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invited speakers

Dr. David Wishart (PhD Yale, 1991) is a Professor in the Departments of Biological Sciences and Computing Science at the University of Alberta. He also holds adjunct appointments with the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences and with the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine.  He has been with the University of Alberta since 1995. Dr. Wishart’s research interests are very wide ranging, covering nanotechnology, molecular biology, analytical chemistry, nutritional science and bioinformatics. For the past 12 years, Dr. Wishart has led the “Human Metabolome Project” (HMP), a multi-university, multi-investigator project that is cataloguing all of the known metabolites in human tissues and biofluids. Using advanced methods in NMR spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, multi-dimensional chromatography and machine learning Dr. Wishart and his colleagues have identified or found evidence for more than 110,000 metabolites in the human body. This information has been archived on a freely accessible web-resource called the Human Metabolome Database (HMDB). More recently, Dr. Wishart’s efforts have focused on characterizing the content of various foods and food products, including milk and dairy products, eggs, meats, herbs, spices, fruits and vegetables. This information is now available in a resource called FooDB. Over the course of his career Dr. Wishart has published more than 380 research papers in high profile journals on a wide variety of subject areas. He currently directs The Metabolomics Innovation Centre (TMIC), Canada’s national metabolomics laboratory.  

Augustin Scalbert is head of the Biomarkers Group at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyons, France (www.iarc.fr). His current research focusses on the development and implementation of metabolomic approaches in cancer epidemiology. Main objectives of his group are to discover novel biomarkers of exposure for dietary, environmental, and other lifestyle factors, and to identify risk factors for cancer and intermediate end-points through biomarker approaches. Robust methodologies developed in his lab for both targeted and untargeted metabolomic analyses have been applied in large multicentric epidemiological studies such as the European Prospective Investigation on Cancer and nutrition (EPIC) study and other EU-funded projects (EXPOsOMICS, TRANSCAN MetaboCCC). He developed the Exposome-Explorer database on biomarkers of exposure to disease risk factors (http://exposome-explorer.iarc.fr/). Before arriving at IARC in 2010, he conducted research at the National Institute of Agriculture Research (INRA) on the structure of lignins and tannins in lignocellulosic materials (INRA Grignon) and on the bioavailability and functions of dietary polyphenols in human nutrition (INRA Clermont-Ferrand). He has been identified as a Highly Cited Researcher (Clarivate Analytics).

Jasper Engel obtained a PhD in Chemometrics from the Radboud University Nijmegen (Netherlands). He has held positions as experimental officer in biostatistics at the NERC metabolomics facility, University of Birmingham and as a post-doc in chemometrics for personalized health care at Radboud University. Since November 2017 he is a researcher at Biometris at Wageningen University & Research.

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Wishart
Scalbert
Engel
Holmes
Rezzi
Westerhuis
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