Keynote lectures

Dr. Jeffrey Friedman is currently a Professor at the Rockefeller University, an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dr. Friedman was born in Orlando, Florida, July 20^th, 1954, and grew up in North Woodmere, Long Island. He graduated from Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute magna cum laude and, at the age of 22, received his medical degree from Albany medical College of Union University in Albany, New York. While at Albany Medical College, he was elected to Alpha Omega Alpha, the medical honor society . After completing a residency in Internal Medicine at Albany Medical Center Hospital, Dr. Friedman came to Rockefeller as a postgraduate fellow and associate physician in 1980. From 1980 to 1981, he also served as a postgraduate fellow at Cornell University Medical College. In 1986, he received a PhD under the tutelage of Professor James E. Darnell. In 1986 he was appointed as an assistant professor at Rockefeller University and an assistant investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dr. Friedman was appointed Professor at Rockefeller in 1995 after serving as Associate Professor and Head of Laboratory of Molecular Genetics and in 1998 was named the first the Marilyn M. Simpson Professor. In 1995 he was appointed Director of the Starr Foundation Center for Human Genetics.

Professor Friedman  is a physician scientist studying the physiologic and genetic mechanisms that regulate food intake and body weight. Dr. Friedman’s research on a genetic basis of obesity received national attention in late 1994, when it was announced that he and his colleagues had isolated the mouse ob gene and its human homologue. They subsequently found that injections of the encoded protein, leptin, decreases body weight of mice by reducing food intake and increasing energy expenditure. They showed that leptin is an afferent signal in a negative feedback loop that maintains homeostatic control of body weight. Current research is aimed at understanding the neural and physiological mechanisms by which leptin transmits its weight-reducing signal. Dr. Friedman was elected to numerous academies, societies and councils and has also received numerous (international) awards for his work.

Professor Friedman’s lecture will be about ‘Leptin and the Regulation of Food Intake and Body Weight’ .

Professor Roel Nusse was born in Amsterdam (1950), the Netherlands. He received his PhD from the Netherlands Cancer Institute and the University of Amsterdam in 1980. He completed postdoctoral studies at the University of California, San Francisco in 1982 working with Dr. Harold Varmus. After several years as head of the molecular biology department at the Netherlands Cancer Institute, he returned to the Bay Area and joined the Stanford faculty in 1990 as a Professor of Developmental Biology. He has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator since 1990 and been the chair of the department of Developmental Biology at Stanford from 1999 to 2020. Currently, he is the Virginia and Daniel K. Ludwig Professor of Cancer Research. In 2010, he was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Professor Roel Nusse is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences.

Professor Roel Nusse has made major discoveries in developmental biology and adult stem cell research. His pioneering research has elucidated the mechanism and role of Wnt signaling, one of the paradigms for the fundamental connections between normal development and cancer. These discoveries relate to fundamental questions on embryogenesis. Professor Roel Nusse co-discovered the gene ‘Wnt’, which is involved in both embryonic development and cancer. He went on to show that this gene is at the heart of a signaling pathway which directs the growth and development of tissues. Professor Nusse’s lab has done key research in elaborating this pathway, tracing Wnt’s role in controlling the pace of stem cell division, regulating tissue regeneration and enabling tumor growth.

Professor Roel Nusse’s lecture will be about ‘Wnt Signaling Leads To Cell Division. But How?  The lecture will outline how Wnt signaling leads to cell division and how it regulates stem cell differentiation and self-renewal.

Professor Beutler, born December 29^th, 1957, had a precocious start in science, which interested him from his early childhood years. At the age of 14, he began to work in the laboratory of his father, Ernest Beutler. He completed medical school at the University of Chicago at the age of 23 a nd spent two years as an intern and resident in the departments of Internal medicine and Neurology at UT Southwestern Medical Center. In 1983 he moved to New York where he worked for two years as a postdoctoral associate and one year as an assistant professor at the Rockefeller University. During this period, Beutler used an unconventional biological assay in the de novo isolation of mouse Tumor Necrosis Factor (TNF). He correctly surmised that the protein mediated much of the acute systemic inflammatory response triggered by administration of LPS to mammals. This pointed the way to the later use of antibodies against TNF in chronic inflammatory diseases.

