Invited speakers
Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Coimbra.
Prof. Dr. Amália Jurado is Professor of Biochemistry in the Department of Life Sciences of the University of Coimbra, Portugal, being responsible for teaching undergraduate courses and the Master's degree courses in Biochemistry “Functional Lipidomics” and “Biophysical and Biochemical Toxicology”. She is Principal Investigator in the group of Vectors and Gene Therapy at the Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology (CNC), area of New Preventive and Therapeutic Strategies, and her field of research is centered on lipidomics and membrane biophysics. Guided by the main objective of envisaging the importance of lipids and membrane structural properties in health and disease conditions, her research activity has covered a wide range of topics, including membrane toxicity, diet effects on membrane structure remodeling, development of non-viral systems for nucleic acid delivery and cancer-targeted gene therapies.
Prof. Dr. Amália Jurado
Her most recent interests focus on the development of a lipid membrane anti‐cancer therapy, based on the delivery of small interference RNAs targeting key-enzymes of lipid metabolism, in order to overcome chemoresistance and render cells of glioblastoma more susceptible to apoptotic stimuli. She has published more than 60 scientific papers in international peer-reviewed journals, including 7 book chapters, and edited the book “A Toxicological/Pharmacological Approach to the Chemico-Biological Interactions at the Membrane Level”, Research Signpost, Transworld Research Network, ISBN 978-81-308-0494-1, 2013. She was a member of the Organizing Committee of the International Course on Toxicology “Survival or Death as a Matter of Fat”, 2010, Coimbra, Portugal. Having established joint collaborations with several national and international researchers, namely in the Universities of Aveiro and Porto, in Portugal, Salamanca, in Spain, Warwick, in U.K., Oslo, in Norway, and Mainz, in Germany, her long-term goal is to generate a core team at CNC devoted to advancing the application of lipidomics in the areas of human health and disease and to implementing translational research projects in collaboration with different national and international Institutions.
Prof. Dr. Christian Salesse
Professor at the Université Laval.
Prof. Dr. Christian Salesse was graduated in biophysics from the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (UQTR) (Québec, Canada) under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Roger M. Leblanc. He was then a postdoctoral fellow under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Helmut Ringsdorf at Mainz Universität (Mainz, Germany). He then held a position of professor at UQTR for 12 years until he moved to the Université Laval in Québec city where he is the head of his research unit. He has been invited professor at different universities including at the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon until the end of 2017. He has been associate editor of journals, he has organized many national and international meetings, and acted as a member of different national and international agencies to evaluate research grant applications. He is holding research grants from the major agencies in Canada for more than 25 years. He is currently supervising 2 MSc and 5 PhD students, one postdoctoral fellow and one research assistant.
Moreover, 21 graduate students have previously obtained a MSc and 15 students a PhD under his supervision. In addition, he also previously supervised the work of 7 postdoctoral fellows and 3 research professionals. He published more than 100 articles. Furthermore, he presented 121 invited talks at different meetings and university departments in several countries, 201 talks or posters presentations at international meetings and 411 talks or posters presentations at national or provincial meetings in total since the beginning of his career. His research activities are aiming to determine the structure and understand the membrane binding of a large number of proteins involved in visual phototransduction and visual cycle as well as to clarify why some of the mutants of these proteins lead to photoreceptor degeneration. His group has developed a strong expertise in the cloning, expression, purification and characterization of proteins as well as on the use of lipid monolayers to analyze the extent of membrane binding of these proteins and their orientation.
Head of the Biomembranes & Nanomedicine unit at iMM Lisboa.
Dr. Nuno C. Santos was born in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1972. He graduated in Biochemistry from the Faculty of Science, University of Lisbon, in 1995, and received his PhD in Theoretical and Experimental Biochemistry in 1999 from the same University, although all the experimental work was conducted at Instituto Superior Técnico (Technical University of Lisbon) and University of California (Santa Barbara). Currently, he is Associate Professor with Habilitation of the Faculty of Medicine, University of Lisbon, and Head of the Biomembranes & Nanomedicine Unit at the Institute of Molecular Medicine (iMM Lisboa). Among other distinctions, his research work was awarded with the Gulbenkian Prize for young researchers (2001), Dr. José Luis Champalimaud Prize – Basic Research (2004) and Dr. José Luis Champalimaud Prize – Applied Research and Technology (2005). He is (co)author of 116 articles in per-reviewed international journals, which received more than 3300 citations (h-index 29, publishing since 1996), presenting a Web of Knowledge impact factor sum of 576.0. In addition to these publications, he (co)authored 10 articles in Portuguese scientific journals, 12 book chapters (mostly edited outside Portugal, in English) and 1 international patent. Among different National and European research projects, he was the coordinator of a consortium funded by the 7th Framework Programme of the European Union (FP7), including 10 different research groups from Europe and Brazil. He is the President of the Portuguese Biophysical Society (SPBf) since 2015.
Dr. Juan Giner-Casares
Ramón y Cajal at the University of Cordoba.
Dr. Juan Giner-Casares graduated in Chemistry in 2005 at the University of Córdoba (Spain) with focus in Physical and Analytical Chemistry. From 2006 until 2009, he did his Ph. D. at the group of Prof. Dr. Luis Camacho in the Department of Physical Chemistry on the same University, mainly studying Langmuir monolayers under experimental and computational approaches. From 2009 to 2013, he worked as a Alexander von Humboldt fellow in the Department of Interfaces of the Max Planck Institute for Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam, Germany. He joined the group of Prof. Dr. H. Möhwald and Prof. Dr. G. Brezesinski on Langmuir monolayers of exotic molecules and bio-related compounds, as well as intensively working on synchrotron based radiation techniques at DESY (Hamburg, Germany). From early 2013 to spring of 2016, he
worked in the BioNanoPlasmonics Lab led by Prof. Dr. Luis Liz-Marzán at CIC biomaGUNE in Donostia/San Sebastián, Spain, aimin gat plasmonic functional materials for biomedicine. Since 2016, Juan is working under a tenure track position (Ramón y Cajal) again the Department of Physical Chemistry in the University of Córdoba (Spain).
FCT Researcher at the University of Lisbon.
Dr. Fábio Fernandes received a PhD in Chemistry at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) in 2007. As a postdoc he worked with Prof. Erwin Neher at the Max-Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, studying FRET sensors for synaptic protein activity. From 2010-2016 he joined the Centro de Química-Física Molecular (CQFM) of IST, where his work focused on the characterization of membrane organization and biophysical properties at both cellular and model membrane levels. In 2016 he joined the research unit on Applied Molecular Biosciences (UCIBIO), at Faculdade de Ciência e Tecnologia (University of Lisbon) as an Auxiliary Researcher and in 2017 became a FCT Researcher at IST. He is currently a member of both CQFM (IST) and UCIBIO, and his research is centered on the development and application of advanced fluorescence microscopy and spectroscopy techniques to characterize molecular interactions and nanoscale heterogeneities in biomembranes.
