Eric J. N. Helfrich

Eric obtained his B. Sc. in Molecular Biomedicine from the University of Bonn in Germany. From early on during his studies, Eric was fascinated by natural products, in particular trans-acyltransferase polyketide synthases. Following his Bachelor’s under the supervision of Jörn Piel, he relocated to Jena to work in the lab of Christian Hertweck during his MSc in Chemical Biology. During his Master’s he spend some time in the laboratories of Bradley Moore and Pieter Dorrestein at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Skaggs School of Pharmacy (University of California at San Diego) in La Jolla, California.

Later on, re-joint the Piel lab, this time at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. He dedicated his PhD studies on deciphering the biosynthetic principles of trans-acyltransferase polyketide synthases. At the time, the biosynthesis of the complex polyketides that these enormous mega-enzyme complexes generate was poorly understood.

After his PhD, Eric moved to Boston for his postdoctoral studies in the Clardy lab at Harvard Medical School funded by a SNF Postdoc Mobility scholarship. In The Clardy lab, Eric worked on the ecology-inspired and genomics-assisted discovery of novel bioactive natural products.

In October 2020, Eric was appointed Professor of Natural Products Genomics at the LOEWE Center for Translational Biodiversity Genomics and the Institute of Molecular Biosciences at Goethe University Frankfurt. His team’s research focuses on locating and characterizing non-canonical biosynthetic pathways that are currently overlooked by state-of-the-art genome mining platforms.

Avena Ross

Dr. Avena Ross received her BSc (Hons.) in Chemistry at the University of Auckland, New Zealand in 2006 and then she completed her PhD in Chemistry in 2012 under the supervision of Prof. John C. Vederas at the University of Alberta, Canada. She then joined the lab of Prof. Bradley S. Moore at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography/University of California at San Diego as an NSERC postdoctoral research fellow. In 2015, Dr. Ross was appointed an Assistant Professor and Queen’s National Scholar in Chemical Biology and Medicinal Chemistry in the department of Chemistry at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. In 2021 Dr. Ross was granted tenure and promoted to Associate Professor at Queen’s University. The Ross group investigates marine bacterially-derived natural products using genome guided approaches and investigates the biosynthesis of marine proteobacterial natural products including lanthipeptides, siderophores, non-ribosomal peptides and alkaloids such as the prodiginines/tambjamines using in vivo (genomics and heterologous expression) and in vitro (biochemical assays of isolated enzymes) approaches.

Tobias Gulder

Tobias Gulder completed his PhD in Organic Chemistry in 2008 at the University of Würzburg, with Gerhard Bringmann. He established his independent research at the University of Bonn (2011–2014) with Jörn Piel as a mentor after completing a postdoctoral training program in Brad Moore’s group at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego (2008–2010). He was appointed Professor of Biosystems Chemistry at the Technical University of Munich’s Department of Chemistry and Center for Integrated Protein Science in 2014.

Since 2019, he is Chair of Technical Biochemistry at the Technical University of Dresden. Currently, with his research team, he works in the area of biomolecular natural product chemistry. Their research focuses on the various aspects of microbial natural products, such as the targeted discovery of new compounds using bioinformatics techniques and synthetic biology methods, as well as the elucidation of biosynthetic pathways and the biocatalytic application of biosynthetic enzymes in the synthesis of complex molecules and in technical applications.

Maria Barbosa

Prof. dr Maria Barbosa is Professor in Bioprocess Engineering and is the Director of AlgaePARC (www.AlgaePARC.com) at Wageningen University and Research Centre, the Netherlands. She has been president of the Dutch Biotechnology Association (NBV). She holds a Ph.D. in Bioprocess Engineering obtained at Wageningen University.  She has worked at ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), Switzerland, IBET, and at EMBO (European Molecular Biology Organisation), Germany.

She presently leads the group on microalgal biotechnology and coordinates several large research programs covering the entire microalgae production chain and applications in the food and feed sectors.

Her scientific interests are in microalgae strain improvement, cultivation, and scale-up.