Canada Research Chair in Systems Genetics & Cell Biology; Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research
and the Department of Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto.

Brenda completed undergraduate and PhD studies at the University of Toronto before taking a role as Research Fellow with Dr. Ira Herskowitz at the University of California, San Francisco, in 1991. Her research focusses on understanding cellular signaling processes and genetic networks in budding yeast using functional genomics, high content screening and gene expression tools. Topics of primary interest include: Exploring Functional Genomics and Genetic Networks using synthetic genetic array (SGA) technology, Phenomics via combined SGA with high content screening (HCS) to define protein localization and abundance in a variety of situations, and Cell cycle-regulated transcription using SGA analysis of reporter gene-expression.

Professor, Biotechnology, Graz University of Technology

Anton Glieder is Prof for Biotechnology at the Graz University of Technology, where he leads a research group for the engineering of protein and pathway expression systems by yeasts with a special emphasis on P. pastoris expression systems. After his studies in chemistry at the University Vienna and his PhD studies in Microbiology at the University Graz, he spent some years as a head of innovation in the food industry and as a postdoc in Biocatalysis at the University of Technology in Graz. As visiting scientist at Caltech and UCSD he gained experience in protein engineering and yeast strain genomics and engineering, which also led to many close and successful collaborations with industry. Later he became a cofounder and CEO&CSO of the Austrian Centre of Industrial Biotechnology and since 2014 he is also founder and CEO of the university spin off bisy GmbH, which provides tools, technologies and services for protein production by P. pastoris with new research facilities in Gleisdorf, Austria.

Research Professor in Systems and Synthetic Biology

Verena Siewers is a Research Professor at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. She obtained her PhD in 2004 in Molecular Biology from the University of Münster (Germany) with a thesis on secondary metabolite production in the grey mold Botrytis cinerea. She worked as a PostDoc at the Technical University of Denmark (2005-2008) on engineering Saccharomyces cerevisiae to produce non-ribosomal peptides, before joining Chalmers University of Technology in 2008, first as a Researcher, then Senior Researcher (2016-2020) and since 2021 as Research Professor. Her main research interest is the application of yeast for the production of various compounds including food ingredients, bioplastics, agrochemicals, nutraceuticals, and pharmaceuticals. Major activities are concentrated around the development of synthetic biology tools such as metabolite biosensors to optimise these yeast cell factories.

Dr Tom Williams completed his PhD in synthetic biology at The University of Queensland in 2015. Tom then started as a postdoctoral researcher under the mentorship of Professors Sakkie Pretorius and Ian Paulsen at Macquarie University where he worked on the ‘Yeast 2.0’ synthetic yeast genome project, engineering one-carbon metabolism in yeast through a CSIRO Future Science Platform Fellowship, engineering minimal genomes, and on a diverse array of projects focused on directed evolution and biosensor engineering. In 2022 Tom became a research group leader and Chief Scientist of the Australian Genome Foundry at Macquarie University. Most recently, Tom co-founded and serves as CEO of Number 8 Bio, which is using synthetic biology to decarbonize agriculture.