Speakers
Klaas van Wijk
Cornell University
Talk Title: Chloroplast Proteostasis & the Clp protease system
Biography: Klaas van Wijk is a professor and chair of the Section of Plant Biology within the School for Integrative Plant Science (SIPS) at Cornell University. He completed his B.Sc. and M.Sc. at the Agricultural University Wageningen (Netherlands), and then obtained a PhD in 1992 from the University of Groningen. From 1997 to 2001, he was an assistant professor in the Dept. of Biochemistry at Stockholm University. He then moved his lab to the Section of Plant Biology in Cornell University. He is a recipient of the Melvin Calvin-Andrew Benson Award from the International Society for Photosynthesis Research, and an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award in 2012 to support his sabbatical visit to the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Plant Physiology in Golm, Germany. He currently serves as a guest editor for The Plant Cell. While at Cornell, van Wijk has given more than 120 invited seminars at conferences, workshops and institutions.
Frederic Berger
Gregor Mendel Institute of Molecular Plant Biology
Talk Title: Precognitive chromatin landscape in sperm: How dad controls your future
Biography: Frederic Berger is a senior group leader at the Gregor Mendel Institute. Research in my PhD and Post-Doc led me to recognise the importance of the cell wall for determination of cell fate. My early career research revealed that seed size is established by endosperm growth and its regulation by maternal components of the seed, a concept proven true for all seeds. Mid-career research focused on fertilization mechanisms. This led to the unravelling of the dynamics of cytoskeleton and chromatin during fertilization and the renewed interest in histone variants. Since 2007, my group pioneered work on the role of histone variants and discovered new types of H2A variants. This work has placed my group at the forefront of research in this field of chromatin dynamics.
John M. Archibald
Dalhousie University
Talk Title: Mergers and acquisitions: endosymbiosis and gene flow in microbial eukaryotes
Biography: John M. Archibald is a University Research Professor of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology at Dalhousie University, and Director of Dalhousie’s Centre for Comparative Genomics & Evolutionary Bioinformatics. He is an Associate Editor for Genome Biology & Evolution and an Editorial Board member of several journals including Current Biology and BMC Biology. He is the author of more than 150 research articles and two books: One Plus One Equals One: Symbiosis and the Evolution of Complex Life (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Genomics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2018). Dr. Archibald is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and in 2016 was elected Member of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2019 Dr. Archibald was awarded the Miescher-Ishida Prize from the International Society of Endocytobiology for his work on symbiosis and organelle evolution.