Professor Leonidas Alexopoulos, Systems Bioengineering lab, National Technical University of Athens and Founder, ProtAtOnce
Dr. Leonidas Alexopoulos is Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens and co-founder of ProtATonce (now Protavio) , a successful biotech startup company.
Dr Alexopoulos has studied at Duke (PhD 2004), MIT, and Harvard Medical School in the areas of Biomedical Engineering, Systems Biology, and Biological Engineering. He combines strong academic research with translational capacity and entrepreneurial opportunities.
He has worked and collaborated with leading companies in the area of biotechnology, drug discovery and Systems Pharmacology including Pfizer, Boehringer Ingelheim, Vertex, and Roche. He holds strong publication and grant record with several international awards and honors for top academic performance.
Professor E Dermitzakis, Department of Genetic Medicine and Development, University of Geneva, Switzerland and Director: Health 2030 Genome Center
Emmanouil (Manolis) Dermitzakis is currently Director of the Health 2030 Genome Center and Professor of Genetics in the Department of Genetic Medicine and Development of the University of Geneva Medical School. He is a member of the Executive Boards of Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN) and the Institute of Genetics and Genomics in Geneva (iGE3), a member of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, and is also an affiliated Faculty member at the Biomedical Research Foundation of the Academy of Athens in Greece. He obtained his B.Sc. in 1995 and M.Sc. in 1997 in Biology from the University of Crete (Greece) and his PhD in 2001 from the Pennsylvania State University in the USA, studying the evolutionary biology and population genetics of regulatory DNA in mammals and Drosophila. His post-doctoral work was at the University of Geneva Medical School, focusing on comparative genome analysis and the functional characterization of conserved non-genic elements. He was an Investigator and Senior Investigator in 2014. His current research focuses on the genetic basis of cellular phenotypes and complex traits. He has authored and co-authored more than 120 papers in peer-reviewed journals and many of them in journals such as Nature, Science and Nature Genetics. His research is supported by the Louis-Jeantet Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the European Commission, the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation and the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). He is also the recipient of a European Research Council (ERC) grant. His H-index is 75 and his wrok has been cited >47000 times (Google scholar July 2017). He has been invited to give talks and keynote lectures in all important genetics meeting and is the organizer of multiple training courses including the Wellcome Trust HapMap course and co-founder and co-organizer of the Leena Peltonen School of Human Genomics. He has served as an analysis co-chair in the pilot phase of the ENCODE (ENCyclopedia Of Dna Elements) consortium and member of the analysis group of the Mouse Genome Sequencing Consortium and the International HapMap project. He had a leading analysis role in the extension of the HapMap (HapMap3 project) and was a member of the analysis group of the 1000 genomes project and is a co-chair in the GTEx project. He has served in the Board of Reviewing Editors
of Science (2006-2011) and as Senior Editor and now Consulting Editor in PLoS Genetic.
Emilija Shukarova Stefanovska, Associate professor, Research Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology “Georgi D. Efremov”
Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Emilija Shukarova Stefanovska, PhD is an associated professor at the Research Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology “Georgi D.Efremov” (RCGEB), Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts,. She holds a PhD in medical genetics from the Faculty of Pharmacy, University “St. Cyril and Methodius”, Skopje. Her research is focused on Medical Genetics; Human genetics; Molecular biology; Hemophilia A; Inherited Deafness; Intellectual Disability. She has extensive experience in molecular characterization of monogenic diseases especially hemophilia, cystic fibrosis, thalassemia, as well as inherited deafness. Her recent activities include development of microarray technology in detections of microdeletions/ microduplications in cases with intellectual disability.
She holds the role of quality manager for the accreditation of the laboratories of RCGEB for molecular testing with specific scope on Molecular characterization of monogenic diseases (thalassemia, cystic fibrosis, haemophilia) and other inherited conditions (Y-chromosome microdeletions, trombophilia), Genetic testing of breast cancer (BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations), Detection of Copy number variations in human genome, Molecular characterization of rare inherited diseases using Next Generation Sequencing technologies.
She has published many scientific publications in prestigious journals and conferences in the areas of her research focus and participated in many research projects, both national and international. She is a member of several national and European societies and working groups in human genetics and molecular biology.
She is an Editorial Assistant of the Balkan Journal of Medical Genetics.
Dr. O Tzortzatou, Lawyer, Expert in Bioethics, BBMRI
Dr. Olga Tzortzatou, is a practicing lawyer in the fields of industrial property and data protection. She practices law since 2007, whereas from 2008 she has been working as an in-house legal consultant for the “Biomedical Research Foundation of the Academy of Athens”, mainly assisting and advising on IP and data related issues (patent drafting, litigation etc.). She has been also drafting/negotiating agreements on behalf of BRFAA in the frame of several national and EU projects (FP7, Horizon 2020, IMI). She has obtained her Ph.D from the Law Faculty of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. In 2015 her book titled “The protection of the sensitive data in the field of biomedical research” which focuses on ELSI issues in biobanking, was published by the legal editions Sakkoulas. She has been a visiting lecturer in the Medical Schools of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and at the Democritus University of Thrace on data protection and medical law and has also lectured at the University of Lefkosia at the Cyprus Medical School. She is a member of the Bioethics Committee of BRFAA since January 2016 and a member of the BBMRI ERIC ELSI team (GDPR, Code of Conduct, Helpdesk TF) representing the Greek node on ELSI issues, since February 2015.