-index is 30.

Jeremy J Barr, Monash University, Victoria, Australia

Ian Connerton, Northern Foods Chair of Food Safety, Division of Food Sciences, School of Biosciences, Sutton Bonington Campus, Loughborough, United Kingdom

Ian Connerton is Professor of Food Safety at the University of Nottingham, UK. He joined the University of Reading in 1987 to teach Microbiology before joining the Institute of Food Research in 1991 first as a Section Leader and then Deputy Head of Food Macromolecular Science. He was appointed as the first Northern Foods Chair of Food Safety in 1998 (now 2 Sisters Chair). Current research includes host pathogen interactions of food borne bacterial (Campylobacter and enterovirulent E. coli) and viral pathogens, and the influence of bacteriophage on foodborne bacterial pathogen populations.

Ayman El-Shibiny, Zewail City of Science and Technology, Giza, Egypt

Dr. Ayman El-Shibiny is currently an associate professor of biomedical sciences at the University of Science and Technology, Egypt. He completed his Ph.D degree in food microbiology (food safety) from Nottingham University, UK. His main research area is phage therapy and his current research interests include the therapeutic use of bacteriophages. Prior to joining Zewail City, El-Shibiny worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Nottingham University in the U.K., Cardiff University in the U.K., and The Evergreen State College in the U.S. He also served as an associate professor and head of the food sciences department in Suez Canal University (Egypt).

Philip J. Griebel, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada

Dr. Griebel is a Research Fellow at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization (VIDO-Intervac) and Professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada. He has been active in research related to mucosal immunity and vaccines for over 25 years and has published over 150 peer-reviewed articles. His current research focus is the role of the microbiome in the development of the mucosal immune system in newborn calves, developing mucosal vaccine delivery vehicles, and vaccination strategies to optimize protection against enteric and respiratory infections.

Sidney Hayes, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada

Sophie Kittler, , University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover, Hannover, Germany

Dr. Sophie Kittler is group leader of the phage group at the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover, Germany. Her main research interests are the practical application of phages in food production and especially in livestock farming. She has been working on phages for six years, performing field trials in commercial broiler flocks during her doctoral research study and in ongoing projects.

Sylvain Moineau, Universite Laval, Quebec, Canada

Catherine E.D. Rees, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom

Dr Cath Rees is currently Associate Professor in Microbiology in School of Biosciences, at the Nottingham University Sutton Bonington campus. Originally she studied Biochemistry at Oxford, followed by PhD in Bacterial Genetics at Leicester University and current research focus is on the application of molecular techniques to study various aspects of applied microbiology. She has a long term interest in the development of recombinant phage-based methods of bacterial detection (specifically Listeria and Mycobacteria) and also in the biology and genetics of these organisms. Recent research focus has been on the development of rapid non-recombinant phage-based tests for the detection of mycobacterial pathogens for the agriculture sector including M. bovis and M. paratuberculosis.

Alejandro Reyes Munoz, Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia

Francesco Santoro, University of Siena, LAMMB – Dept of Medical Biotechnologies, Siena, Italy

Lindsay W. Black, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Maryland, Baltimore, USA

Henrike Zschach, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark

Henrike Zschach holds a B.Sc in Biophysics from the Humboldt University of Berlin and a M.Sc in Bioinformatics from the Technical University of Denmark. She is currently a PhD candidate and started her PhD studies in November 2014.

Tina Motwani, University of Connecticut, Storrs, United States

Dr. Tina Motwani received her PhD in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry from Wesleyan University. She is an Assistant Research Professor in Dr. Carolyn Teschke laboratory at the University of Connecticut. The main goal of Teschke lab is focused on understanding the folding of viral proteins. Using bacteriophage P22 as a model system, they are trying to study how the viral proteins assemble with high fidelity into complex structures that form viruses. Dr. Motwanis project is to investigate the assembly of the portal protein complex during the procapsid assembly of bacteriophage P22.

Peter Mullany, UCL Eastman Dental Institute, London, United Kingdom

I have been working on C. difficile mobile genetic elements for the past 20 years and have published extensively in this field. I have also used some of these elements to investigate virulence of this organism. In addition I have been investigating the genetics underlying the transfer of antibiotic resistance in bacteria.

Chair Persons

Angela Makumi, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

Mark J van Raaij, Centro Nacional de Biotecnologia (CNB-CSIC), Spanish National Research Council, Madrid, Spain

Mark J. van Raaij is Group Leader in the Department of Macromolecular Structures at CNB. His group research focuses on structural biology of the tail fibres of viruses and bacteriophages. Knowledge of the structures of viral and bacteriophage fibre proteins could lead to a variety of biotechnological applications. Modification of the bacteriophage fibre receptor binding specificities could permit improved detection and elimination of specific bacteria. The skills and expertise of the group cover construction of bacterial expression vectors, protein expression, purification, characterization and crystallisation and crystallographic structure determination by de novo or molecular replacement phasing.

Julie Thomas, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, United States

Dr. Julie Thomas is an Assistant Professor in the Gosnell School of Life Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology. Dr. Thomas first became interested in giant phages during her postdoctoral studies at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. At that time it became evident these phages, which were previously thought to be rare, were actually abundant in the environment. It also became apparent there was a massive gap in knowledge as to what makes a giant phage giant. To address this problem the Giant Phage Lab uses multi-disciplinary approaches to study the virion and host interactions of phage SPN3US.

Dr Darren L. Smith, Northumbria University, UK