Keynote Speakers

Roxanne Keynejad is a Consultant Psychiatrist and Clinical Senior Lecturer at King's College London. 

Her research aims to address the social determinants of women's mental health with a particular focus on gender-based violence. Her research collaborations include psychological intervention development and piloting in Ethiopia and menthal health training for medcial students in Somaliland. She is an active member of Circle U. European University Alliance and is committed to strengthening decolonial understanding in global mental health research.  

Christine Falk, PhD, is full Professor for Transplant Immunology and Director of the Institute of Transplant Immunology at Hannover Medical School (MHH) since 2010.

She focuses on mechanisms of ischemia/reperfusion injury mediated innate and adaptive immunity. Regarding rejection after transplantation, the Falk lab focuses on tissue-resident memory T and NK cells, especially in the lung, and their potential role in immunotherapy of lung cancer. She graduated as PhD at the Institute of Immunology at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, Germany, in the field of tumor immunology and continued to work on T and NK cell recognition of solid tumors as postdoc fellow at the Institute of Molecular Immunology, Helmholtz Centre Munich. In 2004, she received her Venia Legendi at LMU for Human Immunology. 2006-2010, she worked at the German Cancer Research Centre (DKFZ) in Heidelberg, Germany, as group leader of the Research Group "Immune Monitoring" with a strong interest in the improvement of cancer immunotherapy by understanding the mechanisms involved in treatment resistance.

Full professor of engineering physics and rookie entrepreneur Prof. Boudoux obtained her PhD from the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program (USA). She then completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Ecole Polytechnique (France) before starting her laboratory in 2007 at Polytechnique Montréal (Canada).

Her research topics range from laser-tissue interactions to novel instruments for biomedical imaging. With a colleague and strategic investors, she later founded Castor Optics, a spin-off company commercializing a new line of double-clad fiber couplers.

Evelien Smits is Full Professor at the University of Antwerp, head of the Center for Oncological Research (CORE), chair of the Department and co-founder of the recognized research excellence consortium with 9 promotors and more than 100 research members, the Integrated Personalized and Precision Oncology Network (IPPON).

The strategic mission of her research is to improve the quality-of-life and the lifespan of cancer patients by increasing the applicability of immunotherapy, both in terms of number of responsive cancer types and number of responsive patients. Therefore, Evelien Smits has got a passion for developing novel immunotherapeutic strategies to treat cancer by combining immune activation and tackling immunosuppression. The major research lines of her team are on cell therapy using natural killer cells or dendritic cells and on immune checkpoints. In addition, she is co-principal investigator of academic investigator-driven cell therapy studies at the Center for Cell Therapy and Regenerative Medicine at the Antwerp University Hospital. Her research comprises the full spectrum from basic research till clinical studies and she has proven to be able to bring new discoveries from the bench to the bedside. Amongst other prizes, in 2017 Evelien Smits received the FWO/FNRS AstraZeneca Foundation Award for her research achievements in the domain of immunotherapy.
She has got several national and international collaborations and a broad international network, evidenced by her obtained grants (including Horizon Europe CANCERNA and MSCA Doctoral Network PlasmACT), research visits, co-publications and memberships of consortia such as COST IMMUNO-model and COST PlasTHER. She has got 175 Web of Science-indexed articles (h-index 50; 9000 citations) as part of the evidence that she achieved characterization of the tumor immune microenvironment and that she successfully investigates novel combination strategies in different cancers, both preclinically and clinically.

Leonid Sazanov is a Professor leading research group “Structural Biology of Membrane Protein Complexes” at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria.

He uses cryo-electron microscopy and X-ray crystallography to study structure and mechanism of membrane-embedded molecular machines from the domain of bioenergetics. His group solved the first structures of bacterial and mammalian respiratory complex I, V/A-type ATPase and proton-translocating transhydrogenase. Leonid was born in Belarus, obtained PhD in Biophysics from Moscow State University in Russia, and performed research in UK at the University of Birmingham, Imperial College London and MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. Since 2000 he was a group leader in the MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit in Cambridge and moved to ISTA in 2015. Leonid is a member of EMBO and a Fellow of the Royal Society.