Dr. Tobias J. Erb studied chemistry and biology at the Univ. of Freiburg, Germany and the Ohio State Univ., USA to graduate with highest honors in 2009. After a 2-year stint as DFG-funded postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Genomic Biology (Univ. of Illinois, USA), T. Erb joined ETH Zurich, Switzerland to found his independent junior research group. In 2014, Dr. Erb accepted an independent group leader position at the Max Planck Society and received an ERC Starting Grant. Dr. Erb holds several awards, among them the PhD Award of the German Society of General and Applied Microbiology and the Encouragement Award of the Swiss Society of Micro¬biology. Recently Tobias Erb was elected and appointed as member of the Young Academy at the German National Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina. Since 2015 he serves on the editorial board of Applied and Environmental Microbiology.
Dr. Arren Bar-Even completed his bachelor studies at the Excellence Program of the Technion, the Israeli Institute of technology. He received his M.Sc. from the Weizmann Institute of Science, specializing in bioinformatics and systems biology. He completed his Ph.D. studies in the Weizmann Institute in less than three years, studying cellular metabolism. He was an independent research group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology. Arren Bar-Even’s lab studied the design principles of metabolic pathways and their implementation for the metabolic engineering of organisms to support novel growth properties and production of value-added chemicals.
Ch. E. Laura Martinelli, Chemical Engineering Master degree in 2001. She worked for 7 years for the Fiat Research Center as project leader. Successfully coordinated several EU, National and local projects. During this period she coordinated the polymer molecular modelling group and the nanostructured material group in Plast-Optic Research Center. (Co)author several publications in recognized scientific international press, currently running an agency providing project management services in R&D field. She has completed a training in Gestalt Counseling and she is currently completing a master in Organizational Development with the Gestalt Approach. She has started the degree in Cognitive a Bio-psychology at the University of Padova.
Dr. Patrik R. Jones, Senior Lecturer in Industrial Biotechnology, Principal Investigator of the Microbial Metabolic Engineering group, PhD in Plant Biochemistry. 15 yr's experience in Metabolic Engineering and Microbial Biotechnology in academia and for-profit companies. Currently ERC Consolidator Grant holder (2011-2015), until recently coordinator of DirectFuel (FP7, www.directfuel.eu) and AquaFEED projects.
Dr. Dan S. Tawfik obtained his B.Sc. in Chemistry and Biochemistry, in 1998, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (with distinction). Following an M.Sc. in Biotechnology (ibid, with distinction), he perused a Ph.D. at the Weizmann Institute of Science and obtained his degree in 1996. Subsequently, he became a postdoctoral fellow at the MRC Centre for Protein Engineering (director Prof. Sir Alan Fersht). In 1999, he became a group Leader in Chemical Biology at the MRC Centre for Protein Engineering, Cambridge. He joined the Department of Biological Chemistry at the Weizmann Institute of Science in 2001 as a Senior Scientist. By 2006, he was promoted to an Associate Professor, and in 2010 became the Benoziyo Professor of Biochemistry.
Dr. Hagai Karchi holds B.Sc and M.Sc degrees from the Hebrew University of Jerusalemױs Faculty of Agriculture, specializing in gene expression. He holds a Ph.D. from The Weizmann Institute of Science and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Dr. Karchi is co-founder of Evogene and served as its CEO from 2002 to 2004. He has over 15 years’ experience in the breeding of tomatoes and in molecular genomics research. His scientific achievements include the development of a molecular system for gene discovery and the development of high yielding, high quality greenhouse tomato varieties. Dr. Karchi has lectured widely in the field of plant genomics and has an extensive record of publications and patents.
