Jim Huggett

Principal Scientist, LGC; Senior Lecturer, University of Surrey

Short biography TBA

Heidi Pharo

Head engineer in the Guro Lind Lab, Oslo University Hospital

Heidi Pharo, M.Sc., PhD, is a head engineer in the Lind lab, which is a part of the Department of Molecular Oncology at the Institute for Cancer Research, the Norwegian Radium Hospital, Oslo University Hospital. She has been working in the Lind lab for 10 years, where she has performed both her master thesis and PhD work.

Her main research interest is to develop clinically relevant DNA methylation biomarkers in cancer, coupled with a strong focus on optimizing DNA methylation analysis pipelines. A large focus during her PhD work was to contribute with methods development to increase the accuracy of droplet digital DNA methylation analyses. Currently, she is also coordinating a large national multicenter trial, validating the performance of a promising urine test for monitoring of bladder cancer recurrence.

Jori Symons

Assistant Professor, UMC Utrecht

Jori Symons obtained his PhD in 2014 at the laboaratory of Dr. Monique Nijhuis, studying co-receptor usage of HIV. He has worked as a postdoc in Melbourne Australia at the Peter Doherty Institute in the lab of Prof. Sharon Lewin where he lead a small team of researchers in HIV reservoir analysis and new cure strategies.

Currently, Jori Symons is an assistant professor at the department of Medical Microbiology, Virology, UMC Utrecht. He studies HIV cure by investigating HIV pathogenesis of the viral reservoir in CNS by HIV integration site, proviral and epigenetic sequencing, in these projects he supervises several PhD students.

Additionally, he leads a team of national and international researchers in the analysis of the quantity and quality of the viral reservoir of different HIV-subtypes. Furthermore, he investigates the role of host factors in the severity of COVID-19, tropism and evolution of SARS-CoV-2.

Jori Symons is also an honorary research fellow at the Peter Doherty Institute, he is involved in ongoing projects investigating nanomedicine with the goal to tackle HIV latency.

Stephanie Fraley

Associate Professor, UC San Diego

Dr. Stephanie I. Fraley is an Associate Professor of Bioengineering at the University of California, San Diego. She earned her B.S. in Chemical Engineering in 2006 from The University of Tennessee, Chattanooga and her Ph.D. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in 2011 from The Johns Hopkins University.

A primary focus of the Fraley lab is to develop molecular detection technologies that address critical unmet needs for infectious disease diagnosis and surveillance. Considering the recent pandemic, it is not difficult to see why such research is critical for the detection and tracing of emerging pathogens/variants, effective patient treatment, and prevention of disease spread. The Fraley lab is working to bring a new age of rapid, broad-based, quantitative, and inexpensive technology to address these challenges. They have built and characterized a novel platform that can accomplish rapid and broad pathogen identification, with sensitivity to the single genome level and the ability to characterize mixed infections. These capabilities are achieved by innovating and integrating concepts from digital PCR and DNA melt analysis to achieve “big data” for machine learning. This enables sequencing by melting. Their ongoing work uses this approach to automatically detect both known and novel emerging pathogens with clinically impactful speed, sensitivity, and specificity.

Fraley’s work has been recognized with a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface, NSF CAREER award, and ACS Research Scholar’s award. She has been named a SAGE Bionetworks Scholar, Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow, Biomedical Engineering Society Rising Star in Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering, Biomaterials Science Emerging Investigator, and Frontiers of Engineering Fellow. She was recently inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.

Marzia Del Re

Associate Professor, UC San Diego

Dr. Marzia Del Re works as Assistant Professor in the Clinical Pharmacology and Pharmacogenetics Unit at the University of Pisa (Italy) and her research program is focused on the 1) diagnosis of adverse drug reactions by pharmacogenetic analysis of germline DNA and 2) monitoring of acquired resistance to targeted therapies using circulating nucleic acids released from tumors in plasma.

Dr. Del Re received the Merit Awards from the American Society of Clinical Oncology (2011 and 2013) for her studies on DPYD variants and adverse drug reactions by fluoropyrimidines. Dr. Del Re received the Umberto Veronesi Foundation Fellowship (2012) for a project on pharmacogenetics of tamoxifen. Dr. Del Re was the recipient of the special award from the Italian Society of Pharmacology for her contribution to research in pharmacogenetics (2014) and the special award "SIF-Farmindustria for Pharmacological Research" (2016). In 2018 Dr. Del Re has been awarded from the Italian Association of Medical Oncology (AIOM) for her research on circulating tumor DNA in lung cancer and in 2020 received the ESMO travel grant for the research “Ki67 expression and CDK4/6i activity: an emerging role for PIK3CA mutations in metastatic breast cancer patients”.

Antoon Lievens

Method Development Scientist, BASF innovation center - Ghent

Molecular biologist & statistician with a career in method qPCR & dPCR development in the fields of GMO, Food Fraud, and plant breeding. Focus on research and development of (d)dPCR analysis tools.