Charna Dibner completed her PhD in Medical Sciences in 2002 under the supervision of Professor Dale Frank in the Department of Biochemistry at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, headed by Nobel Laureate Professor Avram Hershko. She completed her postdoctoral studies in the Department of Molecular Biology at University of Geneva, with Professor Ueli Schibler, working on the mechanisms of transcriptional and temperature compensation of the mammalian circadian clocks. In 2009, she was appointed as a Group Leader of the Laboratory of Circadian Endocrinology in the Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Nutrition, at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Geneva, and in February 2021 Charna was appointed as Associate Professor at the Faculty of Medicine. Her work centers upon the implication of circadian oscillators in regulation of metabolic processes in mammals. In particular, she is interested in unraveling the roles of the peripheral clocks in human metabolic diseases and cancer. Charna’s work has been awarded with a number of prestigious Swiss prizes including Roche Research Foundation prize, Takeda prize for diabetes research, the awards by French Swiss Foundation of Diabetes Research, and by Leenaards prize of Lemanic (French Swiss) area 2019.

The research of Charna Dibner in the spotlight: How Circadian clock dysfunction can lead to lipid profile disruption
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Takeshi Harayama is a group leader at the Institut de Pharmacologie Moléculaire et Cellulaire (IPMC). He received his PhD in 2011 from the University of Tokyo, under the supervision of Takao Shimizu. After a postdoc in the same group, he moved to the University of Geneva in the group of Howard Riezman as a postdoc in 2015. He then started his group at the IPMC in 2020. His group combines enzymology, genetics, and lipidomics to understand the metabolic regulation of various fatty acids found in membrane lipids, and to analyze how lipid acyl-chains regulate cellular functions via their effects on membrane biophysical properties and membrane-associated protein functions.

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Prof. Dominique Langin, DVM PhD, is director of the Institute of Metabolic and Cardiovascular Diseases (I2MC, Inserm University of Toulouse, France). Following doctoral studies in France, he did a post-doctoral internship at the University of Lund in Sweden and, back to France, embarked on a scientific career at CNRS and Inserm. He now holds a professor position at the University Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier and at the University Hospital of Toulouse. He has coordinated several national and European research projects and obtained a Synergy grant from the European Research Council (ERC) in 2020. He received the Friedrich Wassermann Life Time Achievement Award from the European Association for the Study of Obesity in 2011 and the Labbé Prize from the Academy of Sciences in 2019. In 2014 and 2021, he was appointed senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He has devoted his scientific career to the study of the biology of adipose tissue, obesity and diabetes, with a focus on fatty acid metabolism. He has contributed to about 250 original and 80 review articles (h-index 75 WoS).

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Dr. Soazig LE LAY is an Inserm researcher (Inserm UMR1087, l’Institut du Thorax/ITX, Team cardiometabolic diseases) that coordinates an independent research group focused on “extracellular vesicles/EVs in inter-organ communication in cardiometabolic diseases” located in Angers.

After a PhD dedicated to the role of SREBP transcription factors in adipocytes acknowledged by the GERLI PhD price 2004 (PhD supervisor : Dr I Dugail), she acquired a solid background in membrane trafficking and lipid microdomains during her post-doc in Kai Simons’ Lab (2003-2006, Marie-Curie fellow FP6, Dresden – Germany). Recruited as an Inserm researcher in P.Ferré’s lab (2006-2012, Paris), she first dedicated her research to the role of caveolins/caveolae proteins in adipose tissue metabolism (> 20 publications referenced in PubMed on this topic).

Since 2012, she focuses on adipose tissue derived-EVs in order delineate their role and participation in the development of metabolic complications related to obesity. She develops original and innovative approaches using specific proteins as EV tracers to better characterize EVs in term of proteins and lipid material content. Her research theme takes part of the emerging field of EVs, which deserves better characterization in the perspective to use them as disease biomarkers or therapeutic devices to prevent or limit the development of obesity associated metabolic complications.

