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. During her undergraduate degree in Chemistry at the University of Waterloo, Canada, she researched the stability and function of Ca-ATPase with Professor James Lepock. Her PhD studies with Professor Sir Alan Fersht at the University of Cambridge, England, investigated the roles of active site residues on the folding and function of barnase. As a postdoctoral fellow, she investigated activity and drug binding by dihydrofolate reductase with Professor Gerhard Wagner at Harvard Medical School, USA. Dr. Meiering then joined the faculty of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Waterloo, where she currently holds the position of Full Professor. Her research program is focused on elucidating the molecular mechanisms that determine protein function and aggregation, with applications in protein engineering and design for medicine and biotechnology. She won a John Charles Polanyi Award and a University Research Chair. Her professional activities include diverse leadership roles at Waterloo, nationally, and internationally, such as chair of the Proteins Gordon Research Conference and member of Executive Council for The Protein Society. Currently, she is serving as President of The Protein Society.