Keynote Lectures

Prof. Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe MD, was born in Lancashire, England, in 1954. He attended Lancaster Royal Grammar School from 1965 to 1972. He won an open scholarship to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in 1972 to study Medicine at the University of Cambridge. Later he completed his MB ChB medical degree at St Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical College in 1978. Ratcliffe then trained in renal medicine at Oxford University, focusing on renal oxygenation, before founding the hypoxia biology laboratory at Oxford. His laboratory elucidated mechanisms by which human and animal cells sense oxygen levels and transduce these signals to direct adaptive changes in gene expression. He earned a higher MD degree from the University of Cambridge in 1987. He holds appointments as Director of Clinical Research at the Francis Crick Institute, London, Director of the Target Discovery Institute at the University of Oxford and is a member of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research.

Prof. Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe is best known for his discovery on how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability, for which he shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with William Kaelin Jr. and Gregg L. Semenza. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society and a recipient of several international awards for his laboratory’s work on oxygen sensing, including the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine (2009), the Canada Gairdner International Award (2010), the Lasker Award for Basic Biomedical Research (2016), the Buchanan Medal of the Royal Society (2017) and the Massry Prize (2018). He was knighted for his services to medicine in 2014.

Prof. Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe’s lecture will be about ‘Understanding cellular oxygen sensing mechanisms: implications for medicine’. The lecture will outline advances in the molecular understanding of oxygen sensing mechanisms, including the remarkable finding that all eukaryotic kingdoms use enzymatic protein oxidations coupled to proteostasis to signal oxygen levels in their cells. The physiological implications of these advances will be discussed, together with the opportunities and challenges raised in the therapeutic modulation of human oxygen sensing systems.

Professor Jaap Seidell PhD is an internationally recognised researcher of nutrition and Director of the Department of Health Sciences at the VU University of Amsterdam. He is an eminent researcher whose expertise spans on diet, healthy nutrition, chronic diseases and the management of overweight and obesity. Professor Seidell is an expert in nutrition and social medicine. He consults gratuitously for the Dutch government, research funding organisations, the food industry, pharmaceutical companies, health care organizations, NGO’s and the media. He graduated cum laude from Wageningen University, did an internship at the University of Cambridge and received his post doc at Sahlgrens Hospital, University of Göteborg. He became a member of the The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012.

Professor Jaap Seidell’s lecture will be about ‘The effect of information accessibility on health in different parts of the world’. The lecture will outline the different elements of lifestyle diseases like diabetes and obesity worldwide. Various aspects including consequences, management and prevention will be addressed during his keynote lecture. During his talk, the importance of information provision will be outlined next to other important factors that play a key role in the prevention of these kinds of diseases.

Professor Marion Koopmans, DVM PhD focuses on global population level impact of rapidly spreading zoonotic virus infections, with special emphasis on foodborne transmission. Her research focuses on unravelling the modes of transmission of viruses among animals and between animals and humans through food transmission. She uses the pathogenic genomic information to unravel these pathways and to signal changes in transmission or disease impact. Professor Koopmans is the initiator of the global Noronet network, a global network of scientists sharing information on disease outbreaks into a jointly owned database to study norovirus diversity related to human health impact. She is a scientific coordinator of COMPARE, a multidisciplinary research network that has the common vision to become the enabling analytical framework and globally linked data and information sharing platform for the rapid identification, containment and mitigation of emerging infectious diseases and foodborne outbreaks. Next to these projects she is also co-leader in the PREPARE project, an EU funded network for harmonized large-scale clinical research studies on infectious diseases. This project is prepared to rapidly respond to any severe ID outbreak, providing real-time evidence for clinical management of patients and for informing public health responses.

Marion Koopmans is the director of the WHO- cooperation centre for Emerging Diseases at the Erasmus MC and scientific director of Emerging Diseases of the Netherlands Centre for One Health. She has received the Infectious disease award of the Dutch Association for Infectious Diseases and is the recipient of the Stevin Premium 2018. In 2019, she became a member of the The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has co-authored over 500 papers that have been cited over 20.000 times.

Professor Marion Koopmans lecture will be about ‘The Rapidly Evolving World of Emerging Viruses’.  The lecture will outline basic concepts of disease emergence, and go into the factors that drive emerging disease outbreaks in our globalising world. Are emerging disease outbreaks a hype? Should we worry about them? What drives their occurrence? What can we do to prevent and control them, specifically food related changes?

Ellen Roche is currently the W.M Keck Foundation Career Development Professor at the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science and the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She directs the Therapeutic Technology Design and Development Lab. She completed her PhD at Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Her research focuses on applying innovative technologies to the development of cardiac devices. Her research includes the development of novel devices to repair or augment cardiac function. To establish this she uses disruptive approaches such as soft robotics, a combination of mechanical actuation with delivery of cell therapy and use of light-activated biodegradable adhesives. Dr. Roche was employed in the medical device industry for over five years as a research and development engineer. She understands the regulatory pathways to medical device commercialization. Professor Roche holds 5 issued patents, with ten pending and is the author of over 40 conference/journal papers. She is the recipient of multiple awards including the Fulbright International Science and Technology Award, the Wellcome Trust Seed Award in Science, an American Heart Association Pre-Doctoral Award, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and a Charles H. Hood Award for Excellence in Child Health Research.

Professor Ellen Roche’s lecture will be about ‘Therapeutic strategies for cardiac disease using soft materials, structures and devices’. The lecture will outline the future of what implantable cardiovascular devices should be: a multi-targeted, synergistic combination of (i) structural repair (ii) active assistance and (iii) biological therapy. This seminar will focus on representative implantable cardiac devices that Ellen Roche has worked on in each of these three areas, each addressing an identified shortcoming of existing technologies.