She is a member of different research evaluation committees and is a board member of scientific organizations (AFERO/French society for research on obesity, Biogenouest). She was the former FSEV (national french society of EVs, 2018-2021). She has around 60 items referenced in PubMed, with some high-impact publications (Diabetes, Autophagy, JCB, JEV etc…). She is funded by ANR grants, participated in European FP7-lipidomicNet network and currently coordinates national and regional grants.

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Valerie is Professor of lipid biochemistry at the University of Cardiff (Division of Infection and ImmunitySchool of Medicine). She is a lipid biochemist whose research is focused on using mass spectrometry for discovery and characterization of new lipid mediators of inflammation.  For the last 15 yrs she has studied how a subset of oxidized phospholipids generated by circulating vascular cells regulate inflammation, wound healing and thrombosis.  These are made by enzymes in platelets, neutrophils, monocytes and eosinophils and appear to be an essential part of the healthy innate immune system, however when inappropriately generated in the blood stream or in excess, they contribute directly to vascular inflammation. Her current studies are focused on their role in cardiovascular disease and arthritis.  Her laboratory is also studying the composition of the SARS-CoV2 envelope and how it responds to inflammation. 

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Toni Petan received his PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, working on phospholipase A₂ protein engineering and membrane enzymology. Following his postdoc studies in cancer cell biology at Harvard Medical School, he returned to Slovenia and formed a research group at Jožef Stefan Institute, fusing his love for lipids with cancer research. His work is now focused on a fascinating, long-neglected organelle, the lipid droplet, and in particular its roles in fatty acid trafficking and signalling. Some of the research topics his group is currently investigating are 1) the roles of lipid droplets in the production of inflammatory lipid mediators, 2) the interplay between lipid droplets and autophagy and 3) lipid droplets as managers of membrane homeostasis and ferroptosis. He is also an associate professor at Jožef Stefan International Postgraduate School and enjoys working with students.

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Catherine Postic is a research group leader at the Institut Cochin, INSERM U1016, Université de Paris Cité. Catherine Postic earned her PhD at the University Paris Diderot. She completed post-doctoral work at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN USA. During this post-doctoral fellowship she was trained in the field of molecular biology and achieved the making of a conditional locus for glucokinase, a key gene of glucose metabolism. With this approach she explored the cell-specific function of glucokinase in liver and pancreatic ß-cells and demonstrated the importance of this enzyme in glucose sensing. For the past 20 years she has been conducting research on the regulation of carbohydrate and fatty acid metabolism in liver under physiological and pathophysiological conditions (Type 2 diabetes; NAFLD/NASH), focusing on the role of the transcription factor ChREBP. Her group published several comprehensive reviews on this topic, summarizing years of research on ChREBP (Abdul-Wahed et al. Cell Metab. 2017; Ortega-Prieto et al. Front Genet. 2019). She has been an adviser for French government organization in the field of nutrition, metabolism, obesity and diabetes (INSERM) and a member of several national and international scientific committees for research on metabolic diseases. She is part of the Editorial Board of several scientific journals in the field of diabetes and metabolism including Diabetologia, Cell Reports, Journal of Clinical Investigation and Gut.

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Michel Record, PhDSc, is Emeritus Research Director at INSERM (National Institute for Health and Medical Research) and  works  at the Cancer Research Center of Toulouse (CRCT). He started his scientific carreer investigating the metabolism  of ether-linked phospholipids in tumor cells in the INSERM unit headed by Prof.H Chap in Purpan Hospital in Toulouse, and made his post-doctorate in this domain at the laboratory of Prof Fred  Snyder at Oak-Ridge Associated University (USA). Then he moved to investigate cell communication involving phospholipase-derived lipid mediators, specifically phospholipase D. Following a sabbatical at the Basel Institute of Immunology he focused his research on extracellular vesicles as an intercellular communication process vehiculating lipid mediators, that he fully developped in joining the team headed by Marc Poirot and Sandrine Silvente-Poirot who discovered and developped the cholesterol-derived anti-tumor compound Dendrogenin A.

