Thierry Bogaert is a Belgian scientist and businessman. He founded the Belgian biotech company Devgen in 1997 and was its managing director and CEO from 1997 onwards, until he sold the Devgen to Syngenta in 2012 for 400m EUR. During this time he led the science and business strategy of the company and took Devgen public on Euronext in 2005. Building on genetics as its core scientific strength, He developed Devgen into a leading provider of new crop protection technologies to the Agro industry and an Asian seed company that fundamentally redesigned Hybrid Rice delivering a pipeline of high yielding products for Indian and South East Asian markets. Prior to its sale to Syngenta, Devgen seeds were produced on >8000 ha and sold in ~20,000 retail shops across India, Indonesia and Philippines.
He graduated from the University of Ghent (Ghent, Belgium) and received an MSc degree form the University of Manitoba (Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada). He obtained a PhD at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Medical Research Council, (Cambridge, United Kingdom).
As an academic, he held faculty positions at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology of the Medical Research Council (MRC-LMB) in Cambridge and the Medical Faculty of the University of Ghent. His research interest was about Drosophila melanogaster integrins [1] [2] and a Caenorhabditis elegans UNC gene (uncoordinated phenotype). [3]
In 1997, he founded DevGen and became its chief executive officer.
Sydney Brenner was a South African biologist. In 2002, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with H. Robert Horvitz and Sir John E. Sulston. Brenner made significant contributions to work on the genetic code, and other areas of molecular biology while working in the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. He established the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans as a model organism for the investigation of developmental biology, and founded the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, California, United States.
Howard Robert Horvitz is an American biologist best known for his research on the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, together with Sydney Brenner and John E. Sulston, whose "seminal discoveries concerning the genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death" were "important for medical research and have shed new light on the pathogenesis of many diseases".
Marc, Baron Van Montagu is a Belgian molecular biologist. He was full professor and director of the Laboratory of Genetics at the faculty of Sciences at Ghent University (Belgium) and scientific director of the Genetics Department of the Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology (VIB). Together with Jozef Schell he founded the biotech company Plant Genetic Systems Inc. (Belgium) in 1982, of which he was Scientific Director and member of the board of Directors. Van Montagu was also involved in founding the biotech company CropDesign, of which he was a board member from 1998 to 2004. He is president of the Public Research and Regulation Initiative (PRRI).
Frans Van Roy is a Belgian molecular biologist and professor at the University of Ghent. He is head of the VIB Department for Molecular Biomedical Research, UGent. His research interest is on the molecular mechanisms underlying the pathology and the cure of cancer and inflammation-related disorders.
Joël Vandekerckhove is a Belgian molecular biologist and professor at the University of Ghent. He is head of the VIB Department of Medical Protein Research, UGent.
Most animal testing involves invertebrates, especially Drosophila melanogaster, a fruit fly, and Caenorhabditis elegans, a nematode. These animals offer scientists many advantages over vertebrates, including their short life cycle, simple anatomy and the ease with which large numbers of individuals may be studied. Invertebrates are often cost-effective, as thousands of flies or nematodes can be housed in a single room.
Gerald Mayer Rubin is an American biologist, notable for pioneering the use of transposable P elements in genetics, and for leading the public project to sequence the Drosophila melanogaster genome. Related to his genomics work, Rubin's lab is notable for development of genetic and genomics tools and studies of signal transduction and gene regulation. Rubin also serves as a vice president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and executive director of the Janelia Research Campus.
Integrin, beta 4 (ITGB4) also known as CD104, is a human gene.
Utpal Banerjee is a Distinguished Professor of the Department of Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology at UCLA. He obtained his Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry from St. Stephen's College, Delhi University, India and obtained his Master of Science degree in Physical Chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India. In 1984, he obtained a PhD in Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology where he was also a Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Seymour Benzer from 1984-1988.
Keith Burridge is a British researcher and Kenan distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research on focal adhesions includes the discovery of many adhesion proteins including vinculin, talin and paxillin, and ranks him in top 1% of the most cited scientist in the field of molecular biology and genetics. Burridge has published more than 200 peer reviewed articles.
Maria Leptin is a German developmental biologist and immunologist, and the current President of the European Research Council. She was the Director of the European Molecular Biology Organization from 2010 to 2021.
Ruth Lehmann is a developmental and cell biologist. She is the Director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, succeeding David Page. She previously was affiliated with the New York University School of Medicine, where she was the Director of the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine, the Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Professor of Cell Biology, and the Chair of the Department of Cell Biology. Her research focuses on germ cells and embryogenesis.
Kodimangalam S. Ravichandran is a U.S. immunologist and a leading researcher in the area of how we remove billions of dying cells in the body on a daily basis, and how such dead cell removal impacts many human inflammatory diseases. Dr. Kodi Ravichandran obtained his degree in Veterinary Medicine from Madras Veterinary College in 1987. During the last two years of Veterinary School, he became interested in the molecular biology of cellular processes, and how specific drugs function at a molecular level. This led to his pursuing a PhD in Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in the United States. For his doctoral work, he addressed how temporal gene expression and antibody specificities contribute toward the repertoire of B lymphocytes in various lymphoid organs in mice. Dr. Ravichandran then moved to at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute to pursue his post-doctoral research under the guidance of Dr. Steven Burakoff. Here, he focused on intracellular signaling in T cells, and addressed the role of adapter proteins, and published multiple high impact publications (1992-1996). He was also an instructor at Harvard Medical School.
Karen Oegema is a molecular cell biologist at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and a professor of cellular and molecular medicine at the University of California, San Diego. She is best known for her research with Caenorhabditis elegans, which her lab uses as a model system in their mission to dissect the molecular mechanics of cytokinesis. She was given the Women in Cell Biology Mid-Career Award for Excellence in Research in 2017, as well as the Women in Cell Biology Junior Award for Excellence in Research in 2006.
Maneesha S. Inamdar is an Indian developmental biologist specialising in stem cell research. She is a Professor and Chair at the Molecular Biology and Genetics Unit of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR). She is an elected fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Indian National Science Academy and a J C Bose National Fellow.
Duojia Pan is a Chinese-American developmental biologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, where he is Fouad A. and Val Imm Bashour Distinguished Professor of Physiology, Chairman of the Department of Physiology, and Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). His research is focused on molecular mechanisms of growth control and tissue homeostasis and their implications in human disease.
Barry James Thompson is an Australian and British developmental biologist and cancer biologist. He is a professor of the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the Australian National University in Canberra. Thompson is known for identifying genes, proteins and mechanisms involved in epithelial polarity, morphogenesis and cell signaling via the Wnt and Hippo signaling pathways, which have key roles in human cancer.
Bart Deplancke is a Belgian bio-engineer and researcher. He is a full professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, where he leads the laboratory of systems biology and genetics.
Pierre Gönczy is a Swiss and Italian cell and developmental biologist. His research focuses on centriole biology and asymmetric cell division. He is currently professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), where he directs the Laboratory of Cell and Developmental Biology.
Iva Susan Greenwald is an American biologist who is Professor of Cell and Molecular Biology at Columbia University. She studies cell-cell interactions and cell fate specification in C. elegans. She is particularly interested in LIN-12/Notch proteins, which is the receptor of one of the major signalling systems that determines the fate of cells.