Annual Meeting

Lorraine Brennan a full professor and a PI in the UCD Institute of Food & Health and Conway institute. She is the Vice Principal for Research, Innovation and Impact for the College of Health and Agricultural Sciences. She leads a research group at the forefront of the application of metabolomics in nutrition research and the development of Personalized nutrition. She is an ERC awardee and is currently involved in three European Consortia- MUSAE, PlantIntake and Promed-cog.

She served as Director of the European Nutrigenomics Organization for 5 years and led a number of important initiatives such as the development of an Early Career Network and expansion of membership of the organization. She is a member of the National Academies of Science Engineering and Medicine Standing Committee on Evidence Synthesis and Communications in Diet and Chronic Disease Relationships – advising the US NIH and USDA on future research areas of priority. She was a member of the Food2030 Expert group to advise the European Commission with the development of FOOD2030 and exploring and formulating possible future R&I policy recommendations and actions and assessing their potential impacts.

Ruth Andrew holds a Chair in Pharmaceutical Endocrinology at the University of Edinburgh and directs the Clinical Research Facility Mass Spectrometry Core. After qualifying as a pharmacist in 1990, she studied for a PhD in the field of pharmaceutical analysis, using gas chromatography mass spectrometry as an approach to profile catecholamines in hypertension. In 1994, she joined the Endocrinology Unit in the University of Edinburgh to develop further interests in mass spectrometry and establish its use in steroid profiling in cardiovascular disease. Since then Ruth has investigated the regulation of glucocorticoid metabolism and her group has focussed on the role of hepatic 5α-reductase in diabetes and in dynamic methods to quantify these metabolic pathways in vivo using stable isotope tracers. She leads a team specialising in small molecule quantitative analysis in support of translational medicine, most recently investigating the use of mass spectrometry imaging in steroid analysis. She takes an active role in teaching both Honours students (Endocrine Physiology and Pharmacology, Clinical Biochemistry) and post-graduate students. Ruth is incoming College Dean of Post Graduate Research and currently the Deputy Head of the Centre for Cardiovascular Science. She serves on grant panels for the Chief Scientist Office, BBSRC, Wellcome Trust, FWO (Flanders), and the Commonwealth Commission. She is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Endocrinology/Journal of Molecular Endocrinology and a Reviews Editor for the British Journal of Pharmacology.

Dr. Alan Bridge is the Director of the Swiss-Prot group at the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics in Geneva. Trained as a biologist, he joined SIB in 2004 after completing postdoctoral research at the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (ISREC) in Lausanne.

His group is dedicated to building knowledge resources that support the life sciences. Dr. Bridge is a co-principal investigator of UniProt (www.uniprot.org), a globally recognized resource for protein sequences and functional annotation. He also leads several other key initiatives, including the Rhea knowledgebase of biochemical reactions (www.rhea-db.org), the ENZYME nomenclature resource (https://enzyme.expasy.org/), and the SwissLipids knowledgebase for lipids and lipidomics (www.swisslipids.org).

His current work centres on linking knowledge of small molecules and proteins in ways that align with FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles. He is also exploring how AI systems can support human experts in this process—topics that will be featured in his talk.

Beginning his career in 1984 at the Institute for Analytical Instrumentation, St. Petersburg, Andrej Shevchenko remained there until 1994 when he became a Visiting Scientist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg. Shevchenko obtained a Staff Scientist position at EMBL, where he remained until 2001 when he joined the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden, as a Group Leader.