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Christiane Berger-Schaffitzel is Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Bristol. Christiane is a leading expert in electron cryo-microscopy, who has worked at ETH Zürich and EMBL Grenoble before moving to Bristol in 2016. In Bristol, Christiane was key to establish the GW4 facility for high-resolution cryo-EM, funded by the Wellcome Trust. During the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020 Christiane joined the Bristol Uncover group to produce SARS-CoV-2 spike glycoprotein. When solving the spike structure by cryo-EM, Christiane’s team discovered a druggable pocket in the spike receptor-binding domain. The pocket is occupied by linoleic acid which stabilises a non-infectious conformation of spike and interferes with viral replication. Importantly, this pocket is conserved in all highly pathogenic beta-coronaviruses including SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern. Christiane is co-founder of Halo Therapeutics Ltd which further develops this finding to an antiviral nasal spray that is readied for clinical phase I/IIa trials.

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Professor Berger-Schaffitzel’s team made the ground-breaking discovery of a druggable pocket in the SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein that could be used to stop the virus. See also   professor-christiane-berger-schaffitzel-named-one-of-the-most-influential-women

Professor Stéphane Schneider heads the Nutritional Support Unit in the Gastroenterology and Nutrition Department of Archet University Hospital in Nice (France). He is also head of the Nice University Hospital’s food-nutrition liaison committee. Dr. Schneider is vice-president of the French-Speaking Society for Clinical Nutrition and Metabolism (SFNCM), and treasurer of the European Society for Clinical Nutrition and Metabolism (ESPEN). Three years after receiving his M.D. in Gastroenterology from the University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis, he became an assistant Professor and later a full Professor of Nutrition. He is also certified by the European Board of Gastroenterology and Hepatology. He obtained a Master of Science from the University of Paris VII, and a Ph.D. in nutrition from Aix-Marseille University, as well as a CME Diploma from Harvard Medical School. His main research interests are intestinal failure and the effects of aging and chronic diseases on nutritional status and dysbiosis. He has published 216 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals, with an h index of 51.

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François Trottein received his PhD degree in 1992 from the University of Lille. Between 1986 and 1994, he studied helminth and protozoan parasites with the aim to improve vaccine efficacy (1986-1992) and to better understand mechanisms leading to drug resistance (1992-1994). He did a post-doc between 1992 and 1994 at the Walter and ELIZA Hall Institute, Royal Melbourne Hospital. In 1995, he obtained a tenure position at CNRS and he started to develop his own group in France, at the Institut Pasteur de Lille. Since 1995, François Trottein has been working on host/pathogen (parasites, bacteria, viruses) interactions; the objectives being to better understand escape mechanisms to immune responses and to exploit the innate immune system for designing novel therapeutic approaches. He has made major contribution in the field of innate immunity and lipids, either eicosanoids and antigenic lipids. For the later, he described the role (either beneficial or deleterious) of Natural Killer T cells, a population of lipid-reactive T cells, during infection. Since 2010, his group is developing research projects on respiratory infections and more precisely on influenza A virus (flu), SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) and Streptococcus pneumoniae, the leading cause of bacterial pneumonia in humans. The research group has an interest in gut microbiota. The group’s results have given it internationally acknowledged stature in this field. The group has recently patented several therapeutic applications in influenza and pneumococcal infections, including compounds produced by the gut microbiota such as short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs). These metabolites attenuate secondary disease outcomes during influenza – including bacterial superinfection. Pharmacological approaches, prebiotics, and next-generation probiotics are being developed. These notably include bacterial strains selected for their strong anti-inflammatory potential and their ability to produce SCFAs in symbiosis with specific fibres.

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