SPEAKERS
ANNE DELL (PLENARY)
Professor
Department of Life Sciences
Imperial College London
UNITED KINGDOM
Anne Dell is Professor of Carbohydrate Biochemistry at Imperial College London which she joined as a postdoc in 1975. During her career, Anne has spearheaded the development of ultra-high sensitivity mass spectrometric methods for glycomic and glycoproteomic analyses, especially in the area of biomedical research. Her laboratory provides structural underpinning for programmes of research seeking to define the biological roles that glycans play in health and disease. Anne is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Australian Academy of Sciences. She was Head of Imperial’s Department of Life Sciences from 2017 to 2022.
FRED ANSTON (PLENARY)
Professor
Wellcome Trust Investigator
University of York
UNITED KINGDOM
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Dr. Fred Antson, a structural biologist at the University of York, UK, graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1986 and earned his PhD from the Institute of Crystallography in Moscow. After working with Keith Wilson at EMBL/Hamburg, he joined Guy Dodson’s Structural Biology Laboratory at York in 1992. Fred employs cryo-EM and X-ray crystallography to investigate protein/nucleic acid machines found in viruses, with a particular focus on DNA-packaging motors involved in assembly of dsDNA viruses. His research is supported by the Wellcome Trust.
NOR HADIANI ISMAIL
President
Malaysian Natural Product Society
MALAYSIA
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Dr. Nor Hadiani Ismail obtained her Ph.D. in natural product chemistry from Universiti Putra Malaysia in 1999. Her PhD thesis entitled Chemistry and Biological Activity of the Roots of Morinda elliptica won the Tan Sri Ong Kee Hui medal for the Best Postgraduate Thesis 1999 by Institut Kimia Malaysia. She was a professor in Chemistry at Universiti Teknologi MARA and served as the director of Atta-ur-Rahman Institute for Natural Products Discovery (AuRIns), until recently. With more than 200 research publications, she was recognized as Top Research Scientist Malaysia in 2017. A fellow of the Malaysian Chemical Institute and Malaysian Academy of Science, Dr. Nor Hadiani is the current president of Malaysian Natural Product Society.
AMORN OWATWORAKIT
Head
Tea and Coffee Institute
Microbial Production and Innovation Research Group
School of Science
Mae Fah Luang University
THAILAND
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Dr. Amorn is a lecturer in the Biological Science Programme, School of Science at Mae Fah Luang University. He also leads the coffee section of the tea and coffee institute and Microbial product and Innovation research group where he is focused on coffee and mushroom products. Particularly, Cordyceps militaris, a high-value medical mushroom that has been successfully cultivated and commercialised. Currently, Dr. Amorn is engaged in understanding, with a particular emphasis on fungal degeneration, the impacts of analogue substances on fungal growth development, and bioactive compounds using genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics. This information could be useful in industry, such as fungus maintenance and bioactive compound production.
NORHAYATI YUSOP
Senior Lecturer
Basic Sciences Unit, School of Dental Sciences,
Universiti Sains Malaysia, Health Campus,
MALAYSIA
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Dr. Norhayati Yusop is from School of Dental Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia. Her research interest is in cellular mechanism of stem cells and sustainable biomaterials in regeneration of mineralised tissue. As an academician, she involved in teaching biochemistry for dental undergraduate students. She is certified MOOC content developer with Open Learning, and MyDigital Educator 2.0 under Ministry of Higher Education. She has won a number of awards for her work in teaching innovations, including Best Elective Research (in Basic Science) at Dental Student Scientific Conference, Silver Medal in MOOC Competitions and Gold Award for Innovations in Teaching and Learning Competition 2023 for her project entitled Transformative Learning Experiences in Gamified Biochemistry Module. She is the recipient of FAOBMB Thailand Travel Fellowship Special Education Award 2023.
KEHKOOI KEE
Professor / Assistant Chancellor
School of Basic Medical Sciences
Tsinghua University, Beijing
CHINA
Dr. Kee studied meiotic recombination during his graduate school at Weill Cornell Medical School. After his PhD study, he started to study human reproductive biology using embryonic stem cells and became research associate at Stanford University in 2007. He became a principal investigator at School of Medicine, Tsinghua University since 2010 and he is now the tenured Professor in School of Basic Medical Sciences. His team is interested in understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying human germ cell development. Their current research projects include developing in vitro models of human germ cell development and studying mutations causing infertility manifested in clinical setting. They have built many in vitro differentiation and induction systems for studying human germ cells and their neighboring somatic cells, including spermatids, oocytes, and Sertoli cells. These in vitro systems also allow them to study the effect of microgravity on development of human germ cells in spacecraft.
