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Invited speakers
·Evogenomics speakers
· Scientific Commitee
· Organising Commitee
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Giorgio Bernardi received an MD degree from the University of Padua (Italy) and a degree in Physics from the University of Strasbourg (France). He spent most of his scientific career with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), first at the Center for Research on Macromolecules in Strasbourg, then at the Jacques Monod Institute in Paris. Dr. Bernardi was the President of the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn in Naples between 1998 and 2006, and Head of the Laboratory of Molecular Evolution there.
Giorgio Bernardi has published over 350 papers in the fields of molecular genetics and molecular evolution as well as a book entitled “Structural and evolutionary genomics: natural selection in genome evolution” (Elsevier, 2004).
Dr. Bernardi was the Chairman of the FEBS Course Committee (1977-86), of COGENE, the Committee on Genetic Experimentation of ICSU (1982-96), and of the Scientific Council of ROSTE (2002-2004). He obtained a honorary degree from the Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology, Moscow (Russia), and from the University of Ancona (Italy). He was a Fogarty Scholar at NIH, Bethesda, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Osaka and at the National Institute of Genetics, Mishima (Japan).
Dr. Bernardi is a Member of several Academies (including Academia Europaea and the Istituto Veneto) and scientific Societies. He is the Editor-in-Chief of GENE and the Chairman of International Society of Molecular Evolution.
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Daniel Dennett
Daniel C. Dennett, the author of Breaking the Spell (Viking, 2006), Freedom Evolves (Viking Penguin, 2003) and Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Simon &Schuster, 1995), is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He lives with his wife in North Andover, Massachusetts, and has a daughter, a son, and a grandson. He was born in Boston in 1942, the son of a historian by the same name, and received his B.A. in philosophy from Harvard in 1963. He then went to Oxford to work with Gilbert Ryle, under whose supervision he completed the D.Phil. in philosophy in 1965. He taught at U.C. Irvine from 1965 to 1971, when he moved to Tufts, where he has taught ever since, aside from periods visiting at Harvard, Pittsburgh, Oxford, and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.
His first book, Content and Consciousness, appeared in 1969, followed by Brainstorms (1978), Elbow Room (1984), The Intentional Stance (1987), Consciousness Explained (1991), Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995), Kinds of Minds (1996), and Brainchildren: A Collection of Essays 1984-1996 (MIT Press and Penguin, 1998). Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness, was published in 2005 by MIT Press. He co-edited The Mind's I with Douglas Hofstadter in 1981. He is the author of over three hundred scholarly articles on various aspects on the mind, published in journals ranging from Artificial Intelligence and Behavioral and Brain Sciences to Poetics Today and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.
He gave the John Locke Lectures at Oxford in 1983, the Gavin David Young Lectures at Adelaide, Australia, in 1985, and the Tanner Lecture at Michigan in 1986, among many others. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1987.
He was the Co-founder (in 1985) and Co-director of the Curricular Software Studio at Tufts, and has helped to design museum exhibits on computers for the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Science in Boston, and the Computer Museum in Boston.
He spends most of his summers on his farm in Maine, where he harvests blueberries, hay and timber, and makes Normandy cider wine, when he is not sailing. He is also a sculptor. |
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Douglas Futuyma's research interests in evolution focus primarily on speciation and the evolution of ecological interactions among species. He has been a Guggenheim and a Fulbright Fellow, the President of the Society for the Study of Evolution, the American Society of Naturalists, and the American Insitute of Biological Sciences, the editor of Evolution, and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is editor of the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, and is the author of the successful textbooks Evolutionary Biology and Evolution.
Most of his work has centered on the population biology of herbivorous insects and the evolution of their affiliation with host plants. Research on several species centered on genetic differences conferring adaptation to different host plants, and cast light on the evolution of host specificity. Recent work has focussed on whether or not constraints on genetic variation are likely to have influenced the phylogenetic history of host associations in a group of leaf beetles, and on the pattern of speciation in this group. Futuyma's students have worked on diverse evolutionary and ecological studies of insect-plant interactions and of speciation in insects.
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Professor Gonnet started his academic carreer in the analysis of algorithms. Later, in 1980, together with Keith Geddes, he formed the Symbolic Computation Group, a group devoted to research in Symbolic Computation or Computer Algebra, and to the development of the Maple Algebra System.
Maple has found its way into the practical world, aiding engineers to do their computations, assisting scientists in their research and helping students to learn mathematics.
In 1983-84, the University of Waterloo and Oxford University Press became partners for the computerization of the Oxford English Dictionary. At that time, Professor Gonnet and colleagues founded the ``Centre for the New Oxford English Dictionary''.
The Centre has attracted a lot of activity around the work on the dictionary and also in connection with the research being done with large text databases. Some of these activities reached their climax with the publication of the second edition of the dictionary, a work which would have not been possible without intelligent text processing. The main contributions of this project have been in the areas of fast text searching, text structuring and text transformations which then were reused in bioinformatics.
In 1989, Professor Gonnet was awarded the Information Technology Association of Canada annual award for his contributions to computer algebra and text searching.
