4-5 December, 2014
Walter and Eliza Hall Institute
Melbourne

About our speakers

Holger Gerhardt
Holger Gerhardt studied Biology in Darmstadt and Neurobiology in Tuebingen, Germany, where he also completed his PhD in Cell Biology in 2000. During his post-doctoral research with Christer Betsholtz at Gothenburg University, Sweden, Dr. Gerhardt conceptualized the endothelial tip and stalk cells; a discovery that kick-started his work on endothelial guidance and vascular patterning. In 2004, he became a group leader at the London Research Institute-Cancer Research UK. Dr. Gerhardt is EMBO Young Investigator (2007) and recipient of the prestigious Lister Prize (2008). In 2009, he received the Walter Fleming Medal of the German Society for Cell Biology, in 2011 the Judah Folkman Award of the North American Vascular Biology organization and in 2012, the Hooke Medal of the British Society of Cell Biology.
Since 2010, Dr. Gerhardt also heads the Vascular Patterning Laboratory at the VIB, KU Leuven, Belgium, building an integrated research team across institutions to combine expertise in vascular disease models with his cell biology approach to unravel principles of vascular network formation in development and disease. Since the beginning of September 2014 Dr. Gerhardt is research group leader at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) and at the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH) and concurrently W3 Professor of Experimental Cardiovascular Research at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. Furthermore, he is integrated into the German Centre for Cardiovascular Research (DZHK), a nation-wide research association.

Benoit Bruneau
Benoit G. Bruneau, Ph.D., is Associate Director and Senior Investigator at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease, and Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. He holds the William H. Younger, Jr., endowed chair in cardiovascular disease, and is the recipient of the Lawrence J. and Florence A. DeGeorge Charitable Trust/American Heart Association Established Investigator Award.
Before joining Gladstone, Dr. Bruneau was a Scientist at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and Assistant Professor in the Department of Medical Genetics and Microbiology at the University of Toronto. He earned his doctorate in Physiology at the University of Ottawa and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School in the laboratory of Jonathan and Christine Seidman.
Dr. Bruneau’s research is aimed at understanding the mechanisms by which gene programs are deployed during cardiac differentiation. He is interested in how all levels of transcriptional regulation coordinate this process, and how it is integrated during organogenesis. Ultimately through his lab’s efforts he would like to uncover how these processes are dysregulated in congenital heart disease, and how they could be harnessed to regenerate diseased hearts.