Suzana SALCEDO
Tuesday 18^th February 2025 | from 09:00 to 09:45
Session 2 | Chair: Abdelrahim Zoued

Biography

Suzana P. Salcedo, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

Suzana is an Associate Professor of Immunology of Infectious Diseases at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA). She studied microbiology in Porto, Portugal, and received a Ph.D. in 2003 from Imperial College London for her work on Salmonella pathogenesis. She did postdoctoral training at the Centre of Immunology Marseille-Luminy, France, and was recruited as an INSERM permanent researcher in 2005 to study how Brucella modulates innate immunity. In 2012, she was awarded a FINOVI Young Researcher grant to start her team at the Laboratory of Molecular Microbiology and Structural Biochemistry, University of Lyon/CNRS, France. She led this team until August 2023 as an INSERM Research Director, studying how bacterial pathogens modulate cellular responses to cause disease in humans and animals, namely Brucella spp. and Acinetobacter baumannii. This work is now continuing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Peter CHIRSTIE 
Tuesday 18^th February 2025 | from 16:30 to 17:15
Session 4 | Chair: Kevin Macé

Biography

Professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, McGovern Medical School (UTHealth), Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics.

Dr. Christie has been investigating the structural and functional diversity of type IV secretion systems (T4SSs) for over 35 years. As a postdoctoral fellow, he initiated studies exploring how Agrobacterium tumefaciens delivers oncogenic T-DNA to plant cells through the now archetypal VirB/VirD4 T4SS.  At UTHealth, he continued these studies and expanded investigations into the mechanisms of action of T4SSs functioning in Enterococcus faecalis, Rickettsia spp., and Enterobacteriaceae. Dr. Christie uses a combination of genetic, biochemical and in situ cryoelectron and fluorescence microscopy approaches to explore the scope of T4SS diversity and decipher the mechanisms of action of these fascinating nanomachines.

Hélène CHIAPELLO
& Nathalie LEBLOND-BOURGET
Wednesday 19^th February 2025 | from 08:45 to 09:30
Session 4 | Chair: Virginie Libante

Biographies

Hélène Chiapello:

Hélène Chiapello is a senior INRAE Research Engineer in microbial genomics and bioinformatics at the MaIAGE research unit of INRAE in Jouy-en-Josas.

Helene’s research activities now focus on the analysis and characterization of microbial diversity within bacterial (meta)genomes and pangenomes. She is also currently being coordinating a groups of bioinformatics engineers and biostatisticians at INRAE and has recently been nominated data Stewart of the INRAE Microbiology and the Food Chain Division of INRAE. She continues her involvement in a number of cross-disciplinary microbial bioinformatics-related projects, particularly with regard to open science and the development of innovative training courses.

Nathalie Leblond Bourget:

Professor of Microbiology and Genetics at the University of Lorraine, she leads the research team “ICE-Transfer and Adaptation” (ICE-TeA), which develops bioinformatics tools to investigate the prevalence and diversity of integrative and conjugative elements (ICEs) and integrative and mobilizable elements (IMEs). The team’s objective is to unravel the role of these mobile elements in genome plasticity and bacterial adaptation to various environments. A key focus of their work is understanding how these elements contribute to the dissemination of antibiotic resistance within bacterial populations. The ICE-TeA team also employs an interdisciplinary approach, combining bacterial genetics, protein biochemistry, and structural biology to elucidate the mechanisms behind ICE and IME transfer. This research aims to pave the way for the development of conjugation inhibitors.

Sagar BHOGARAJU
Wednesday 19^th February 2025 | from 14:00 to 14:45
Session 6 | Chair: Steffen Backert

Biography

Sagar was born in Nizamabad, India and studied biological sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He then moved to Munich, Germany to pursue his doctoral studies on eurkaryotic cilium at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry. After PhD, Sagar moved to Frankfurt to pursue postdoctoral research in the topic of ubiquitin signaling at the Goethe University, Frankfurt Germany.
In 2018, he was appointed Group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Grenoble France.
Sagar’s research group at EMBL focuses on various topics under the umbrella of ubiquitin signaling in disease and physiology. The research in his group is funded by Agence Nationale de Recherche (ANR), EMBL and EMBO.

Bhogaraju group webpage: https://www.embl.org/groups/bhogaraju

Uli KLÜMPER
Thursday 20^th February 2025 | from 10:25 to 11:00
Session 8 | Chair: Xavier Bellanger

Biography

Dr. Uli Klümper is a microbial ecologist at the Institute of Hydrobiology at Dresden Technical University in Germany. He holds a PhD from the Technical University of Denmark and was awarded a Marie Skłodowska Curie Individual Research Fellowship to join the University of Exeter. His main research focus is on understanding the proliferation of antimicrobial resistance in the environment with a specific focus on the underlying ecological and evolutionary processes involved. He is specifically interested in the spread and selection dynamics of antibiotic resistance genes and plasmids in complex bacterial communities and the environmental drivers that cause changes in their abundance. To identify such drivers, he has developed several state-of-the-art microbiological and molecular methods to quantify plasmid transfer and the mobility of antibiotic-resistance genes. Dr. Klümper serves as a scientific advisory board member of the German “One Health Plattform” and works closely with the German Environmental Agency to define safe levels of antibiotic pollution in the environment.