In 1989, Professor Gonnet accepted a position with E.T.H. Zurich, where he is working in Bioinformatics. Professor Gonnet and Prof Steven Benner founded the ETH Computational Biochemistry Research Group. The CBRG was responsible for the first self-matching of an entire protein database. The CBRG specializes in sequence analysis, models of evolution and phylogeny construction. The work in bioinformatics has been extended to various aspects including the creation and curation of the OMA database, the largest database of orthologous relations. The CBRG is a member of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics.
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Eviatar Nevo, Professor of Evolutionary Biology and holder of the Chair in Evolutionary Biology, set up the Biology department at the University of Haifa in 1971; has been the Institute’s director since he founded it in 1977. A native of Tel Aviv (1929), he earned his degrees, in biology, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which awarded him the M.Sc. with special distinction and the Ph.D. summa cum laude.
He has been a Fulbright Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the American Association of the Advancement of Science, a Member of the New York Academy of Sciences (of which he became an Inaugral Member of tPlease select an item.he Charles Darwin Associates), and a Foreign Member of the Linnaean Society of London, and a Foreign member of the National Academy of Science of Ukraine. In 1990, the World University Roundtable conferred on him an Honorary Cultural Doctorate. A member of the Human Genome Organization, he was honored in 1995 by the Ukrainian Botanical Society. He was confirmed "Man of the Year" in 1997, and obtained the 20th Century Achievement Award from the American Biographical Institute, and he obtained the Decree of Merit and was included as an entry in the "First Five Hundred's",was confirmed Man of the Year 1998, and International Man of the Milenium by the International Biographical Centre, Cambridge, England, as well as was nominated Deputy Director of IBC Cambridge in Asia.
In addition to being a member of various professional societies in Israel and the United States, Professor Nevo serves on the editorial board of Israeli and international journals of ecology, genetics and evolution. A prolific writer, he is author, editor and co-editor of eleven books and author of 720 scientific papers and chapters in books dealing with various fields of evolutionary biology. He focused on the origin of species and adaptations in nature and the maintenance of genetic diversity in natural populations of plants and animals.
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Francisco Mauro Salzano
Graduated in Natural Sciences by the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in 1950 he specialized in Genetics at the University of São Paulo (USP) in 1951. Returning to Porto Alegre, he was admitted as a member of UFRGS’s staff in 1952, and in 1955 obtained his Ph.D. at USP. An one-year post-doctoral stay at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, 1956-1957) followed. Along the years he developed his professional career at UFRGS, reaching the Professorship level in 1981; in 1999 he was awarded the Emeritus Professor title. His scientific investigations started with research in Drosophila, but after the USA stay he turned to human genetics, in which he is engaged up to the present. In addition, he collaborated in investigations involving Brazilian native grasses, wheat, rodents, felines, cattle, chicken, and non-human primates. In relation to Homo sapiens, the studies involved normal and pathological characteristics, in a large number of populations of all major ethnic groups, with an emphasis in South Amerindians. He has been the author or co-author of 1,308 contributions to the scientific literature, including 439 full scientific papers, 50 chapters of books, and 18 books. A total of 44 Ph.D.s, and 43 M.Sc.s obtained their degrees under his supervision. He has presided or has been in the governing board of many national and international associations and received many honors at these two levels, being a member of the Brazilian, USA, Chilean, Latin American, and Third World Academies of Sciences.
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Emile Zuckerkandl is one of the founding fathers of the field of molecular evolution. In the 1960s, through examining both the constancy and the changes occurring in life’s informational macromolecules (DNA, RNA, and protein), he pointed out that these molecules provided unparalleled knowledge about the past of genes and organisms. He discovered the existence and significance of macromolecular sequence homology independently of Vernon Ingram, recognized the basic importance for evolution of gene duplication, and predicted the resolution of the great multiplicity of proteins into a relatively small number of homology groups. He argued that new proteins can in general be evolved only from old proteins, postulated the existence of pseudogenes, and recognized that not only genes but also certain gene interaction patterns can be extremely ancient. In collaborative work with Linus Pauling, he formulated the molecular clock hypothesis and published the first molecular phylogenetic tree. He was first to emphasize the importance for evolution of regulatory changes in genes relative to structural changes and to recognize that phenotypic changes are likely most frequently attributable to merely quantitative changes in gene expression. Regarding the role of extensive stretches of chromatin in gene regulation, he focused on “sectorial” gene repression and gene potentiation in development. He repeatedly pointed to functions of so-called junk DNA, such as the role of heterochromatin in cell determination and the use of extensive stretches of noncoding DNA by developmental regulatory genes as binding sites for proteins that determine the structure and regulatory effects of chromatin. He emphasized that a ready changeability and dispensability of DNA sequences does not imply their nonfunctionality. He analyzed evolutionary fates of programs of gene action, predicted that a greater complexity of gene interaction networks would be found in “higher” compared to “lower” organisms, and recognized that an evolutionary increase in regulatory complexity represents primarily a trend intrinsic to the internal molecular environment, with the external environment having only to concur.
Dr. Zuckerkandl is currently Consulting Professor of Biological Sciences at Stanford University and President of the Institute of Molecular Medical Sciences in Palo Alto, California. Formerly he was President of the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine, and earlier the founding director of of the Research Center for Macromolecular Biology at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Molecular Evolution and served as its editor-in-chief until recently. He is a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. |
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