Organisers

Organisators

Prof. Dr. Rudi Balling is the Director of the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine in Luxembourg. He is a developmental biologist and geneticist. He studied nutrition at the Universities of Bonn and Washington State University, USA and received his PhD in Human Nutrition from the University of Aachen, Germany. After completing research posts at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute in Toronto, Göttingen and Freiburg, he became director of the Institute of Mammalian Genetics at the GSF in Munich (1993-2000) and of the Helmholtz Centre of Infection Research in Braunschweig (2001-2009). During this time Rudi Balling has coordinated the German Human Genome Project (1996-2000), the European ESFRI-Project EATRIS (European Advanced Translational Medicine Research Infrastructure) (2008-2010) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Grand Challenges Consortium on the development of Vaccine Animal Models (2005-2009). In 2009, he founded the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB), an interdisciplinary Research Centre at the University of Luxembourg dedicated to the analysis of neurodegenerative diseases through computational and system biology oriented approaches. Rudi Balling is member of several Scientific Advisory Boards, amongst others the Excellence Cluster „Inflammation at Interfaces“ at the University of Kiel (since 2013, elected chairman since 2014), the RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences Advisory Council (since 2013) and the Institute of Molecular Genetics (IMG), Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (since 2013).

Dr Reinhard Schneider is the Head of the Bioinformatics Core facility at the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) at the University of Luxembourg. He received his PhD in biology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany and has over 90 research papers published. Between 1994-2010 he worked as a Team Leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, where he led the “Data Integration and Knowledge Management”. Before joining the EMBL he was co-founder of LION bioscience AG, Heidelberg where he served as Chief Information Officer being responsible for the worldwide software development. Reinhard Schneider was also the CEO of LION bioscience Research Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts, when he established an IT-based knowledge management system for Bayers gene-based research and development efforts. Prior to founding LION bioscience, he worked as a scientist in the biocomputing department at the EMBL, Heidelberg, where he studied various aspects of protein structures. He co-developed a large-scale automated sequence analysis system which became the foundation of LION’s software offering and is an expert in the use of massive parallel computers in biology. He is a member of the executive committee of the International Society for Computational Biology where he serves as the treasurer and chairs the Governance, Fundraising and Finance Committee. Besides his academic career, he is involved in several start-up projects in Germany and Luxembourg.