Frederic Garzoni

Frederic was associated to the Berger group and in charge of the Eukaryotic Expression Faculty at the EMBL Grenoble. In a collaboration with the Fender group from the IBS Grenoble he started working on human Adenovirus. They found out that one of the viral components can spontaneously form scaffolds (so called ADDomers) which are extremely stable for months even without cooling. Working in the pathogen research field, they were familiar with one practical issue vaccines usually have: delivery and storage requires an expansive cooling chain. So, by using synthetic protein engineering approaches, you could add immunogenic epitopes to the ADDomer scaffold surface and create a thermally stable vaccines, right? This idea was the starting shot for founding their own company Imophoron. Impressively, within no time Frederic and his team achieved first promising results for Chikungunya infection prevention (see publication). 
If you do not want to miss one of our conference fever pitches, join Frederic’s workshop how to make a contagious idea for vaccine design real!

Shem Johnson

Shem did his PhD and post-doc in the Gruenberg lab here in Geneva and was involved with the PhD community organization and integration of newcomers (Thanks, Shem!). Today Shem works at the University of the Arts London where he set up and leads a laboratory focused on biodesign, biomaterials, and bioart. He creates environments that helps create a conversation between science, art, and design inside the maker culture of the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.
We are looking forward to an inspiring workshop about (sm)art work, (intelligent) design and truly interdisciplinary science!

Frédéric Schütz

Frédéric studied mathematics and computer science in Geneva. For his PhD he moved to Melbourne and worked on statistical interpretation of tandem mass spectrometry data for proteomics studies. Frédéric stayed in the field of biostatistics and is nowadays a statistician at the University of Lausanne as well as at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. He is training students as well as biologists in statistical concepts and helps researchers of different biological and medical fields with their data analysis and interpretation. Besides his work for UniL and SIB, Frédéric also supports various science communication platforms and campaigns.
We are very happy to have Frédéric with us and are 95% confident that his workshop will be great!

Dos and Don'ts:
How to set up a laboratory!

Imagine you worked hard for years, you published well and then it finally happens: you got a position to run your own lab! Great! But wait, before all your exciting ideas can be realized you need to set up the lab. How do you do that, though? What are problems and challenges you have to solve? Money, time, safety, paperwork, politics, flexibility - all these kind of points need to be addressed. While scientists are well trained in dealing with scientific problems, we are poorly prepared for these kind of issues. Young PIs often have to go through that in a ‘learning by doing’ fashion. If you want to know these kind of experiences, then join our workshop ‘Dos and Don’ts - how to set up a laboratory’. We got you a group of young PIs who just opened their labs (some in Switzerland, some in the UK) and are willing to share their stories. We are happy to welcome to our discussion panel: Andreas Boland, Miriam Stoeber, Eva Frickel, Wanda Kukulski and Shem Johnson!