Monika Poboży

Director of the Department of International Cooperation at the Ministry of Education and Science. Doctor of Humanities in the field of political sciences (2008), political scientist (graduate of the Institute of Political Sciences, Faculty of Journalism and Political Sciences of the University of Warsaw), lawyer (graduate of the Faculty of Law and Administration of the University of Warsaw); author and editor of a number of publications on the law and political system of the European Union as well as the principles of functioning of EU institutions and policies; fellowship holder of the Free University in Brussels (2003), the University of Konstanz (2005) and the University of Mainz (2008), in 2016-2017 a member of the Polish Accreditation Committee; in the years 2012-2015 deputy director of the Institute of European Studies of the University of Warsaw for didactics and quality of education; in 2011-2018, assistant professor at the Faculty of Journalism and Political Science at the University of Warsaw; in 2017-2020, deputy director of the President’s Office at the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection.

Marta Miączyńska

Marta Miączyńska is a molecular cell biologist, trained at the University of Vienna, EMBL Heidelberg and at the Max Planck Institute for Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden. Currently she is the Director and the head of the Laboratory of Cell Biology at the International Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology in Warsaw. Member of EMBO, EMBO Council, Polish Academy of Sciences and Academia Europaea. The Miączyńska group studies the molecular mechanisms integrating membrane transport, in particular endocytosis, with intracellular signaling. Their current research reveals aberrations in intracellular transport in cancer cells that can serve to design new therapies in oncology.

Edith Heard, FRS

EMBL Director General. Edith Heard’s group is studying epigenetic mechanisms in development and disease. The Heard group focuses on epigenetic processes such as X-chromosome inactivation, in order to learn more about the basic principles of gene regulation, and to explore the roles of chromatin modifications, chromosome organisation and non-coding RNAs on gene expression in development and disease, in particular diseases with sex bias where X-chromosome gene activity can play a key role.

Monika Lachner

Head of Internal Scientific Training and Dean of Graduate Studies at EMBL.

Cath Brooksbank

Jan Kosinski

Jan is a structural biologist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and Centre for Structural Systems Biology (CSSB) in Hamburg. He studied at the University of Warsaw and did his Ph.D. at the International Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IIMCB) in Warsaw. Then he moved for a postdoc abroad, first in Italy at the Sapienza University of Rome and then in Germany at EMBL Heidelberg. In September 2017, he started his own research group at EMBL and CSSB in Hamburg. The group characterizes large complexes using structural modeling and studies viral infection cycles using cellular structural biology and microscopy techniques. He is a co-chair of the Infection Biology Transversal Theme at EMBL.

Maria Zimmermann-Kogadeeva

Maria is a group leader in Genome Biology Unit at EMBL Heidelberg since 2021, investigating microbial ecosystems with a combination of computational and experimental approaches. Maria has interdisciplinary background in computer science and systems biology. Her PhD project at ETH Zurich included developing machine learning-based methods for metabolic flux analysis and multiomics integration approaches to investigate metabolic adaptation in pathogenic bacteria. For postdoctoral training, Maria moved to the human microbiome field to investigate the molecular mechanisms of host-microbiome interactions in vivo. Her research group combines computational modelling and multi-omics data integration to investigate how microbes adapt to their surroundings, and how metabolic adaptations of individual bacteria shape the functional outcome of microbial communities and their interactions with the environment.

Rainer Pepperkok

Rainer is the Director of Scientific Core Facilities and Scientific Services, Head of the Advanced Light Microscopy Facility, a Team Leader and Senior Scientist at EMBL. Rainer was a founder and is currently the scientific coordinator of the European Light Microscopy Initiative (ELMI). He is also the EMBL representative for the EMBL-BioImaging node; and participates in the leadership of the EMBL Imaging Centre.

Following a degree in Physics at the University of Heidelberg, Rainer carried out his PhD work at EMBL under the supervision of Wilhelm Ansorge. He received his PhD in Cell Biology at the University of Kaiserslautern in 1992. During postdoctoral work at the University of Geneva, Rainer made contributions to the understanding of vesicular coat proteins in membrane trafficking. He was among the first to use GFP technology to image membrane traffic in living cells. Rainer later headed the light microscopy laboratory at the UK’s Imperial Cancer Research Fund; now part of Cancer Research UK. He returned to EMBL Heidelberg in 1998 as Head of the Advanced Light Microscopy Facility and a team leader in the Cell Biology and Biophysics Unit. He became a Senior Scientist in 2012 and since 2014 has headed EMBL’s Core Facilities. Since 2019 Rainer is the Director of Scientific Core Facilities and Scientific Services.

