Speakers

Short bio: Eva Nogales is a Distinguished Professor in Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She studied physics at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, did her doctorate in biophysics at the University of Keele, UK, and carried out her postdoctoral work at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). She joined the University of California, Berkeley in 1998 and has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator since 2000. She is also a Senior Faculty Scientist at LBNL. Nogales is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and foreign member the Real Academia de Ciencias de España. In 2020 she served as President of ASCB. In 2023 she received the Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine.

Short Bio: Alvaro went to college in Madrid, obtaining an undergraduate degree in theoretical physics. He then moved to the USA, where he did his doctoral and postdoctoral training in Biophysics and Evolutionary Systems Biology at Brandeis and MIT. In 2013 he started his own group as a Rowland Fellow at Harvard. He moved the lab to Yale in 2016 as an Assistant Professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2021. He moved back to Spain in 2022 as a group leader first at CNB-CSIC and then at IBFG. He’s received multiple grants and awards, including an ERC CoG, a Packard Fellowship, an NIH MIRA award and an HFSP grant.

Liz grew up in Guelph, Ontario and Bocholt, Germany. She graduated with a BSc degree in Honours Chemistry, Physics Option in 1988 from the University of Waterloo. She completed her PhD in 1992 at the University of Cambridge with her thesis on the influence of active site residues on the folding and function of barnase, with supervisor Professor Sir Alan Fersht in the Department of Chemistry. She then worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School in the Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology. Her postdoctoral research was on the activity and drug binding of dihydrofolate reductase analyzed by multidimensional heteronuclear NMR in the group of Professor Gerhard Wagner.

In 1996, Dr. Meiering joined the faculty of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Waterloo, where she currently holds the position of Full Professor. She won a John Charles Polanyi Award and a University Research Chair. Her professional activities include serving on the Editorial Board for Protein Engineering Design and Selection, the ALS Society of Canada Scientific Advisory Board, CIHR Grant Review Committee, NIH Grant Review Panel, and a wide range of other internal and external committees and roles, including as Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Associate Director of the Centre for Bioengineering and Biotechnology University of Waterloo, Director of the Guelph-Waterloo Centre for Graduate Work in Chemistry and Biochemistry, as well as Executive Council Member of The Protein Society and Chair of the Proteins Gordon Research Conference. Currently, she is serving as President of The Protein Society.