Speakers NWO Biophysics 2024
Keynote Speakers
Tanja Mittag
Full member Structural Biology at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
Dr. Mittag received her PhD from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, where she used NMR spectroscopy to characterize multistep protein-ligand binding mechanisms. She trained as a Postdoctoral Fellow with Julie Forman-Kay at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, where she revealed how a highly dynamic complex with several interconverting interfaces can encode a cell cycle switch. She joined Structural Biology at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in 2010 as an Assistant Member and became Associate Member in 2016 and Full Member in 2021. Her lab uses a spectrum of biophysical, biochemical and cell biological tools to elucidate the mechanism underlying phase separation and its roles in physiological and pathological processes. She was awarded the Michael and Kate Bárány Award for Young Investigators from the Biophysical Society (2021) for her rigorous and foundational contributions to the field of macromolecular condensates and their biological relevance.
Rob Philips
Physical biologist at California Institute of Technology
From the age of 17, Robs life has been driven primarily by science. He colored everything from the books he read to the destinations he chose for travel, which now include having led 15+ field trips in evolutionary biology all around the world. Hiis first loves were physics and mathematics, but as he learned more about the living world, it seemed that many of the most exciting problems in science are found there. As a result, he made the switch from materials physics to biology when he moved from a faculty position at Brown University to Caltech. The NIH Director’s Pioneer Award gave him the chance to become a full-time physical biologist. Much of his biological education and taste in biological questions have come from the privilege of teaching and doing research with a host of fantastic collaborators. Until recently, he served as Physiology Course co-director. Most importantly, his nearly two decades of work on his books “Physical Biology of the Cell”, “Cell Biology by the Numbers” and “The Principles of Biological Shape” have shown him how quantitative thinking can serve as an engine of biological discovery. Stimulated by these experiences, his laboratory has focused on careful predictive modeling in physical biology complemented by precision measurements at both the single-molecule and single-cell level to precisely test those predictions.
Plenary Speakers
Adam Cohen
Professor in the departments of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Physics at Harvard
Adam Cohen is a professor in the departments of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Physics at Harvard. His research focuses on developing tools to study molecules, cells, and organisms, with a focus on imaging membrane potential and other physical forces. He has used voltage imaging to study bioelectric phenomena in samples ranging from single bacteria to behaving mice to human stem cell-derived neurons from patients with neurological disorders. Cohen has received the Sackler Prize in Chemistry, a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship, Blavatnik National Award in Chemistry, the American Chemical Society Pure Chemistry Award, and a Presidential Early Career Award from Barack Obama. As a high school student, he won first place in the U.S. Westinghouse Science Talent Search for constructing an electrochemical scanning tunneling microscope.
Cohen obtained PhD degrees from Stanford in experimental biophysics where he worked with W. E. Moerner (2007) and Cambridge, UK in theoretical physics where he worked with Shaul Mukamel and L. Mahadevan (2003). He was an undergraduate at Harvard where he graduated summa cum laude in 2001.
Cees Dekker
University Professor at TU Delft
Cees Dekker is Distinguished University Professor at TU Delft. Trained as a physicist, he pioneered nanotechnology with many discoveries on carbon nanotubes in the 1990s. Since 2000, he moved to single-molecule biophysics and nanobiology. His current research focuses on (i) nanopores for protein sequencing; (ii) chromosome structure, in particular SMC motor protein; and (iii) building a living synthetic cell from lifeless molecules.
Dekker is an elected member of the KNAW and fellow to the APS and the IOP. Dekker was Director of the prestigious Kavli Institute of Nanoscience Delft, initiated an entirely new Department of Bionanoscience at Delft, and leads large national research consortia. He received an honorary doctorate and many prizes such as the 2001 Agilent Europhysics Prize, 2003 Spinoza award, 2012 ISNSCE Nanoscience Prize, 2017 NanoSmat Prize, and the 2021 Nano Research Award. Dekker was knighted as Knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion, and he received ERC Advanced Grants in 2009, 2015, 2020. Dekker published over 400 peer-reviewed papers that got cited >80.000 times (H-index 122).
Karen Alim
Professor in Biological Physics and Morphogenesis at Technical University of Munich
Prof. Alim (*1981) investigates in the field of biological physics how form and structure arise in life. The aim of her research is to identify the physical principles underlying the development and function of organisms.
Prof. Alim studied physics at the University of Karlsruhe, at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and at the University of Manchester. For her doctorate she performed research at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics of the University of California in Santa Barbara and at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where she received her doctorate in 2010. From 2010-2015 she worked at Harvard University as a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer before joining the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen in 2015 as a Max Planck Research Group Leader. In 2019 Prof. Alim was appointed to the Physics Department of TUM.
Tzviya Zeev-Ben-Mordehai
Associate Professor at Bijvoet Centre for Biomolecular Research of the Utrecht University
Tzviya Zeev-Ben-Mordehai is an associate professor at the Bijvoet Centre for Biomolecular Research of the Utrecht University in the Netherlands. She is an expert in structural cell biology of mammalian gametes. Her group combines biochemistry, biophysics, advanced cryo-EM methods and cross-linking mass spectrometry to unravel the molecular basis of fertilisation
Title: The multi-scale architecture of mammalian sperm flagella and implications for motility
Abstract: Sperm are powered by a microtubule-based molecular machine—the axoneme. It is unclear how axonemal microtubules are ornamented to support motility in diverse fertilization environments. We use cryo-electron microscopy to resolve structures of native axonemal doublet microtubules (DMTs) from bovine sperm. We identify >60 proteins decorating sperm DMTs; at least 15 are sperm associated and 16 are linked to infertility. By comparing DMTs across species and cell types, we define core microtubule inner proteins (MIPs) and identify conserved axonemal microtubule-associated proteins (MAPs) with unique tubulin-binding modes. Our study provides structural foundations for understanding sperm evolution, motility, and dysfunction at a molecular level.
Uulke van der Heide
Medical Physicist and Group Leader at Netherlands Cancer Institute
Uulke van der Heide works as a medical physicist and group leader at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He holds a chair as professor of imaging in radiotherapy at the Leiden University Medical Center. He is chair of the scientific council of the European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology and participates as course director in the course on-line MRI-guided radiotherapy of the ESTRO school
His research group works on MRI-guided radiotherapy for prostate cancer and the development and validation of quantitative MRI for tumor characterization for radiotherapy dose differentiation.
Yasmine Meroz
Associate Professor at Tel Aviv University
Yasmine investigates the physics underlying computational and behavioral processes in plants, such as decision-making, memory phenomena, and collective behavior. Yasmine has a B.Sc. in physics and mathematics, a M.Sc. in physics, and a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Tel Aviv University. She then continued to a postdoc in physics at that Weizmann Institute, studying dynamics of electron glasses, and a second postdoc in applied mathematics at Harvard, where she made a shift and studied memory and decision-making in cellular chemotaxis. This influenced her view on intelligent behavior as a computational process, and became central to her work as an independent researcher studying plants.