Trainer biographies

Thomas Payne – EMBL-EBI

Thomas Payne is a Curator within the Metabolomics Team at EMBL-EBI responsible for MetaboLights. He worked previously as a Bioinformatic/Computational Research Associate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln centre on the large-scale, computational analysis of metabolomics, lipidomics & proteomics data. He has a PhD in Metabolic Phenotyping from Imperial College London under the supervision of Professor Jeremy Nicholson. 

Gonçalo Correia – Imperial College London

Gonçalo is a Research Associate at the Imperial MRC-NIHR National Phenone Centre (NPC) and at the Clinical Phenotyping Centre (CPC).
His main research interests are in the development of bioinformatic workflows and pipelines for the pre-processing and analysis of metabolic profiling data (Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and mass spectrometry) and on the statistical data analysis of metabolic phenotyping dataset and other -omic datasets.
For some of his work, see the publication list below or checkout his personal github profile and the NPC Informatics team github profile.

Theodore Alexandrov – EMBL

Theodore Alexandrov is a team leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), the Europe’s leading life science laboratory. He is also the head of the EMBL Metabolomics Core Facility and a faculty of the Molecular Medicine Partnership Unit between EMBL and Heidelberg University. The Alexandrov team at EMBL aims to reveal the secrets of metabolism in time and space in tissues and single cells by developing experimental and computational methods. In 2022, he is launching a BioStudio startup-in-making project at the Bioinnovation Institute in Copenhagen aimed at commercialization of spatial single-cell metabolomics for drug discovery and personalized medicine.

Yann Guitton – MetaboHub

Yann is the head of the metabolomics, lipidomics and steroidomics center in Nantes. He has a background in agronomy and a PhD in plant physiology. Since his PhD research project, he has worked on several non-targeted metabolomics projects and has improved his skills in bioinformatics data processing. Yann also has a good knowledge of software from MS manufacturers (Thermo, Agilent, Waters and Shimadzu mainly). Today, he is particularly interested in the automation of mass spectrometry data processing tasks in the GALAXY environment

Elena Chekmeneva – Imperial College London

Elena is a Research Associate in Structural Elucidation of metabolites at Imperial College London. Her current research work involves development of analytical methods and comprehensive pipelines for metabolites identification using a variety of analytical techniques, such as mass spectrometry, NMR spectroscopy, and chromatography together with advanced statistical analytical tools. Elena enjoys teaching as well as learning. The desire to learn inspired her to work in different professional and geographical environment.

Warwick (Rick) Dunn – Liverpool University

Rick is an analytical chemist and biochemist who leads the Analytical and Clinical Metabolomics Group at the University of Liverpool. The group has developed and applied lab-based and computational metabolomics tools in the study of human health, disease and ageing in mammals. He has specific interests in (1) enhancing metabolite annotation in untargeted metabolomics studies and increasing the biological knowledge we obtain from these studies and (2) studying cancer, endocrinology, cardiac diseases and human transplantation.

Lorraine Brennan – University College Dublin

Lorraine is a am a full professor and a PI in the UCD Institute of Food & Health and Conway institute. She leads a nutritional metabolomics group that are at the forefront of the application of metabolomics in nutrition research and the development of Personalized nutrition. She was awarded an ERC consolidator grant in the field for discovery work and currently she is involved in two European Consortiums- Improve and Promed-cog. They develop strategies for using metabolomics profiles to aid assessment of food intake. They also develop strategies for delivering personalised nutrition. Lorriane served as Director of the European Nutrigenomics Organization for 5 years and led a number of important initiatives such as the development of an Early Career Network and expansion of membership of the organization. Recently, she was appointed to the National Academies of Science Engineering and Medicine Standing Committee on Evidence Synthesis and Communications in Diet and Chronic Disease Relationships.

Melanie Föll – University Medical Center Freiburg

Melanie Föll is leading the junior research group “MALDI imaging” https://www.uniklinik-freiburg.de/pathologie/forschung/nachwuchsgruppe-maldi-imaging.html at the Institute of Surgical Pathology, University Medical Center Freiburg. The group analyzes clinical tumor tissue cohorts by MALDI mass spectrometry imaging to investigate spatially resolved tumor biology and derive spatio-molecular signatures with diagnostic and prognostic potential. Furthermore, the group establishes open-source tools and reproducible data analysis workflows in the Galaxy platform and works towards improving quality control, standardization and reproducibility of MALDI imaging.

