Alexander Idnurm was awarded a PhD from the University of Melbourne in 2002. He then did post-doctoral studies at Duke University Medical Center, USA (2002-2007) and established his own group at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. In 2014 he returned to the University of Melbourne. His research has focused on gene functions and evolution in a diverse array of fungal species, with a focus being on those that cause problems in agriculture or as human pathogens. These species have included the pathogen Cryptococcus neoformans, model zygomycete Phycomyces blakesleeanus, and the canola pathogen Leptosphaeria maculans. A unifying theme behind this research has been towards gaining insights into the mechanisms by which fungi undergo rapid change to adapt to their environments.

Yokohama National University

Graduate School of Environment and Information Sciences

Yokohama, Japan

Maiko Kagami is a Professor in Graduate school of Environment and Information Sciences, Yokohama National University, Kanagawa, Japan, since April 2018. Her research interests lie in the area of aquatic ecology, examining the dynamics and roles of plankton and microbes in biogeochemical cycling.

Maiko completed her Ph.D. at Kyoto University, Japan in 2002. During her Ph.D., she examined plankton dynamics in Lake Biwa, and found the importance of parasitic fungi infecting phytoplankton.

From 2002-2006, she worked as a JSPS research fellow (postdoc) in the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW), Center for Limnology. She discovered the new material flow via parasitic fungi in aquatic food webs, which was named as Mycoloop after Mycology and her name (Maiko).

From 2006 September, she became a faculty member, a lecturer (2006-2012) and associate professor (2012-2018) in Department of Environmental Science, Faculty of Science, Toho University, Chiba, Japan. She continued her research line of aquatic ecology.

Maiko has actively collaborated with oversea researchers, particularly Germany and Netherlands. She has been PIs of several Grants-in-Aid (KAKENHI), including those promoting international collaborations. From 2016-2018, she has been a PI of the Fund for the Promotion of Joint International Research (Fostering Joint International Research) and stayed for 1.5 year as a guest researcher at Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB-Berlin) in Germany and at Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW) in the Netherlands.

Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC-CNS), and Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB), Spain

Toni is a ICREA Research professor, and group leader at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB), and the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC), and associate professor at the UPF. He leads the comparative genomics groups. His main research interests are in the fields of genomics and evolution with significant contributions to the understanding of how genes, pathways, organisms and communities evolve and function.

University of Kiel, Germany

The research of Eva Stukenbrock focuses on the ecological interactions and co-evolution of fungi associated with plants. Since her PhD at the ETH in Zurich, she has used the plant pathogenic fungus Zymoseptoria tritici as a model to study pathogen evolution. During her post doc at Aarhus University, Denmark she worked with Prof. Mikkel Schierup to apply whole genome coalescence analyses to infer the speciation history of Z. tritici and related Zymoseptoria species. In 2010, she was appointed group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, Germany, and since 2014 she is Max Planck Fellow and professor at Kiel University.

Her group integrates computational biology with experimental and molecular approaches to study mechanisms of host specialization of plant pathogens.

Professor Sakkie Pretorius is Deputy Vice Chancellor: Research at Macquarie University in Sydney. He has a background in synthetic yeast genomics and wine biotechnology. Sakkie began his career in South Africa. At Stellenbosch University, he became the founding Director of South Africa’s Institute for Wine Biotechnology. In the US and Europe, he conducted research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany, and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium.  In 2003, Sakkie relocated to Adelaide to take up the role of Managing Director of the Australian Wine Research Institute. In 2013, he took up his current role as Deputy Vice Chancellor Research at Macquarie University where he also initiated a research program in Synthetic Biology and founded the Australian Genome Foundry. He is the driving force behind a university-wide BioInnovation Strategy and leads the Australian team of the International Synthetic Yeast Genome project. Sakkie has published 230 research papers, delivered 600 conference presentations, won research grants totalling more than $120 million, achieved many awards, and filed six patents. Over the past three decades, he has supervised or co-supervised 33 PhD students and 56 MSc students.

Sarah is head of the Centre of Excellence in Mycotoxicology and Public Health and senior full professor at Ghent University, Belgium.

She is coordinator of the international thematic network MYTOX-SOUTH®.

She has been elected as President of the International Society of Mycotoxicology (ISM) in 2021.

In 2022, she became Member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts.

Her research focuses on mycotoxin detection methods, metabolomics and untargeted analysis, mycotoxins and human health, and exposomics.

Research results are published in more than 400 A1 peer reviewed papers (web of science h-index 58).

She was an expert in EFSA CONTAM working groups (2011-2018) and a member of the Scientific Committee of the Belgian Federal Agency for Food Chain Safety (2015-2020). In 2015 she was awarded the Ghent University Prometheus Award for research.

Moreover, next to the research activities, she is the Department Chair of Bioanalysis at the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, as well as the Faculty Director of Studies since 2022.

Cathie earned her doctorate in Biology from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in 2001 under the tutelage of Orson K. Miller and completed her postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom in the lab of Lorna Casselton. She worked for four years as a research molecular biologist with the USDA-ARS, Systematic Botany and Mycology Lab in Beltsville, MD, and for four years as an Assistant and Associate Professor at Louisiana State University.  Currently she is Professor of Mycology in the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology and Director of the Arthur and Kriebel Herbaria at Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN. The Aime Lab researches the systematics and evolution of early diverging basidiomycetes and of tropical fungi. Of particular interest are rust fungi and fungal diseases of tropical tree crops such as coffee and cacao and their socio-economic impacts on rural farmers in developing economies. Cathie is a Fellow of the Mycological Society of America (MSA), the Explorer’s Club, and the Linnaean Society of London, a former officer of the MSA and past Managing Editor of the journal Mycologia, and a Purdue University Faculty Scholar.