Albino Oliveira-Maia (Champalimaud, Portugal)
Albino Oliveira Maia completed a medical degree at Universidade do Porto, and a doctorate in neuroscience, developed at Duke University, under the supervision of Profs. Miguel Nicolelis, and Sidney Simon. After returning to Portugal, Albino trained in adult psychiatry at the University Department of Psychiatry of NOVA School of Medicine, in Lisbon. During residency, he was engaged in postdoctoral training at the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme, under the supervision of Prof. Rui Costa, and completed a Master Degree in Public Health at the Harvard School of Public Health, in Boston, where he also trained in non-invasive brain stimulation with Prof. Alvaro Pascual-Leone. Currently, Albino coordinates the Neuropsychiatry Unit at the Champalimaud Clinical Centre and is Psychiatrist and Invited Professor of Psychiatry at the University Department of Psychiatry of NOVA School of Medicine.
Asya Rolls (Israel Institute of Technology, Israel)
Asya Rolls obtained a bachelor of science in Life Sciences from the Technion and continued her graduate studies in Physical Chemistry in the same department. For her PhD research, she transitioned to neuroimmunology and joined the laboratories of Prof. Michal Schwartz from the Department of Neuroscience and Prof Ofer Lider from the Department of Immunology at the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Israel. As a graduate student, she focused on how the immune system controls the brain. Then, she moved for a postdoctoral training to Stanford University, where she worked in the laboratory of Prof. Luis de Lecea in collaboration with Prof. Craig Heller and Prof. Irv Weizmann on sleep, which has a major homeostatic impact on the organism. Now, as an independent researcher at the Medical school of the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology), she asks the complementary question: how does the brain regulate immunity?
Carlos Ribeiro (Champalimaud, Portugal)
Born in Basel, Switzerland, Carlos Ribeiro studied Bio II at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel and performed his diploma under the supervision of Dr. Markus Affolter and Prof. Walter Gehring studying how TGF-beta signaling and HOX transcription factors affect transcription in the Drosophila embryo. After graduating in 1999 he continued in the laboratory of Prof. Affolter for his PhD studies until 2003 where he used 3D time lapse imaging approaches in the living embryo to study the molecular and cellular mechanisms used to sculpt the tubular breathing network of the fruitfly. In 2004 he joined the laboratory of Barry Dickson at the IMP in Vienna, Austria, for his postdoctoral training where he first characterized Robo receptor trafficking in living Drosophila embryos and then became interested in decision making in the adult fly. Carlos Ribeiro became principal investigator of the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme at the IGC in 2009. His laboratory studies how neuronal systems sense metabolic needs and modify neuronal processes to generate the correct behavioral decisions needed for the survival and reproduction of organisms.
Cristina Afonso (Champalimaud, Portugal)
Cristina Afonso obtained the Microbial and Genetic Biology degree at Lisbon University and completed her PhD in Biomedical Sciences (at Lisbon Medical School) under the supervision of Dr. Domingos Henrique, where she investigated the role of the PAR polarity complex in establishing cell polarity in the embryonic chick neuroepithelium. She moved for a postdoctoral taining at Institute for Molecular Medicine, under the supervision of Dra. Maria Manuel Mota Malaria Unit. Here, she studied actin reorganization inside Plasmodium-infected host hepatocytes. She then joined the laboratory of Rui Costa at Champalimaud Foundation as a postdoctoral fellow, where she has been studying the effects of parasite infection on host behavior.
Dafni Hadjieconomou (Imperial College London, United Kingdom)
Dafni studied Molecular Biology and Genetics in Greece and did a Master's course in Clinical Neuroscience at University College London. She then joined Iris Salecker’s lab at the National Institute of Medical Research in London for her PhD. During her time at NIMR, Dafni became acquainted with the nervous system of Drosophila, and developed Flybow to investigate the ways by which neurons within the fly visual system assemble into circuits. She is currently working as a postdoc in Irene-Miguel Aliaga’s lab at Imperial College London. Irene’s lab explores how different aspects of gut physiology contribute to the regulation of metabolic homeostasis. Irene’s work pioneered the study of enteric neurons in the fly, and has identified new mechanisms by which they regulate adaptations to reproductive challenges and nutrient scarcity. Such findings have been enabled by development of integrative methods to monitor gut function and whole-body physiology in vivo. In Irene’s lab, Dafni is currently investigating the functions of neurons innervating anterior portions of the digestive system, and is exploring the links between intestinal physiology and food intake.
