The Participants

Is a a senior staff scientist in The Center for Computational Structural Biology at the Scripps Research Institute. For the past decade my work has filled the gaps existing between scientific visualization and artistic illustration leading to better understanding and a better view of some highly complex scientific data: such as induced-fit molecular recognition, viral unit self-assembly, the complex mechanism of DNA structure, and crowded cellular environments. I have been the lead developer of softwares frameworks dedicated to multiscale molecular modeling and visualization : ePMV (protein visualization in third party 3D software), cellPACK (crowded cellular molecular modeling), cellPACKgpu (real time crowded cellular modeling), mesoscale ( web interface for integrating data ), cellPAINT ( illustration and interaction with molecular landscape) and cellPAINT-VR (modeling and interacting with biological structure in a Virtual Reality context). 

Drew Berry is a biologist-animator renowned for his visually stunning and scientifically accurate animations of molecular and cellular processes. Trained as a cell biologist and microscopist Drew brings scientific rigour to each project, ensuring current research data are represented. Since 1995, Drew has been a biomedical animator at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research. His work has been exhibited at international venues, including the Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, and the Royal Institute of Great Britain. In 2011, he collaborated with the musician Björk for her album Biophilia. His many awards include an Emmy, a BAFTA, and the MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship. See his animations on wehi.tv.

Bridget Carragher is currently the Lead Technical Director of the recently established Chan-Zuckerberg Imaging Institute.  She received her Ph.D. in Biophysics from the University of Chicago in 1987. She then worked in various positions, both in industry and academia, until moving to the Scripps Research Institute in 2001. From 2002–2022, together with Clint Potter, she served as the Director of the National Resource for Automated Molecular Microscopy (NRAMM), an NIH-funded national biotechnology research resource. NRAMM’s mission was the development of automated imaging techniques for solving three-dimensional structures of macromolecular complexes using cryo-transmission electron microscopy (cryoEM). NRAMM contributed a number of novel technical advances for cryoEM and cryoET and has been acknowledged in ~500 scientific publications.

In 2007 Bridget and Clint co-founded NanoImaging Services, Inc., which provides cryoEM and other microscopy services to the biopharmaceutical and biotechnology industry. In 2015 Bridget and Clint moved their academic lab from The Scripps Research Institute to the New York Structural Biology Center and took up positions as Co-Directors of the Simons Electron Microscopy Center (SEMC). SEMC expanded to encompass the National Center for CryoEM Access and Training, the National Center for In-situ Tomographic Ultramicroscopy, and the Simons Machine Learning Center. Bridget is an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, BMB department.

John Glass is a professor and leader of the JCVI Synthetic Biology Group. His expertise is in molecular biology, microbial pathogenesis, RNA virology, and microbial genomics. Dr. Glass is also an adjunct faculty member of the University of Maryland at College Park Cellular and Molecular Biology Program, and member of the Global Viral Network Scientific Leadership Board.

Dr. Glass is part of the Venter Institute team that created a synthetic bacterial cell. In reaching this milestone, the Venter Institute scientists developed the fundamental techniques of the new field of synthetic genomics including genome transplantation and genome assembly. Dr. Glass was also leader of the JCVI project that rapidly made synthetic influenza virus vaccine strains in collaboration with Novartis Vaccines and Diagnostics, Inc., and Synthetic Genomics, Inc. At the JCVI he has also led the bacterial outer membrane vesicle based vaccine, genome transplantation, and Mycoplasma genitalium minimal genome projects, and projects studying other mycoplasma and ureaplasma species. Glass and his Venter Institute colleagues are now using synthetic biology and synthetic genomics approaches developed at the JCVI to create cells and organelles with redesigned genomes to make microbes that can produce biofuels, pharmaceuticals, and industrially valuable molecules.

Danielle Grotjahn is an Assistant professor in the Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology at Scripps Research. She joined Professor Gabe Lander’s lab at The Scripps Research Institute for her Ph.D. studies, where she used cryo-electron tomography and subtomogram averaging to solve the first three-dimensional structure of the microtubule-bound dynein motor complex. Danielle completed a short postdoctoral position in Dr. Grant Jensen’s lab at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) before starting her independent career as a Scripps Fellow in 2019. She was promoted to Assistant Professor in 2021. Danielle was awarded consecutive Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovation awards from the Damon Runyon Cancer foundation in 2021 and 2023, The Baxter Young Investigator in 2022, and named a Pew Scholar in 2023. Her lab studies the structural and functional interactions that mediate stress-induced modulations to mitochondrial networks using cellular cryo-electron tomography. Her lab also specializes in developing analysis tools to quantify the complex architecture of filaments and membranes visible within cellular tomograms.

