Speakers

 

Keynote

Erik Danen

Professor of Cancer Drug Target Discovery / Director BSc Bio-Pharmaceutical Sciences

After postdocs at NIH, Bethesda MD and NKI/AVL, Amsterdam NL, Erik Danen moved to Leiden University as tenure track Assistant Prof. and became tenured Associate Prof. in 2012, and full professor in 2018. He has managed biomedical research as PI, work package leader, or co-investigator in grants funded by the Dutch Scientific Organization (NWO), the Dutch Cancer Society (KWF), the European Union (FP7), the Netherlands Genomics Initiative, and Leiden University. His research centers on mechanisms underlying cancer metastasis and therapy resistance. It involves 2D and 3D tissue modeling and automated real time confocal microscopy. Much of the work takes place in the Leiden University Cell Observatory where high throughput RNAi / compound screening is applied. In collaboration with the Institute of Biology a pipeline for automated whole animal bioimaging of cancer growth and dissemination using zebrafish xenograft models has been established. In collaboration with the Institute of Physics in UL methodology has been developed to study the biophysical aspects of cell adhesion and cell migration.

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Sabina Caneva

Sabina Caneva is a tenure track Assistant Professor and Delft Technology Fellow in the Department of Precision and Microsystems Engineering at TU Delft. She is interested in bridging advances in instrumentation and nanofabrication with insights into biophysical phenomena at the smallest scale. Her group focuses on developing ultrasenstivie nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS) to study fundamental questions and tackle challenges in nanobiology, including molecular diagnostics and size-selective biomolecular transport across cell membranes. She currently leads the interdisciplinary BioNEMS team of 2 Postdocs, 3 PhD students and 3 Master students, with backgrounds in nanoscience, physics, optical engineering, electrical engineering and physical chemistry.

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Reno Debets

Reno Debets chairs the laboratory of Tumor Immunology, Dept Medical Oncology, Erasmus MC-Cancer Institute (since 2000). The laboratory consists of 18 people, including PhD students and postdoctoral fellows, and research aims to understand how solid tumors evade immune control, and to explore therapeutic strategies to (re-) establish tumor-specific T cell responses according to 3 lines: 1.Develop and test adoptive T cell therapy, 2. Understand and intervene with cross-talk between tumor cells and T cells, and 3. Monitor patient T cell immunity. Debets also participates in the research groups of the Division of Onco-immunology and Department of Medical Oncology of Erasmus MC.

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Murali Ghatkesar

Murali Krishna Ghatkesar is Assistant Professor at Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. He obtained his PhD from University of Basel, Switzerland. He was postdoc at Caltech and University of Virginia in the USA before taking the present position. He won Swiss National Science Foundation and Novartis Foundation fellowships. His research interest lies at the nexus of physics and biology covering the fields of M/NEMS, Micro/nanofluidics and Nanobiotechnology. The major contributions being resonating modes of microcantilever in liquid, increasing mass sensitivity with higher resonating modes and time-resolved measurements of membrane protein-ligand interactions. Presently his focus is on fabrication and applications of hollow microcantilever AFM pipette for dispensing, aspiration, weighing and imaging.

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Miao-Ping Chien

Miao-Ping Chien joined the Department of Molecular Genetics at Erasmus Medical Center in June 2017. Chien was born and raised in Taiwan, where she studied Molecular Biology at National Yang-Ming University. She obtained her PhD in Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego, and went to Harvard University for postdoctoral research, focusing on technology development for biology using multidisciplinary approaches. 

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