| Megan Davey is a Developmental Biologist at the Roslin Institute where she has a Career Progression Fellowship. From New Zealand originally she came to the UK specifically to study embryonic development, completing a PhD at the University of Dundee in 2003, investigating vasculature development in the talpid3 chicken mutant. |  |
| Dr. Jack C. M. Dekkers received B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from the Wageningen Agricultural University and a Ph.D. in Animal Breeding from the University of Wisconsin. From 1989 to 1997 he was on faculty at the University of Guelph, focusing on development of genetic improvement programs for dairy cattle. He moved to Iowa State University in 1997, where he currently is Full Professor and Leader of Animal Breeding and Genetics. Current research focuses on integration of quantitative and molecular genetics, with applications to swine and poultry. Dr. Dekkers has received numerous awards, including the J.L. Lush (ADSA) and the Rockefeller Prentice (ASAS) Awards in Animal Breeding. |  |
| Professor Tariq Enver’s research at the The Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Oxford uses three related approaches to understand how transcription factor networks regulate stem and progenitor cell fate, and how they are dysregulated in leukaemia. Since 2003 he has been Director of Stem Cell Research at the MRC Molecular Haematology Unit in the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, and was appointed as visiting Professor of Stem Cell Biology at the University of Lund in Sweden in September 2005. |  |
| Colin Farquharson. In 1989 I obtained my PhD at the University of Aberdeen before completing post-doctoral positions at the Rowett Research Institute and Roslin Institute. In 2000, I was appointed a Principal Investigator at Roslin Institute leading my own group investigating the cellular and molecular mechanisms controlling bone growth and development. |  |
| Michel Georges is DVM, PhD and head of the Unit of Animal Genomics at the University of Liège. This multidisciplinary team has been focusing for more than 10 years on the molecular dissection of complex traits of agronomic and medical importance. Amongst their major achievements are the positional cloning and genetic engineering of the myostatin gene causing “double-muscling”, the positional identification of structural and regulatory quantitative trait nucleotides influencing agronomically important traits in livestock, the molecular dissection of polar overdominance at the ovine callipyge locus, and more recently the identification of polymorphic miRNA-target interactions. |  |
| Professor David Hume is an international authority in genome sciences, with a particular focus on the function of specialised cells of the immune system in infection, inflammatory disease and cancer. He is the Director of the Roslin Institute and was previously Director of the ARC Special Centre for Functional and Applied Genomics at the Institute for Molecular BioScience at the University of Queensland. |  |
| Professor Jonathan Flint For the past ten years, my laboratory has been investigating the genetic basis of common psychiatric disorders, in particular the determination of the genetic basis of anxiety and depression in animal models and humans. |
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| Professor Philippe Gros is Professor of Biochemistry at McGill University, Montreal. His past and present awards include International Scholar of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Distinguished Scientist, Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Research in his lab is centred on three main areas: resistance to chemotherapy in tumour cells, genetic basis of susceptibility to infectious diseases and genetic basis of neural tube defects in neurogenesis. |  |
| Chand Khanna DVM, PhD is a diplomat of the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine (Oncology). Dr. Khanna received his PhD in Pathobiology from the University of Minnesota and then completed post-doctoral training as a Senior Staff Fellow of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda Maryland |  |
| Jonathan Lamb is currently the Professor of Veterinary Clinical Immunology at Edinburgh University and a Principal Investigator in the EBRC. His scientific career has focused on research in the areas of immunology and inflammation with a specific interest in T cell biology and the regulation of immune responses. |  |
| Andreas Lengeling PhD is a Senior Academic Fellow at the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests are genetics of host-pathogen interactions and macrophage biology. He received a Biology Diploma and a PhD in Genetics from the University of Bielefeld (Germany) and had postdoctoral positions at UPENN (Philadelphia) and the National Research Centre for Environment and Health (Munich). Before joining UoE he was head of a Young Investigator Group at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research in Braunschweig (Germany). |  |
