Speaker bios: Infectious Disease Genomics Symposium

Prof. Dr. Johannes Krause earned his Ph.D. in Genetics at Leipzig University. He was appointed junior professor for Paleogenetics at the University of Tübingen in 2010, and subsequently full professor for Archaeo- and Paleogenetics at the same university in 2013. In 2014, he became founding director of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, heading the Department of Archaeogenetics. In 2018 he became full professor at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. He is one of the founding directors of the Max Planck-Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean (MHAAM), established in 2017. In 2020 he was reappointed to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and his department moved to Leipzig.

Prof. Dr. Krause focuses on the analysis of ancient DNA to investigate such topics as pathogens from historic and prehistoric epidemics, human genetic history and human evolution. He contributed substantially to deciphering the Neanderthal genome and the shared genetic heritage of Neanderthals and modern humans. In 2010, while working at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, he discovered the first genetic evidence of the Denisovans, an extinct hominin discovered in Siberia. His recent work includes revealing the genetic heritage of ancient Egyptians, reconstructing the first Pleistocene African genomes, uncovering the source of the epidemic plague bacteria that periodically caused historic and prehistoric epidemics in Europe, and clarifying the complex history of Europe’s prehistoric mass migrations.

Prof. Dr. Krause has more than 250 publications in peer-reviewed journals, including Nature, Science, Cell, Nature Reviews Genetics, PNAS, Nature Microbiology, and Nature Communications. He also authored two international bestsellers translated in more than 20 languages.

Mara completed her PhD in Population Biology at UCDavis studying the female side of sexual conflict and arms race dynamics in Drosophila in the lab of David Begun. Continuing to work on this study system, she moved to Tracey Chapman’s lab in London for a postdoc where she generated transgenic flies lacking seminal fluid proteins and studied fitness consequences of these losses. She took a year away from science after this postdoc and then returned to London for another postdoc with Fotis Kafatos and George Christophides at Imperial College London, where she switched to working on Anopheles mosquitoes.

In 2012 she was awarded an MRC Career Development Fellowship and in 2014 she moved to Sanger and to form her group focused on vector population genomics. Over the past five years, she has had a leading role in the Malaria Cell Atlas and the Anopheles 1000 genomes project and she leads the ANOSPP and BIOSCAN projects. Mara is an associate editor at GENETICS and is on the Board of Directors for the International Barcode of Life Consortium. She currently holds grants from MRC, Wellcome, UKRI, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Kenny is Professor of Experimental Medicine, Co-director of the Baillie Gifford Pandemic Science Hub, and a consultant in critical care medicine at the Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh. He graduated from the University of Edinburgh in Physiology in 1999 and Medicine in 2002. As a medical student he founded a high-altitude research charity, Apex, which has supported 7 student-led research expeditions over the past 20 years. After basic training in internal medicine in Glasgow, and in anaesthesia in Edinburgh, he was appointed to the ECAT (Edinburgh Clinical Academic Track) at the University of Edinburgh in 2008, completing a PhD in statistical genetics in 2013 and clinical training in intensive care medicine in 2014.

After a period at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, he returned to Edinburgh to lead a research group based at the Roslin Institute and the Centre for Inflammation Research.  He has advised the World Health Organisation and UK government on multiple outbreaks of infectious disease. He has provided global leadership on research preparedness for pandemics, writing the protocol that was used in China for the very first description of novel coronavirus disease and leading UK-wide research to characterise the illness. He contributed to the design and set-up of the clinical trials that discovered the first four effective treatments for severe COVID-19, and discovered a genetic clue that led directly to one of those treatments - the first example of translation from host genetics to drug treatment in an infectious disease.  He has been recognised with fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Academy of Medical Sciences, has obtained over £100M in research funding, and is among the top 0.1% most highly-cited researchers worldwide across fields.

Simon is a clinical lecturer in intensive care medicine. His PhD, part of an MB-PhD, was at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), National Institutes of Health (NIH) on transcription factor binding and chromatin. Following completion of his degree in medicine, he joined the US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as an affiliate post-doctoral fellow. He undertook the academic foundation programme in Cambridge to continue medical training, joining the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, with Tony Green.  He completed core training in anaesthesia and moved to the University of Edinburgh to undertake specialty training in intensive care medicine as a clinical lecturer. He joined the MRC human genetics unit, working on functional genomic approaches in complex traits such as inflammation. 

Sara graduated from Trinity College Dublin after which she completed a PhD studying determinants of cytoskeletal function in Drosophila at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology, Edinburgh.

