Course organisers

David Armstrong | EMBL-EBI

Hi, I’m David. I received a BSc in biochemistry from the University of Sheffield in 2010. I continued at the University of Sheffield, completing a Ph.D in structural biology in 2014, co-supervised by Prof. Mike Williamson and Prof. C. Neil Hunter FRS, with a focus on using solution NMR for structural determination of proteins in the chlorophyll biosynthesis pathway. I joined Protein Data Bank in Europe (PDBe) in 2015 as a database curator and in 2018 took on the role of outreach and training lead for PDBe. This role involves the coordination of training, outreach and public engagement activities for the PDBe, PDBe-KB and AlphaFold DB resources, as well as contribution towards curation of data for the PDB and EMDB archives.

Piraveen Gopalasingam | EMBL-EBI

Piv joined EMBL-EBI in 2017 as a Scientific Training Officer for the Training Team and is primarily responsible for the scientific development and delivery of training within the CABANA project. He is a Train the Trainer instructor, and has an interest in science communication, community building, equality, diversity and inclusion.

Piv gained his BSc in Biomedical sciences at Queen Mary University of London in 2009 before completing his PhD at the University of Birmingham in 2015, investigating the structural biology of cancer-causing phosphatases. Whilst writing his thesis he joined the University of Warwick as a postdoctoral researcher studying receptor-ligand interactions and later took on a teaching position at Kingston University London. During this time, he obtained associate fellowship status from the Higher Education Academy, supervised structural bioinformatics MSc projects, co-organised the local Café Scientifique and co-founded the London chapter of PubhD, a communication platform for researchers to explain their work to the public.

Gerard Kleywegt | EMBL-EBI

Gerard gained a PhD University of Utrecht, 1991. Postdoctoral Fellow, then assistant professor, research scientist and associate professor, University of Uppsala, 1992-2009. Coordinator, then Programme Director of the Swedish Structural Biology Network, 1996-2009. Professor of Structural Molecular Biology, University of Uppsala, 2009.

Christine Orengo | UCL

Christine Orengo is a computational biologist, whose core research has been the development of robust algorithms to capture relationships between protein structures, sequences and functions. She has built one of the most comprehensive protein classifications, CATH, used worldwide by tens of thousands of biologists, and central to many pioneering structural and evolutionary studies. Christine is a Vice President of the International Society of Computational Biology (ISCB). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology and Elected member of EMBO since 2014, and a Fellow of ISCB since 2016. She is a founder of ELIXIR 3DBioInfo. Her group develops computational methods for classifying proteins into evolutionary families. They exploit structural and sequence data to do this and a major interest is in the development of algorithms to recognise very distant relationships.

Sophie Spencer | EMBL-EBI

Sophie is an Events Organiser for the EMBL-EBI, having joined in October 2021. Here she manages the logistics for a variety of onsite training courses, workshops and events.

Sophie has experience in delivering a wide range of events, including but not limited to Graduations, Award Ceremonies, Conferences, and an array of virtual events. She has been working in events since graduating from the University of Leicester in 2016 where she studied Biochemistry BSc.