WOONG SUN
Professor
Department of Anatomy
Korea University College of Medicine
SOUTH KOREA
Prof. Sun earned his degrees in molecular biology from Seoul National University, South Korea. He held postdoctoral positions at Osaka University, Japan, and Wake Forest University, USA, before becoming a professor at Korea University College of Medicine in 2002. Prof. Sun's research focuses on understanding the mechanisms of neural development, utilizing stem cell research and novel histological techniques. He is also an active member of the Asian-Pacific Society for Neurochemistry (APSN) and the Korean Society for Molecular and Cell Biology (KSMCB).
FIRDAUS RAIH
Professor
Department of Applied Physics
Faculty of Science and Technology
Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
MALAYSIA
Prof. Firdaus Raih is currently a Professor of Bioinformatics and Computational Structural Biology at UKM. He currently leads a research group that primarily focuses on investigating the molecular interactions that affect function and/or effect molecular level function regulation using the structure, function and evolution of biological macromolecules to compare how atomic level variations can result in different functions by effecting regulatory or mechanistic changes. The approaches employed in exploring and investigating these datasets primarily involve bioinformatics, computational biology and genomics but also extend to structural biology (mainly X-ray crystallography), synthetic biology and systems biology. Insights from these investigations can provide clues as to how molecular level regulation and responses in living systems are carried out that eventually lead to an organism’s capacity to adapt to extreme (ie. extremophiles) or diverse environments (such as a bacterial pathogen or parasite adapting to a host), as well as the discovery of novel factors associated with pathogenesis (toxins and pathogenesis/virulence regulation systems).
"MEET THE EXPERTS" SESSION
Annie Chai
Deputy Head
Translational Cancer Biology
Cancer Research Malaysia
MALAYSIA
Dr. Annie Chai is the Deputy Head of the Translational Cancer Biology Research Unit at Cancer Research Malaysia. After completing a PhD at The University of Hong Kong, she joined Cancer Research Malaysia and led one of the first oral cancer genome-wide CRISPR/Cas9 essential screens. She is now working on promising therapeutic targets from the screen to identify effective treatments for Asian cancers, such as oral and nasopharyngeal cancers. Dr Chai has won several awards including the Dr. Ranjeet Bhagwan Singh Research Grant, and the ASEAN-Republic of Korea Next Innovator Award 2022. Dr. Chai is also the inaugural chairperson for the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Global Scholar-in-Training Alumni Committee, supporting the AACR’s mission to promoting the professional development of early- and mid-career scholars from countries with emerging economies.
Pung Yuh-Fen
Professor
Division of Biomedical Science
University of Nottingham Malaysia
MALAYSIA
Yuh-Fen is a Professor in the Division of Biomedical Science at the University of Nottingham Malaysia. She obtained her Ph.D degree in Biological Sciences from the National University of Singapore. After graduation she performed her post-doctoral trainings in Singapore, United States and United Kingdom prior to joining University of Nottingham Malaysia. Her research focuses on developing biomarkers and treatments for metabolic and cardiovascular diseases, integrating both basic science and translational medicine. Her laboratory employs various techniques such as cellular bioenergetics, molecular biology and biochemical assays, histological and immunofluorescent staining, and bioinformatics analyses of in vitro and clinical samples. Outside of her professional life, Yuh-Fen enjoys gardening and actively participates in voluntary community events and outreach programs.
Hamizah Shahirah Hamezah
Research Fellow
INBIOSIS
Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
MALAYSIA
Dr. Hamizah Shahirah Hamezah is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Systems Biology, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM). She graduated from UKM with Bachelor in Genetics (Hons.) and Master in Medical Science. She obtained her PhD in Medical Science from Shiga University of Medical Science, Japan. Upon completing her PhD, she was appointed as an Assistant Professor at the Molecular Neuroscience Research Center, Shiga University of Medical Science, Japan. She has a great interest in understanding the mechanisms of learning and memory, as well as interventions for cognitive decline during aging and neurodegenerative diseases. Her research focuses on finding possible biomarkers leading to cognitive decline in brain aging and Alzheimer’s disease by using the state-of-art omics approaches, brain imaging, and cognitive neurosciences. She is interested in finding possible therapeutics for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases by investigating the effect of natural compounds on transgenic animal models.