| Neil Mabbott completed a Ph.D. at the University of Aberdeen in 1995 before moving to the Neuropathogenesis Unit in Edinburgh. He is now a Principal Investigator in the EBRC where his research concentrates on determining how TSE agents exploit the immune system to reach the CNS. |  |
| Professor Colin L Masters researches neurodegenerative diseases of humans, including Alzheimer’s disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. He is the Executive Director of the Mental Health Research Institute of Victoria and Laureate Professor in Pathology at the University of Melbourne. He is a prolific author covering multidisciplinary aspects of the neurodegenerative diseases. |  |
| Professor Jean Manson, OBE is an internationally recognized scientist in TSE research. She is the Head of the Neuropathogenesis Unit of the Roslin Institute and holds a personal chair at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on elucidating mechanisms of TSE disease transmission within and between individuals using unique transgenic mouse models. She chairs the Scottish TSE Network and is a member of the WHO TSEs Working Group, the UK SEAC government advisory body and the Executive Committee of the NeuroPrion EU Network of Excellence. She was recently awarded an OBE in the 2008 New Year's honours list. |  |
| Dr Jeffrey Pollard joined the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1988 and in 1993 became a Professor of Developmental and Molecular Biology; currently he is also Deputy Director of the Cancer Center and Director for the Center for the Study of Reproductive Biology and Womens Health His research interests are in: 1) Placental immunity 2) Role of macrophages in development and cancer 3) Mechanism of action of the female sex steroid hormones, estradiol-17b and Progesterone. |  |
| John Quackenbush received his PhD in 1990 in theoretical physics from UCLA working on string theory models. Following two years as a postdoctoral fellow in physics, Dr. Quackenbush applied for and received a Special Emphasis Research Career Award from the National Center for Human Genome Research to work on the Human Genome Project. He spent two years at the Salk Institute working on developing physical maps of human chromosome 11 and two years at Stanford University working on new laboratory and computational strategies for sequencing the Human Genome. In 1997 he joined the faculty of The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) where his focus began to shift to post-genomic applications with an emphasis on microarray analysis. Using a combination of laboratory and computational approaches, Dr. Quackenbush and his group developed analytical methods based on integration of data across domains to learn biological meaning from high-dimensional data. Since joining the faculties of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Harvard School of Public Health in 2005, his work has increasingly focused on the analysis of human cancer and expanded to embrace systems-based approaches to understanding and modeling biological problems. |  |
| Geoff Simm heads SAC’s Sustainable Livestock Systems Research Group - a group with interests in animal breeding and genetics, behaviour and welfare, development and livestock production systems. He is President of the British Society of Animal Science and Chair of the National Standing Committee on Farm Animal Genetic Resources. |  |
| Professor Charles Weissmann, M.D., Ph.D. Charles Weissmann contributed importantly to the elucidation of RNA phage replication, developed site-directed mutagenesis and reverse genetics, discovered the quasi-species nature of viral populations, cloned and expressed human alpha-interferon genes in E.coli, cloned the PrP gene and demonstrated that PrP knockout mice were immune to prion infection. He is member of the Royal Society, the National Academy of Science (US), the Orden Pour Le Merite (Germany) and has been awarded six honorary doctoral degrees and many scientific prizes. |
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| Professor Mark Woolhouse is Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at University of Edinburgh. He has held research posts at University of Zimbabwe, Imperial College London and University of Oxford and he has worked on a variety of infectious disease systems: human schistosomiasis; verocytotoxigenic E. coli in cattle; the epidemiology and transmission biology of foot-and-mouth disease in livestock; trypanosomiasis in humans, cattle and tsetse; and transmissible spongiform encephalopathies in cattle and sheep. He was a government advisor during the UK 2001 foot-and-mouth disease epidemic (work for which he was awarded an OBE in 2002) and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. |  |