Dr. Suzan Wopereis
Talk to me about… my research
My research focuses on ‘what is health, how can health be quantified and how to measure effects from nutrition and lifestyle on health’. I joined TNO in 2006 and works with a bioinformatics research group active in the field of nutrigenomics and systems biology. I am acting as principal investigator in several public private partnerships focusing on systems health applying genomics technology, bioinformatics, standardised infrastructures and artificial intelligence. In the last 5 years most of my research focuses on personalized nutrition. This included the coordination of the evidence-based scientific advice system that has been implemented by the American personalised nutrition start-up company ‘Habit’ (https://habit.com/). In 2016 Iwas awarded the ‘Excellent researcher of 2015’ for her work on personalised nutrition. I have a PhD in medical sciences from Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center.
Talk to me about…something people may not know about me
I have my own personal story around personalised nutrition… and furthermore that I’d like to play volleyball, to do bootcamp and I’d like to travel (preferably adventurous long walking trails in the middle of nowhere)
Dr Carl Merril
Dr. Merril, a 1962 graduate of Georgetown University Medical School studied phage biology and medical applications for over 5 decades at the NIH. His studies were inspired by participation in the Cold Spring Harbor Phage Biology Course in 1966 and they included: the interactions of phage and mammalian systems, the development of enhanced phage strains for use as antibacterial agents and the development of phage libraries as an aid in searching for phage for the treatment of individual clinical infections. An extensive, Phage library along with technologies needed to facilitate their use has recently been developed by the Naval Medical Research, Biological Defense Research Directorate and Infections Disease Departments. This technology has been licensed and a Cooperative Research Agreement has been established with Applied Phage Therapeutics (APT), a company cofounded by Dr. Carl Merril and his son , Gregory Merril, where they serve as the Chief Scientific Officer and Chief Executive Officer, respectively. The primary goal of APT and the Navy is to further the development and clinical appliations of phage, particularly for serious antibiotic resistant bacterial infections.
Dr Breck Duerkop
Dr Derek Holman
Derek Holman is a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine. His post-doctoral research focuses on the integration of label-free non-invasive chemical imaging into transcriptome platforms for precision medicine applications. He received his Ph.D. in 2016 from the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences where his research involved investigating neurocognitive dysfunction due to genetic disorder or mild-to-moderate brain injuries. This involves genetic manipulation of mice, precise sample preparation, and multi-modal molecular imaging. Derek received his Bachelor degree in Chemistry from University of California at Berkeley.
Dr Catherine Loc-Carrillo
I obtained my Ph.D. from Nottingham University, UK in 2005, studying ‘Bacteriophage control of campylobacters in poultry production’ and have over 18-years of experience working with phages and medically important pathogens. I worked in the biotech industry between 2006 and 2009, developing phage-based products to detect foodborne pathogens and decontaminate food following regulatory guidelines. I moved back into academia in 2010 to work for the University of Utah. I’m currently a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Utah and a Research Scientist at the Salt Lake City Veterans Affair Medical Centre.
My research is focused in developing translational studies to prevention and treatment polymicrobial infections using experimentally infected animal models. My goal is to conduct well-controlled, impartial research to investigate the use of phages as biocontrol agents to clinically problematic infections, with particular emphasis on antibiotics resistant bacteria.
Dr Cara Fiore
Dr Nick Conley
Dr. Nick Conley is Principal Scientist for Locus Biosciences. Before joining Locus in 2018, Nick was co-founder of EpiBiome, a South San Francisco-based precision microbiome engineering company that built the world’s first fully automated high-throughput phage discovery, characterization, and genomics platform, where he served in various roles, including CEO and Chief Science Officer. During this time, the company gained admission into Illumina Accelerator, Johnson & Johnson Innovation’s JLABS, and Stanford-StartX; secured non-dilutive funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the US Department of Defense; established a top-3 pharma partnership; and raised more than $10 million dollars in financing. Prior to EpiBiome, Nick was Staff Scientist at HGST, a Western Digital Company. Nick completed a postdoc in Developmental Biology at Stanford University, and he holds a PhD and BS in Chemistry from Stanford University and The University of Texas at Austin, respectively.