Marynka Ulaszewska – Thermo Fisher Scientific

I am analytical chemist with 12+ years’ experience in application of mass spectrometry in quantitative and qualitative methods. My scientific spirit has driven me through the most advanced and cut edge projects dedicated to analytical improvements in fields of food quality&safety, clinical sciences, and environmental science. I dedicated my scientific career to investigate kinetic responses in humans to nutritional challenges, monitoring ADME of food constituents in different biological fluids. Today my work focuses on untargeted analyses and structure elucidation of small molecules, I am responsible for on-line spectral library mzcloud.org

Egon Willighagen – Maastricht University

Assistant professor (Dutch: “universitair docent”) in the Department of Bioinformatics – BiGCaT group of the NUTRIM research school at Maastricht University. Working on the RiskGONE, NanoSolveIT, Sbd4Nano, and VHP4Safety projects on safety and systems biology of substances and nanomaterials, and the COST action EpiLipidNET. Co-founder of the Chemistry Development Kit, contributor to WikiPathways, and many other open science projects. Former Editor-in-Chiefs of the Journal of Cheminformatics.

Ozgur Yurekten – EMBL-EBI

For more than 20 years, I have participated in many software development, cybersecurity, and digital transformation projects. I have proficiency in software engineering, cybersecurity, project management, digital transformation, and enterprise architecture. I have strong programming skills, especially Python, Java and C++. Over the 15 years of my professional life, I have hands-on experience in secure SDLC and tools, DevOps tools, agile methodologies, containerization technologies, and databases. I have been working at EBI as a software developer since April, 2022.

Michael Zimmermann – EMBL

Michael Zimmermann is a group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg. Michael received his Bachelor’s degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences from Basel University and his Master’s degree in Biotechnology from the Ecole Supérieure de Biotechnologie (ESBS) in Strasbourg. After research internships at Harvard University and at UCSF, he performed his PhD work at ETH Zurich in metabolomics and Systems Biology and he pursued his postdoctoral training at Yale University to investigate metabolic host-microbiome interactions. His research group at EMBL employs bacterial genetics, metabolomics, gnotobiotic mouse work, and mathematical modeling to systematically map metabolic microbiota-host interactions. Among several honors and scholarships, Michael was awarded the Daimler Benz Scholarship, Agilent’s Steve Berger Award, the 2021 FEBS Anniversary Prize, and an ERC Starting grant.

Noemí Tejera Hernandez – EMBL-EBI

I completed my PhD at La Laguna University (Tenerife, Spain), where among other techniques, I became proficient in the use of GC-FID for the quantification of fatty acids in a wide range of biological samples and set up an HPLC method to analyze carotenoids in diets and biological materials. Upon finishing my PhD, I joined the Department of Pharmacology at Vanderbilt University (US). During my postdoc, I accomplished the identification and characterization of novel lipid mediators generated by human cells and studied the oxidative metabolites of curcumin using HPLC and LCMS. After this, I joined the Department of Nutrition at the University of East Anglia (Norwich, UK), where I was part of several studies in lipid metabolism and a clinical trial that investigated the impact of several factors on flavonoids’ absorption, distribution, metabolism, and elimination in humans. From 2018 to March 2023, I applied my expertise in analytical chemistry to a new field for me, Microbiology, working in the development and validation of metabolic models on Staphylococcus epidermidis and Campylobacter. Since March 2023, I am part of MetaboLights in EMBL-EBI, as a Metabolomics Data Curator.

Krishna Tiwari – EMBL-EBI
I am analytical chemist with 12+ years’ experience in application of mass spectrometry in quantitative and qualitative methods. My scientific spirit has driven me through the most advanced and cut edge projects dedicated to analytical improvements in fields of food quality&safety, clinical sciences, and environmental science. I dedicated my scientific career to investigate kinetic responses in humans to nutritional challenges, monitoring ADME of food constituents in different biological fluids. Today my work focuses on untargeted analyses and structure elucidation of small molecules, I am responsible for on-line spectral library mzcloud.org