Invited Speakers

UConn Health, USA

Peter Setlow is Distinguished Professor of Molecular Biology and Biophysics at UConn Health in Farmington, CTHis BA in Chemistry is from Swarthmore College, his PhD in Biochemistry from Brandeis University, with postdoctoral work at Stanford University Medical School, he joined the faculty of UConn Health in 1971. His research on the formation, biochemistry, resistance, killing and germination of spores of the bacteria of Firmicutes, has resulted in > 500 articles on these topics. He is on the editorial boards of Journal of Bacteriology, Applied and Environmental Microbiology and International Journal of Food Microbiology, and an editor of Journal of Applied Microbiology, Letters in Applied Microbiology and PLoS One, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, an Honorary Member of the Society for Applied Microbiology and a member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering.

Harvard University, USA

Richard Losick is the Maria Moors Cabot Professor of Biology, a Harvard College Professor, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor in the Faculty of Arts & Sciences at Harvard University. He received his A.B. in Chemistry at Princeton University and his Ph.D. from MIT. He was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows. He is a past Chairman of the Departments of Cellular and Developmental Biology and Molecular and Cellular Biology. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Member of the American Philosophical Society, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology. He is a recipient of the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, the Selman A. Waksman Award of the National Academy of Sciences,  the Canada  International Gairdner Award, and the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize for Biology or Biochemistry of Columbia University.

Pasteur Institute, France

Isabelle Martin-Verstraete carried out her Ph.D at the Pasteur Institute in Paris where she studied the regulatory role of the phosphotransferase system and the carbon catabolite repression in the physiology of Bacillus subtilis. She further developed projects on the sulfur metabolism and its regulation. In 2009, she began working on the nosocomial enteropathogen Clostridium difficile mainly on the regulatory network controlling toxin synthesis, sporulation, and stress response in C. difficile. In collaboration with the team of Adriano Henriques (ITQB, Lisbon), she combined global approaches and single cell strategies to define the regulons of the sporulation-specific sigma factors in C. difficile showing that the existence of a reduced communication between the forespore and the mother cell and of a weaker connection between gene expression and morphogenesis compared to B. subtilis. She also worked on the mechanism of control of skin excision during sporulation, on the links between the general stress response and sporulation and on enzymes involved in detoxification of oxygen and ROS. 

New York University, USA

Patrick Eichemberger is an Associate Professor of Biology in the Center for Genomics and Systems Biology at He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Geneva, where he studied molecular mechanisms of transcriptional activation in the laboratory of Dr. Hans Geiselmann. He was trained as a postdoctoral fellow in the group of Prof. Richard Losick at Harvard University, where he investigated the transcriptomics of spore formation. In his own laboratory at New York University, he studies gene regulation networks, the mechanisms of spore coat assembly and the properties of the spore surface. He is the co-organizer (with Prof. Jonathan Dworkin) of the annual NYBIG conference (New York BacillusInterest Group). With Prof. Adam Driks, he co-edited the book The Bacterial Spore: From Molecules to Systemsat ASM Press.

University of Cambridge, UK

Graham Christie is Lecturer at the University of Cambridge, UK. His main research interest concerns the molecular mechanisms that underpin spore germination, in particular the structure and function of the receptors and enzymes central to this process. More recently his group have been developing novel super resolution microscopy and crystallographic techniques to reveal insights to the architecture and structure of the coat and exosporium in spores of various species. Research aside, Graham is also a Fellow and Director of Studies at Peterhouse where he teaches cell and molecular biology (using Bacillus subtilisat any opportunity) to the next generation of researchers.