Returning to UT Southwestern as an HHMI investigator (1986), Professor Beutler developed chimeric proteins in which the TNF receptor was attached to antibody heavy chains. These proteins strongly and specifically inhibited TNF, were non-antigenic, and ultimately helped many patients suffering from TNF-mediated inflammatory diseases. The receptor for lipopolysaccharide (LPS), one of the classical inducers of these cytokines, had remained unknown and Professor Beutler resolved to find it. In 1998, Professor Beutler and his group reported that toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) was the essential membrane-spanning component of the LPS receptor and was highly specific as an LPS sensor. Each of the other TLRs proved to detect other conserved inflammatory components of microbes. This was the basic means by which the innate immune system distinguished self from non-self. The science of innate immunity blossomed in the wake of Professor Beutler’s discovery, for which he shared in the Nobel Prize (2011).

During the years that followed, Professor Beutler revolutionised mammalian forward genetics. Professor Beutler and his team used a powerful germline mutagen (ethynitrosourea) to induce heritable phenotypes in mice, affecting immunity, metabolism, behavior and development. Professor Beutler developed a method for instantaneous determination of which mutation is responsible for phenotype. The Beutler lab has declared over 5,000 mutations in more than 2,300 genes to be causative of one or more phenotypes among more than 100 phenotypes monitored. In the majority of cases, mutations found in mice are partly or fully phenocopied by mutations in humans. As such, new understanding—and treatments—of many human diseases will continue to flow from Professor Beutler’s work.

Regental professor Bruce Beutler’s lecture will be about ‘From phenotypes to genes in immunity’. The lecture will outline how Toll(-like) receptors detect microorganisms and activate our innate immunity and how TNF is involved in inflammatory diseases.

Hanneke Schuitemaker PhD is the Head of Viral Vaccine Discovery and Translational Medicine and Disease Area Stronghold Leader for Viral Vaccines at Janssen Vaccines & Prevention B.V. She has been in these roles since 2010 and oversees Janssen’s viral vaccine programs including investigational vaccine candidates for HIV, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), Ebola, Zika, COVID-19 and HPV. In addition, she is a Professor of Virology at the Amsterdam University Medical Center.

Hanneke Schuitemaker is a medical biologist by training, she received her PhD in Medicine in 1992 at the University of Amsterdam. She worked for more than 20 years on HIV-1 pathogenesis, first at Sanquin (1989-2007), the blood supply foundation in the Netherlands, where she was the Chair of the department of Clinical Viro-Immunology (1998-2007), and then at the Amsterdam University Medical Center (2008-2010), where she was the Chair of the Department of Experimental Immunology. From 2003 to 2004 , she worked as a visiting scientist at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. She successfully trained more than 30 PhD students and co-authored more than 320 peer-reviewed scientific articles.

Janssen started in January 2020 with the development of a COVID-19 vaccine. Thirteen months later, the vaccine was approved for emergency use. During Professor Schuitemakers’ lecture, the most important data of this development trajectory will be discussed as well as the complexity of working on vaccine development during the pandemic. The work that hasn’t been done and an overview of additional activities will be shared . The name of her lecture will be “The development of the Janssen COVID-19 vaccine: a marathon at sprint speed”.

Karl Deisseroth is Professor of Bioengineering and of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Deisseroth received his undergraduate degree from Harvard in 1992, his PhD from Stanford in 1998, and his MD from Stanford in 2000. Deisseroth then completed his medical internship and adult psychiatry residency at Stanford, and is board-certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. He continues as a practicing psychiatrist (inpatient and outpatient) at Stanford with specialization in affective disorders and autism-spectrum disease, employing medications along with neural stimulation. Deisseroth also serves as Director of Undergraduate Education for Bioengineering at Stanford, and is known for providing free educational programs that have disseminated his technologies to thousands of laboratories around the world.

In exploring how properties of the brain arise from activity of its cellular components, Deisseroth has pioneered the basic science discoveries that enabled this goal, including resolving the structural and functional mysteries of natural light-gated ion channels, and discovery of the neural cell types and connections that cause adaptive and maladaptive behavior. Along the way, over the last 17 years, his laboratory has created and developed technologies for observing and controlling biological systems (like the brain) at high resolution, while maintaining these systems in the intact state; these technologies include optogenetics, hydrogel-tissue chemistry, and a broad range of enabling methods.

Deisseroth has also published a book of literary nonfiction, relating the experiences of psychiatric patients to modern neuroscience – Projections (Penguin Random House) ­­– in 2021.

Professor Karl Deisseroth’s lecture will be about ‘Inner workings of channelrhodopsins and brains’. The lecture will outline a new cryo-electron microscopy structure of ChRmine at 2.0 Å resolution. The structure reveals striking architectural features never seen before in channelrhodopsins