Jens C. Brüning (Max Plank Institute for Metabolism Research, Germany)
Dr. Jens Brüning is Director of the Max Planck Institute for Metabolism Research in Cologne and Director at the Center for Endocrinology, Diabetes and Preventive Medicine at the University Hospital in Cologne. His research focusses on elucidating the CNS-dependent regulation of energy and glucose metabolism. These studies revealed a previously unappreciated role for insulin action in the central nervous system (CNS) to control organismal glucose homeostasis and insulin sensitivty. His group has defined distinct Agouti-related peptide (AgRP)-expressing neurons in the hypothalamus as critical mediators of insulin's metabolic actions, revealed the molecular mechanisms of insulin action in these neurons as well as their alterations in obesity. More recently, through the use of neurocircuitry mapping techniques his group defined the projections of these AgRP-neurons within the CNS, which govern insulin-dependent control of systemic insulin sensitivty via the regulation of autonomic innervation.
John Cryan (University College Cork, Ireland)
John F. Cryan is Professor & Chair, Dept. of Anatomy & Neuroscience, and a Principal Investigator in the APC Microbiome Institute at University College Cork, Ireland. He received a BSc and PhD from the National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland. He was a visiting fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia, which was followed by postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA and The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California. He spent four years at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research in Basel Switzerland, as a LabHead, Behavioural Pharmacology prior to joining UCC in 2005. Prof. Cryan's current research is focused on understanding the interaction between brain, gut & microbiome and how it applies to stress, neuropsychiatric and immune-related disorders. Prof. Cryan has published over 300 peer-reviewed articles and has a H-index of 68 (Google Scholar). He is a Senior Editor of Neuropharmacology and of Nutritional Neuroscience and an Editor of British Journal of Pharmacology and is on the editorial board of a further 16 journals. He has won numerous awards and is a regular media contributor. He was a TEDMED speaker in Washington in 2014 and named President-elect of the European Behavioural Pharmacology Society in 2015.
José Oliveira (Champalimaud, Portugal)
José Oliveira graduated in Medicine from the University of Coimbra, Portugal, after which he started residency in Psychiatry in Centro Hospitalar Psiquiátrico de Lisboa. He completed his PhD thesis at the Translational Psychiatry Laboratory at the Mondor Institute for Biomedical Research in Paris (Professor Marion Leboyer). He is currently a trainee in Psychiatry and is interested in immunogenetics of psychiatric disorders and its potential interactions with environmental factors such as infections and childhood adversity.
Keith Kelley (University of Illinois, USA)
Keith W. Kelley is Professor Emeritus of Immunophysiology at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Kelley earned his Ph.D. in 1976, a time when the immune system was considered only to protect against infectious diseases. He helped reshape that view by bringing physiology to immunology. It is now accepted that there is an active dialogue between the immune system and brain, and these discoveries are improving human and animal health. Professor Kelley has been honored with 10 university and national awards, published more than 250 peer-reviewed scientific papers as well as 70 book chapters, is well cited with an h-index of 68, been funded for 50 years as the Principal Investigator of NIH grants and served on four dozen NIH study sections. He is currently a Full Member of the Neuroendocrinology, Neuroimmunology, Rhythms and Sleep NIH Study Section. Dr. Kelley is a Past-President and Secretary-Treasurer of the PsychoNeuroImmunology Research Society. He has been Editor-in-Chief of Brain, Behavior, and Immunity since 2003. The latest impact factor of the journal is 5.9, ranking it in the top 14% of all immunology journals and 11% of neuroscience journals.