Topic: Defining Complex Drug Mechanisms with Metabolomics Dr. Darren Creek Monash University, Australia (Video)

Biography: Dr. Darren Creek is a Senior Lecturer and NHMRC Career Development Fellow at the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, and is Director of the Metabolomics Node of the Monash Proteomics and Metabolomics Facility. He completed his PhD at Monash University in 2007, and performed post-doctoral research in Uganda, Scotland and Australia working on antimalarial drug discovery and clinical trials, before focusing on metabolomics studies of tropical parasites. He developed several novel analytical methods and software tools for the metabolomics field, and discovered novel pathways and drug mechanisms in protozoan parasites. Dr Creek’s laboratory currently uses metabolomics and proteomics to understand mechanisms of drug action and resistance for infectious diseases, with a major focus on African trypanosomiasis and malaria. In 10 years since completion of his PhD, Darren has over 75 publications, 10 grants and fellowships from NHMRC, ARC and NIH, and was recently a Director of the International Metabolomics Society.

Topic: Mitochondrial Dysfunction and Cancer: Metabolites and Beyond (Video) Dr. Christian Frezza University of Cambridge, UK

Biography: Dr. Christian Frezza is an MRC Programme Leader at the MRC Cancer Unit, University of Cambridge. He studied Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Padova, Italy, and gained his MSc in 2002, after a period of research on mitochondrial toxicity induced by photoactivable anticancer drugs. Christian then joined the laboratory of Luca Scorrano in Padova to start a PhD on mitochondrial dynamics and apoptosis. In 2008, he moved to the Beatson Institute of Cancer Research in Glasgow as recipient of an EMBO Long Term Fellowship, where he investigated the role of mitochondrial defects in tumorigenesis. He moved to the MRC Cancer Unit in 2012, to take up his current position. Christian’s research is focused on understanding the role of altered metabolism in cancer, particularly investigating how small molecule metabolites affect the process of tumorigenesis. The major goal of his team is to exploit this knowledge to pioneer novel tools for cancer diagnosis and therapy.

Topic: Pathway Mapping Operations in BioCyc Dr. Peter D. Karp SRI International, USA

Biography: Dr. Peter D. Karp is the director of the Bioinformatics Research Group within the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International. Dr. Karp has authored more than 160 publications in bioinformatics and computer science in areas including metabolic pathway bioinformatics, computational genomics, scientific visualization, and scientific databases. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the International Society for Computational Biology. He received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1989, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the NIH National Center for Biotechnology Information.

Topic: Computational Tools for the Identification of Unknowns Prof. Dr. David S. Wishart University of Alberta, Canada (Video)

Biography: Dr. David Wishart (PhD Yale, 1991) is a Professor in the Departments of Biological Sciences and Computing Science at the University of Alberta. He is also a senior research officer and the director of the Nano Life Science program at the NRC’s National Institute for Nanotechnology (NINT). He has been with the University of Alberta since 1995. Dr. Wishart has active research programs in structural biology, nanobiology, synthetic biology, prion biology, bioinformatics and metabolomics. Some of his lab's most significant contributions have been in the area of protein chemical shift analysis and the prediction of protein structure.