Invited Speakers

Nir Friedman is a professor and group leader at Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel. His research uses systems biology to understand the dynamic properties of T cell differentiation, repertoires and interactions with other cells. 

Nathalie Balaban is a professor and group leader at the Racah Institute of Physics, Israel. She was the first to identify a non-genetic basis of antibiotic resistance among bacterial cells. Her lab applies physics concepts, modelling and experimental microbiology to understand the basis of this type of persistence. 

James Sharpe is a professor and group leader at EMBL/Center for Genomic Regulation, Spain. His group studies the development of the vertebrate limb, both at the level of gene regulatory networks, and at the level of the physical interactions between cells and tissues. The group includes embryologists, computer scientists, imaging specialists and engineers. Their aim is to capture the whole process of understanding, from novel approaches for data-capture (live time-lapse OPT imaging) to finite-element simulations of the growing 3D structure and computer models of the gene networks responsible for pattern formation across the organ. 

John Reinitz is professor in the department of statistics at the Institute of Genomics & Systems Biology, Chicago. His lab is engaged in a long term project to understand how DNA sequence specifies biological form. They are interested not only in the specification of typical form by a typical genome, but also in the effects of variability. They consider these issues in the specific context of segment determination in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. The starting point for their investigations are quantitative data on gene expression, extracted from images of confocally scanned fixed or living embryos. They use this numerical information to find parameter sets for specific models of fundamental processes of gene regulation and pattern formation by means of large scale optimization procedures performed on parallel computers. These models may be specified in terms of DNA sequence or be more coarse-grained. They might take the form of a dynamical system, deterministic or stochastic, or simply be a complex but explicit mathematical function. 

José HALLOY  is professor at University Paris Diderot. He is famous for his studies of the social behavior of insects via experimental systems (such as real-time monitoring of insects exposed to robot intruders) and computer modelling. He is now at the Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire des Energies de Demain where he leads an interdisciplinary program dedicated to the dynamic adjustment of energy sources and consumption to the social behavior of users. 

François Massol (CNRS-GEPV, UMR 8198, France)

François Massol (CNRS) is a Researcher (CR2) at CNRS, Lille. His interests mainly lie in the broad topic of "spatially structured evolutionary ecology", and tackle ecological questions through statistical or theoretical modelling. He is currently exploring the following themes: adaptive dynamics, community ecology, dispersal, ecological networks, exchange networks, food webs, mating system, metacommunity, metapopulation, spatial ecology.

Afternoon session on "Regulatory Networks".

Marian Walhout is Professor and group leader at University of Massachusetts, USA. Her lab studies the structure, function and evolution of regulatory and metabolic networks. By the large-scale identification of physical and regulatory interactions between transcription factors and their target, they uncover how external signals or metabolic states generate specific transcriptional responses. 

Philippe Bastiaens is professor and Director at the MPI for molecular Physiology at Max Planck Institute, Dortmund, Germany. His group studies signalling regulatory cascades at very fine scales to understand their dynamic properties and specificity.