Links:

https://grotjahnlab.org/

https://github.com/GrotjahnLab/surface_morphometrics/

Ever since working on my first depictions of cell biology as a Medical Illustrator, I have dreamed of being able to peer deep into a cell— to explore structural and mechanistic relationships across all scales as a means to better understand a cell’s inner workings. I eventually returned to graduate school for a second degree in Art Olson’s lab at the Scripps Research Institute to establish protocols and develop software that could begin to assemble multitudes of fragmented data, spanning all of biology, into integrated whole-cell structural models. My former UCSF lab’s Mesoscope project and the teams I currently manage at the Allen Institute for Cell Science continue this mission by uniting biologists, UX Designers, programmers, and artists to interoperate the computational tools of science and art. We built the Allen Cell Explorer website (allencell.org) to provide online access to a trove of volumetric microscopy images, analysis tools, modeling tools, and scientific summaries that describe the organizational diversity of human stem cells. Now, in 2023, we have begun an effort to refactor and democratize our website, data, and tools to make them more robust, reproducible, and easy to use.

Zaida "Zan" Luthey-Schulten is the Murchison-Mallory Endowed Chair in Chemistry at the University of Illinois, She received a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Southern California in 1969, a M.S. in Chemistry from Harvard University in 1972, and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University in 1975. From 1975 to 1980, she was a Research Fellow at the Max-Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Goettingen, and from 1980 to 1985, a Research Fellow in the Department of Theoretical Physics at the Technical University of Munich. She is the Murchison-Mallory Endowed Chair in Chemistry.

Luthey-Schulten the new Director of the new NSF Science and Technology Center for Quantitative Cell Biology is primarily responsible for the GPU-based integrative cell modeling initiatives and knowledge transfer with NVIDIA.

Peter Mindek is a co-founder and CTO of nanographics, a scientific visualization studio based in Vienna, Austria. He received his doctoral degree from TU Wien in 2015. In his dissertation, he proposed ways to visually explore large parameter spaces of visualizations of scientific data. As a post-doctoral researcher at TU Wien, he developed techniques for illustrative molecular visualization and storytelling. Currently, besides scientific visualization, his research interests include procedural animation and automated music generation for enhancing visual stories.

https://nanographics.at

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvehvv6Pe8121DLiAtRSfTA

Alexander Rose is a BIOVIA R&D Software Engineering Manager at Dassault Systèmes. He previously worked for the RCSB PDB at UCSD and has a PhD in Computational Biophysics from the Humboldt University of Berlin. He is a principal developer of the web molecular graphics suite Mol* (https://molstar.org) and previously created NGL (https://nglviewer.org), one of the first modern web molecular graphics viewers. His web molecular graphics software is widely used in academia and industry to visualize and interrogate molecular data in life and material sciences. He likes to run along the intersection of structural biology and professional software development to enable scientists to benefit more from 3D molecular data.

Vishal Sivasankar is a Research Scientist and the leader of the Physics of Life group at Zia Lab in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Missouri– Columbia. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in Mechanical Engineering in the field of Thermal, Fluid, and Energy Sciences, for the development of computational models for reactive wetting. His research at MU focuses on exploring the underlying mechanisms that govern the functions of biological cells. His research focuses on developing bio-colloidal physics framework to study the interactions and transport of constituent biomolecules that orchestrate cellular behavior 

Elizabeth Villa, Ph.D. is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and an Associate Professor of Molecular Biology in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of California San Diego. She completed her PhD in Biophysics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a Fulbright Fellow. She was a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Munich. She was recruited to UC San Diego in 2014. Dr. Villa was the recipient of an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award to pursue high-risk high-reward research developing cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) and new technological and computational techniques to advance structural cell biology. She was named a Pew Scholar in 2017, and she was selected to become a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in 2021.

Links:villalab.ucsd.edu

Professor Ynnerman is a visualization researcher who focuses on developing fundamental concepts that find their application in real world solutions. He is passionate about the communication of science to both laymen and experts. He is the proud leader of a large research division with great people and have the privilege of being the director of a visualization center with research, education, innovation and public engagement as an agenda.

Professor Ynnerman is currently the head of the Media and Information Technology division at the department of Science and Technology (ITN) at Linköping University and is the director of the Norrköping Visualization Center C. He is the head of a renowned research division in Visualization and Computer Graphics. He plays a leading role on the international visualization arena and is a frequently invited speaker at international conferences and other events.