Sara joined the Baillie lab in 2014 as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow.

Sara explores the host-pathogen interaction, which is integral to understanding why some people become very sick when they are infected with pathogens. Previously, she has focused on the interaction between influenza A virus and human macrophages. More recently, Sara is focusing on how CRISPR technology can alter gene expression in lung tissue to see how it might change the response of the cells to pathogens.

Katie Dubarry is in the final year of her PhD at the Roslin Institute and Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC). In her project, she focuses on gene expression of sheep’s immune cells, using techniques in molecular biology and bioinformatics.

Her aim is to find genetic variants that could be impacting immune gene expression, and her project involved several components. First, she generated and sequenced RNA from healthy sheep of different breeds. Her sample size was more than 100 animals. “This large number is unusual in sheep research”, she explains. Katie also performed single cell nuclei RNA sequencing, highlighting that, until then, “there was no data on immune cells in sheep at single cell resolution”. Finally, Katie’s work also involved eQTL analysis. She used a subpart of her large dataset (around 60 sheep) and matched genotypes, looking for regions that influenced the expression levels of genes. “eQTL analysis is common in medical research. However, little has been explored for sheep in this area”.

Laura Glendinning graduated from the University of Leeds in 2011 with a degree in medical microbiology. After briefly working in industry, Laura went on to do a masters by research at the University of Edinburgh, followed by a PhD at The Roslin Institute. In her PhD and in her subsequent career, her research has focussed on understanding the microbiota that live inside the guts and respiratory systems of poultry, livestock and pets. In 2023 she started her own research group with a focus on understanding how the gut microbiota of animals can help improve their nutrition, disease resistance and welfare. 

Carolina Mayes is a Research Fellow in Science, Technology & Innovation Studies at the University of Edinburgh. As part of the ERC-funded project “The epidemiological revolution: A history of epidemiological reasoning in the twentieth century” (PI Lukas Engelmann), she is examining the early history of genetic epidemiology in the US and the UK, and the role of population geneticists in the emergence of this field. Her previous research addressed the operationalization of public health genomics in US-based precision medicine initiatives, and the incorporation of participatory frameworks in biomedical research projects. She received her PhD in Sociology and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego.

Beatriz Orosa's scientific career started with a PhD at the University of Barcelona (Spain), where she studied the defence of Arabidopsis plants to fungal pathogens and acquired invaluable knowledge on plant pathogen interactions. During my PhD, she also had the opportunity to work on human autoimmunity at the Institute of Health Research (Santiago de Compostela, Spain), focusing on deciphering the molecular signals that induce autoimmunity. After her PhD, she moved to Prof Ari Sadanandom’s group (Durham University) to study how plants employ protein posttranslational modifications (PTMs) for fast and accurate regulation of stress responses. My four years in Durham led to a series of exciting discoveries; she revealed how PTMs play a key role in perceiving and responding to environmental stress, which has direct relevance to agritech approaches to boost the ability of crops to cope with a changing environment.

Beatriz' increasing interest in PTMs led me to the University of Edinburgh to Prof Steven Spoel’s group, where she developed new proteomic tools to investigate for the first time how linkage-specific ubiquitin signalling orchestrates plant immunity.

James completed his PhD in bioinformatics and statistical genetics in 2007 from the University of Edinburgh, and following positions at the European Bioinformatics Institute and University College Dublin returned to Edinburgh to work first at the MRC Human genetics unit before joining the Roslin in 2013. James’s group is focused on understanding mammalian gene regulation, genome evolution and human and animal disease genetics.

Dr. Tim Regan is an immunologist specialising in invertebrate aquaculture species. After earning a PhD on innate immune regulation in the human gastrointestinal tract, Dr. Regan's career has spanned bioinformatics, systems biology, and CRISPR technology, culminating in a 2023 Career Track Fellowship at the Roslin Institute to lead research on aquaculture species immunology. His lab is currently exploring the impact of host genetics and environmental stressors on blue mussel immunology.

Clark is an ECAT Clinical Lecturer in Infectious Diseases and Medical Microbiology, working in the University of Edinburgh Centre for Inflammation Research (Institute for Regeneration and Repair) and the Regional Infectious Diseases Unit (NHS Lothian). His primary research interest is therapeutic augmentation of macrophage microbicidal responses against aerobic gram-positive cocci (streptococci, staphylococci, enterococci) as a host-directed therapy approach for infectious disease.