BEAR PGR Conference Keynote Speakers

 
Presenter Description

loman-nick-230x230 Professor Nick Loman
Professor of Microbial Genomics and Bioinformatic
School of Biosciences

Nick is Professor of Microbial Genomics and Bioinformatics at the University of Birmingham. His research explores the use of cutting-edge genomics and metagenomics approaches to the diagnosis, treatment and surveillance of infectious disease. Nick has so far used high-throughput sequencing to investigate outbreaks of important Gram-negative multi-drug resistant pathogens such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Acinetobacter baumannii and Shiga-toxin producing Escherichia coli. His current work focuses on the genetic diversity of Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection in chronic lung diseases such as cystic fibrosis as a diagnostic and prognostic marker. A more general aim is to develop bioinformatics tools to aid the interpretation of genome and metagenome-scale data in routine clinical practice.

He is currently Co PI of the CLIMB project -  initiative to deliver a cutting-edge scalable and dynamic bioinformatics platform to support academic research groups, government agencies and health service facing the challenges of big data in modern microbiology.

 


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Dr Luisa Orsini
Associate Professor in Biosystems and Environmental Change
School of Biosciences

Dr Luisa Orsini is an Associate Professor in Biosystems and Environmental Change at the University of Birmingham (UoB). She uses multidisciplinary science to understand evolutionary processes and mechanisms that enable freshwater communities, responsible for delivering critical ecosystem services (e.g. clean water, nutrient cycling, food provisioning) to persist in the face of human impact. Evolution occurs on multidecadal time scales. To reconstruct long-term dynamics, Orsini applies high throughput sequencing technologies (genomics, transcriptomic, metabolomics, environmental DNA) to sedimentary archives of inland waters, which have the unique advantage of preserving biological and environmental signals temporally. These archives are the resource of ‘resurrected’ specimens of the keystone crustacean Daphnia magna (waterflea), the biological agent at the core of a novel engineering biology solution for wastewater decontamination. Orsini applies engineering biology to translate fundamental science discoveries into practical applications of wide impact. To this end, she develops biotechnologies towards process-scale surface and wastewater decontamination as well as novel tools for the cost-effective and high throughput quantification of biodiversity to guide environment agencies and policy makers in conservation strategies. By translating cutting-edge multidisciplinary science into practical applications, Orsini provides tools and processes for mitigation interventions that enable green growth and meet UN developmental goals. 

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Professor Jack Grieve
Professor of Corpus Linguistics
Department of English Language and Linguistics

Jack is a Professor of Corpus Linguistics at the University of Birmingham. My research involves analysing large corpora of natural language to understand language variation and change. I am especially interested in grammatical and lexical variation in the English language across time, space and communicative context, as well as developing methods for quantitative linguistic analysis. I also conduct research on authorship analysis and sometimes consult on casework as a forensic linguist..

Jack also consults on casework as a forensic linguist and is on the editorial boards of the open access journal Frontiers in Digital Humanities and the open access book series Language Variation published by Language Science Press.

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