Helen Parkinson

Helen leads the Knowledge Management Section of EMBL-EBI having previously led the Molecular Archival Resources. Her Samples, Phenotypes and Ontologies Team delivers databases, analyses, data integration tools and ontologies for biomedicine. She moved to bioinformatics and computational biology while performing positional cloning for primary pulmonary hypertension, a rare genetic disease. Helen’s passion is semantic data integration and providing users with useful data. Her team participates extensively in international collaborations ranging from data analysis and data generation projects to data integration projects such EOSCLife, Health Data Research UK, Intervene, the Patient Derived Cancer Models Finder, the GWAS and PGS Catalogs and others.
Prior to joining EMBL-EBI in 2000, Helen was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Leicester, where she worked on the genetic basis of the genetic disease Primary Pulmonary Hypertension, Hypophosphatasia and synteny at human chromosomes 7 and 12. Her PhD thesis examined the temperature compensation of circadian rhythms in Drosophila.

Leszek Kaczmarek

Leszek Kaczmarek, full member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, member of European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and Academia Europaea is a professor and head of the Laboratory of Neurobiology and the president of the at BRAINCITY: Center of Excellence for Neural Plasticity and Brain Disorders; Nencki EMBL partnership at the Nencki Institute, Warsaw; Poland. His major research achievements include: (i) discovery of c-Myc protein role in regulation of the cell cycle; (ii) discovery of the learning-related gene (c-fos) expression in the mammalian brain; (iii) revealing apoptotic component of excitotoxicity in the adult brain; (iv) discovery of specific role of cyclin D2 in the adult brain neurogenesis; (v) discovery of involvement of matrix metalloproteinases in synaptic plasticity, learning and memory, epileptogenesis, alcohol addiction and schizophrenia; (vi) defining the role of the central amygdala in appetitive learning and memory. He has published over 250 research papers, cited over 12 000 times.
L. Kaczmarek was invited as a lecturer to more than 100 international and national meetings and over 300 times to talk on research seminars, workshops, etc.; he promoted over 40 PhDs and was PI or coordinator on over 50 domestic and international grants. He was postdoc at the Temple University (Philadelphia, USA), as well as visiting professor at the: University of Catania (Italy), McGill University (Montreal Canada), UCLA (Los Angeles, USA), and Institute of Photonic Sciences, ICFO, (Castelldefels, Spain). He served on numerous program and grant committees, editorial and advisory boards, as well as authorities of Polish and international scientific societies and organizations. Presently he serves on the Polish-US Fulbright Commission as the Chair of the Academic Committee, on the Scientific Advisory Board of the ERANET Neuron (EU), President of the European Molecular Biology Conference (EMBC) and Polish delegate to EMBC and EMBL Council, as well as Chair of the ERC LS5 (Neuroscience and Disorders of the Nervous System) Consolidator Grant panel.

Cornelius Gross

Dr. Cornelius Gross has been a group leader at the Epigenetics & Neurobiology Unit of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Rome since 2003. In 2009 he was promoted to Senior Scientist and since 2020 he is Interim Head of Unit. His research (full publication list here) aims to understand the neural circuit mechanisms controlling instinctive behaviors with a special focus on fear and anxiety. He has also carried out research into the developmental origins of behavioural traits and has worked extensively on the role of microglia in shaping the developing brain. In 2011 he published a landmark paper – cited over 2800 times – that establishing a role for microglia in the elimination of synapses.
Dr. Gross was raised in the United States and received undergraduate training in biophysics at the University of California, Berkeley and then pursued doctoral research at Yale University studying transcriptional regulation by homeodomain factors with William McGinnis. Dr. Gross then joined the group of René Hen at Columbia University as a postdoctoral fellow where he discovered a developmental role for serotonin in determining life-long anxiety-related behavior and identified the serotonin receptor responsible for the therapeutic effects of antidepressants. In his early work at EMBL he showed how deficits in serotonin autoregulation can cause sudden infant death syndrome and how serotonin moderates the impact of maternal care on anxiety traits in adulthood. In 2013 he was awarded an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) to study social and predator fear circuits in the brain.