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Speakers
Thermo Fisher Scientific Guest Speakers
 Dr Ryan Bomgarden, PhD As a Senior Staff Scientist at Thermo Fisher Scientific, Ryan leads a team of scientists in the mass spectrometry reagent group focused developing novel products and workflows for the proteomics market. Ryan received his bachelor’s degree from Coe College with majors in Chemistry and Molecular Biology before completing his Ph.D. at Stanford University under Dr. Karlene Cimprich where he characterized ATR checkpoint kinase DNA binding and signaling in UV-sensitive patient cells. In 2005, Ryan joined Pierce Biotechnology, now part of Thermo Fisher Scientific, where he has led the development of over a 100 new products including Tandem Mass Tag reagents for relative quantitation of proteomic samples, protein digest standards for LC-MS quality control, MS-cleavable crosslinkers for protein structure analysis, Heavy Protein IVT Kits for production of stable isotope-labeled proteins; and ActivX Probes for enzyme inhibitor profiling and detection. |
 Dr Sergei Snovida, PhD Sergei Snovida has developed many products for mass spectrometry, including TMT reagents, instrument calibration solutions, and various sample preparation kits for proteomics experiments. Prior to obtaining his Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry from the University of Manitoba (Canada), he worked as an analytical quality control scientist at several pharma and industrial chemical companies. Sergei completed postdoctoral work at Academia Sinica (Taiwan) where he worked on the development of new MS techniques for glycomics and glycoproteomics workflows. His professional interests include separations, peptides & carbohydrates, experimental design, and analytical method development and optimization in general. |
Local Speakers
 Dr David W. Greening, PhD Dr Greening is laboratory head of Molecular Proteomics within the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute, and La Trobe University. David has an interest in the development and application of new technologies to better understand extracellular signalling, exploring how exosomes and other biological extracellular vesicles can reprogram cellular environments. He completed his PhD at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and University of Melbourne, and further post-doctoral studies at Joint Proteomics Laboratory between Walter and Eliza Hall Institute and the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, where he developed new approaches to understand secreted factors and their function by mass spectrometry. David’s work combines molecular biology, subcellular fractionation with quantitative proteomics including metabolic and isobaric labelling, to explore fundamental processes of exosome composition and function, with emphasis on developing new diagnostic strategies and novel modulators of cellular reprogramming and regenerative medicine. |
 Dr Albert Lee, PhD
Neurodegenerative disorders, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD), are increasing in prevalence but lack targeted and mechanism-based therapies. Despite various biological stresses (e.g. oxidative stress) and processes (e.g. RNA metabolism) that appear to contribute to the pathogenesis of these diseases, the molecular events and converging pathways behind these diseases remain unclear. Both ALS and FTD are characterized by perturbations to protein and cellular homeostasis (“proteostasis”) that ultimately leads to pathological features, such as aberrant protein aggregation and inclusion formation within neurons, which correlate with neurodegeneration. Therefore, the central hypothesis to our research program is that ageing and cellular stresses (such as gene mutations) contribute to functional impairment of the proteostasis network, thereby facilitating aberrant neuronal protein aggregation.
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 Dr Benjamin L. Parker, PhD Dr Benjamin Parker completed is PhD split between the University of Southern Denmark and University of Sydney where he developed assays to quantify protein modifications by mass spectrometry. He performed post-doctoral research with Prof. David James in the diabetes program at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and then obtained an NHMRC Early Career Fellowship in the Metabolic Systems Biology Program at the Charles Perkins Centre. He is currently a group leader the Department of Physiology at The University of Melbourne. His research team is focused on understanding how genetic variants and signal transduction regulate metabolism with the goal of identifying new therapeutic targets to treat metabolic disease. |
 Dr David Stroud, PhD David Stroud is an NHMRC Career Development Fellow and laboratory head within the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Melbourne. He has an interest in the development and application of new technologies to better understand the assembly of multi-protein membrane complexes, with a focus on those found in the mitochondria and the endomsomal protein sorting system. David was awarded his doctorate from the University of Freiburg, Germany in 2011 under the supervision of Prof. Klaus Pfanner. In 2012 David returned to Australia and was awarded an NHMRC Peter Doherty ECR Fellowship. Since then, his work has been focused on mitochondrial respiratory chain assembly and miss-assembly in disease. Under the mentorship of Prof. Mike Ryan, David established a mitochondrial systems biology research program which moved to The University of Melbourne in 2018. David’s work combines traditional biochemistry and molecular biology techniques with an in-house proteomics pipeline, and he routinely employs technologies such as metabolic and isobaric labelling, whole cell proteomes and affinity enrichment mass-spectrometry (including proximity tagging approaches such BioID) to answer basic biological questions, understand the pathogenesis of human metabolic disease, and develop new diagnostic strategies. |
 Dr Ralf B. Schittenhelm, PhD Ralf studied Biochemistry at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, and completed his PhD at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, in 2009. He joined the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) as a post-doctoral fellow to hone his skills in proteomics working alongside Prof. Rudi Aebersold, one of the world pioneers of modern proteomics technologies. In 2012, Ralf was awarded a Swiss National Foundation (SNF) Fellowship and moved to Australia to join the group of Prof. Anthony Purcell at Monash University. He received in the following year a SFGBM (Swiss Foundation for Grants in Biology and Medicine) Fellowship for Advanced Researchers, and was appointed in 2016 as Director of the Monash Proteomics & Metabolomics Platform to provide mass spectrometric expertise to researchers and the broader community. |
 Dr Asolina Braun, PhD Asolina completed her undergraduate degree at Leibniz University (Hanover, Germany) in May 2008 and went on to complete her PhD in Infection Biology at the Hanover Medical School. Asolina's training and research experience covers a broad range of disciplines including; immunology, molecular biology, biochemistry and genetics. She has contributed to the field of research by establishing an intralymphatic injection technique in mice to track how immune cells migrate from the periphery to the draining lymph nodes. |
 Ashleigh Dale Ashleigh Dale completed her Bachelor of Science (Biochemistry, Molecular Biology & Genetics) with First Class Honours in 2018 at the University of Sydney and investigated the interactome of Campylobacter jejuni in the context of protein N-linked glycosylation by cross-linking mass spectrometry (XL-MS). This work is now being expanded on in her PhD under the supervision of Prof. Stuart Cordwell and her auxiliary supervisor Dr. Mark Larance. Ashleigh presented the work completed in her Honours project at APS Lorne Proteomics in 2019 which won her a student oral award. She will also be showcasing this work at HUPO 2019. Her research interests include interactomics and improving databases of major pathogens through advances in XL-MS, as well as using this information to elucidate pathogenesis strategies as possible treatment targets. |