Lunaphore Spatial Biology Week 2021

Deniz received his bachelor’s degree in Electrical & Electronics Engineering in 2009 and his master’s degree in Microsystems in 2012 from METU, Ankara, Turkey, where he worked on developing novel microresonant mass sensors for cell detection applications. After spending two years as a research assistant at EPFL, he started working at Lunaphore on a short-term Intellectual Property (IP) project. He then joined the company full-time in October 2015 as Intellectual Property Manager. He is responsible for managing the IP portfolio, advising the management on IP strategy, and gathering and structuring information on critical topics relevant to strategic decision-making.

Charlotte Stadler is a co-director of the Spatial Biology Platform at Science for Life Laboratory. She is also the Head of the National Spatial Proteomics facility. She received her Ph.D. in 2012 within the framework of the Human Protein Atlas (HPA) project, with Prof. Emma Lundberg and Prof. Mathias Uhlén as her supervisors. During her PhD she established many of the protocols and pipelines for image based subcellular protein profiling that are used in the Human Protein Cell Atlas.
Today, her main focus is to develop and implement services and technologies that can be offered by the Spatial Proteomics Facility. Her internal research projects focus on the implementation of multiplexed imaging solutions into clinical practice but also on integrating different omics types for a more complete molecular understanding of the tissue sample biology. For more information: https://www.scilifelab.se/facilities/cell-profiling/ https://www.proteinatlas.org/

Dr. Alex Klimowicz is a Principal Scientist in the Department of Immunology and Respiratory Discovery Research at Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc. In this capacity he leads the Molecular Histopathology Group, implementing and applying cutting edge in situ techniques, whole slide imaging, and digital image analysis, to build target to disease linkage in human tissue specimens for projects and external collaborations across the Department. Alex holds a PhD in Molecular Biology, and has 10 years of experience in the fields of digital pathology and quantitative immunohistochemistry. Prior to moving to Boehringer Ingelheim, Alex was an Adjunct Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Oncology at the University of Calgary, where he led a core quantitative immunohistochemistry lab focused on cancer biomarker research.

Inti Zlobec received her Ph.D. in Experimental Medicine (Pathology) from McGill University in Montreal. By combining her interests in pathology and biostatistics, she has developed biostatistical models for predicting response to preoperative radiotherapy in patients with rectal cancer and optimized workflows for biomarker analysis. In 2011, she received the title of ‘Privatdozentin’ from the University of Basel. Today, Inti Zlobec works as Associate Professor at the University of Bern, where she leads the Translational Research Unit and Tissue Bank Bern. She is Chair of the Working Group IT for the European Society of Pathology and President of the Swiss Consortium for Digital Pathology (SDiPath). Her research group includes a multi-disciplinary team using experimental methods and digital pathology to gain insights into the biology of colorectal cancers, their molecular subtypes, prognoses, and therapy responsiveness to improve patient management.

Dr. Merghoub directs the Ludwig Collaborative Laboratory and the Swim Across America Laboratory at Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK). I am a member researcher of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at MSK. I also lead the biorepository for the Melanoma Service at MSK. My research project investigates the means for developing immune-based therapies to treat cancer. In addition, some of my work aims to study the pathogenesis and treatment of melanoma as a model system and is directed in part at developing tools to study melanoma, lung cancer, and immune responses in multiple cancers. My projects are heavily collaborative across different disciplines at MSK.

Michael Surace received a BS in Biology from James Madison University in 2004 before joining the Medical Automation Research Center in the Department of Pathology at the University of Virginia. In 2006 he began graduate studies in the laboratory of Dr. Liwu Li, working on nuclear receptor and TLR signaling network crosstalk and its role in the polarization of macrophage activation phenotypes (M1/M2). He received his Ph.D. from Virginia Tech in 2010. Postdocs were at the Medical College of Virginia at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, in the departments of Anatomy and Neurobiology, investigating the cellular mechanisms of microglial activation in response to toxic insult in Parkinson’s Disease and Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, working on astrocytes as inflammatory immune cells in multiple sclerosis. In 2015 he joined STCube Pharmaceuticals as a research scientist characterizing novel immune checkpoint inhibitor antibodies with multiplex immunofluorescence and digital pathology image analysis to support mechanistic action research. In 2017 he joined Medimmune/ AstraZeneca as a scientist developing and validating Multiplex IF panels. Since then, he has continued developing the mIF platform inside Translational Medicine Oncology, focusing on validation of panels, reproducibility across sites, and improving the image and data analysis pipelines for research and clinical trials to support the development of predictive and prognostic models incorporating multiple markers and spatial information.