KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Dr. Sonia Anand is a Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at McMaster University, is the Director of the Chanchlani Research Centre focused on Health Equity Research, and is a Senior Scientist at the Population Health Research Institute. Dr. Anand received a Doctor of Medicine from McMaster in 1992, Internal Medicine Training at McMaster and a Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada in 1996. After additional clinical training in thrombosis and in vascular medicine at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Dr. Anand works as a vascular medicine specialist at Hamilton Health Sciences and McMaster University. Dr. Anand further received her Master’s in Clinical Epidemiology at McMaster in 1996 and Ph.D. in Health Research Methodology at McMaster in 2002. She holds the Canada Research Chair in Ethnic Diversity and Cardiovascular Disease and the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Ontario/Michael G. DeGroote Chair in Population Health Research. Her present research focuses upon the environmental and genetic determinants of vascular disease in populations of varying ancestral origin, women, and cardiovascular disease. Dr. Anand has been awarded more than 46 million dollars in research funding in the last 10 years including two recent COVID-19 observational studies. Dr. Anand’s work is widely published amongst academic journals with over 415 scientific publications, and in 2019 she was inducted as a Fellow to the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences.

Dr. Castro-Gamboa is a professor and researcher at the Chemistry Institute of São Paulo State University (IQ-UNESP), Brazil. In 2000 he obtained his Ph.D. in natural products chemistry from the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar). Since 2021, he is a founding member of LAMPS (Latin American Metabolic Profiling Society) an organization that endeavors to strengthen the Latin American metabolomic scientific community.  His research interests are discovering bioactive metabolites from Brazilian plants and microorganisms, understanding synergism phenomena in natural complex mixtures, and developing analytical methods, through metabolomics, using NMR and MS towards the conservation and rational use of the Brazilian biodiversity.

Prof. Dr. Hennicke Kamp studied Food Chemistry at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern, and received his Ph.D. in 2004 for the thesis “Investigations on the mechanism of the genotoxic/carcinogenic action of the mycotoxin Ochratoxin A“ (Supervisor: Prof. Gerhard Eisenbrand). 2004, he started his career at BASF SE, Ludwigshafen, Department of Experimental Toxicology and Ecology. During this time, he headed the laboratories for alternative methods and mechanistic toxicology. From 2008 to 2010, he worked as a toxicological consultant for the BASF metabolome solutions. From 2010 to 2021 he was group leader with varying responsibilities. Since June 2021, Hennicke Kamp is managing director of BASF Metabolome Solutions GmbH in Berlin, Germany.

Hennicke Kamp was responsible as project leader for the development of alternative methods as well as metabolomics in toxicology and participated in numerous publicly funded projects and initiatives, such as the MERIT project. He was WP-leader and member of the steering team and executive office of the H2020 project EU-ToxRisk, and scientific advisor to the IMI project eTRANSAFE. Currently, he is WP-co-leader, member of the steering team and executive office of the H2020 project RISKHUNT3R. He is involved in initiatives promoting metabolomics for regulatory use, such as MERIT, MATCHING, OECD CG-ARM and the ecetoc task force for smart studies.

From 2005 to 2009, Hennicke has been Founding Member, Member of the Steering Committee and Head of the Working Group of the European Partnership for Alternative Approaches to Animal Testing (EPAA). He is Member of DGPT and SOT. He holds a lectureship on “Toxikologie und Gefahrstoffrecht (toxicology and hazardous material regulation)” at University Bielefeld since 2007, which was awarded with an honorary professorship in 2018. In 2012, he received the BASF Innovation Award.

*Recipient of 2022 Metabolomics Society President's Award

Rachel Kelly is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Channing Division of Network Medicine (CDNM) at Brigham and Women's Hospital and an Associate Epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School. She completed her PhD at Imperial College London studying the molecular epidemiology of non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, before moving to Boston to undertake her postdoc at the Harvard School of Public Health where she expanded this work to explore the role of the dysregulation of metabolism in carcinogenesis. Rachel has been at the CDNM for six years and focuses on metabolomic epidemiology and the integration of metabolomics with other omic data types in the study of complex chronic diseases. She is particularly interested in the derivation of metabo-endotypes and their role in precision medicine initiatives. Rachel's primary phenotypes of interest are in early life development including neurodevelopment and respiratory health. She is currently leading one of the largest meta-analyses of metabolomic epidemiology data to date via the Consortium of Metabolomics Studies (COMETS) initiative, of which she is an executive committee member. Rachel is also a founding member of the metabolomics society Metabolomic Epidemiology Task Group.

Joelle Sasse Schläpfer is an assistant Professor for Plant-Soil Interactions at the University of Zurich, Institute for Plant and Microbial Biology, since 2019. She combines her expertise in molecular plant biology, plant transporters and immunity, and analytical chemistry to study how plants shape their interactions with microbes. Specifically, she is interested in elucidating root exudation dynamics to discover how plant-beneficial interactions can be promoted in a targeted manner in agriculture.

Justin J.J. van der Hooft is an Assistant Professor in Computational Metabolomics in the Bioinformatics Group at Wageningen University, the Netherlands, and an author of over 80 peer-reviewed articles in the metabolomics field. He obtained his MSc (2007) in Molecular Sciences (Wageningen University, NL) and his PhD (2012) at the Biochemistry and Bioscience groups in Wageningen (Wageningen University & Research, NL). Justin is very fascinated by the ingenuity of nature in creating marvelous chemical structures and their diverse roles in ecosystems that include inter-kingdom communication and this a main driver of his research. After a postdoctoral period in Glasgow, UK, studying both analytical and computational aspects of metabolite structure annotation, he returned to Wageningen in 2017 to work on linking metabolome and genome mining workflows. Since he started his own group in 2020, his team has continued to develop computational metabolomics methodologies to decompose the mass spectral data of complex metabolite mixtures into structure and substructure information. By linking genome and metabolome mining, his team studies plant, food, and microbiome-associated metabolites to find novel bioactive metabolites and infer their source and function. Since 2022, he is also affiliated with the University of Johannesburg, South Africa, as a visiting professor. Interested? Find out more and meet the team here: https://vdhooftcompmet.github.io.