Scientific Programme

This year our Plenary Speakers are:

Valerie O’Donnell, PhD, FMeDSci is Professor of Biochemistry, Cardiff University.

Valerie O’Donnell’s research is focused on lipid signalling in innate immune cells.  Her lab is recognised for their discoveries on bioactive oxidized lipids generated by blood cells and platelets, that promote thrombosis and regulate innate immunity. Her group in Cardiff have identified several families of lipids, elucidated their structures, uncovered their biochemical mechanisms of formation, then characterised their pro-coagulant and immunoregulatory functions.  Aside from this, her work has demonstrated how metabolism of bioactive lipids by mitochondria is needed for platelet aggregation and found that blood pressure can be impacted by the gut microbiome. 

Valerie is overall lead of LIPID MAPS, an ELIXIR Core Data Resource, and a member of the Global Biodata Coalition.  Prior to working at Cardiff, she was a Parker B Frances Fellow at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and EU Biotech/Marie Curie at the University of Bern, Switzerland, where she researched mechanisms of free radical and oxidative stress signalling in the vasculature.
 

Cristina Legido-Quigley, PhD, is affiliated with King’s College London and with the Steno Diabetes Centre Copenhagen.

Cristina is also a Lundbeck Foundation fellow. Her current appointments are Reader in Systems Medicine, Institute of Pharmaceutical Science, Life Science & Medicine, King’s College London, UK; Senior Scientific Consultant, Steno-Diabetes Centre, Copenhagen, Denmark; Director and founder of the consultancy company BrainLogia, UK; Chair of International Clinical Metabolomics, Denmark; International Scientific Advisor Board Member, Alzheimer’s Foundation, Paris, France.

Cristina's main area of interest is applying lipidomics and metabolomics research in neurometabolism, to study how the brain copes with disease, as well as finding clinical tests for healthy aging, Alzheimer's, cognition, diabetes and metabolic diseases. Her discoveries span fatty molecules that are important for cognition, molecules that in liver alert to tissue damage, together with modulating molecular pathways for improving the treatment of diabetes. She is also researching risk scores leveraging biomarkers and clinical data, multiomics and machine learning for better personalised diagnoses in the clinic. She has been a group leader at King's College London since 2006. In 2018 she moved to Steno, a hospital and research centre in Denmark, to be the Head of Systems Medicine. She shares her findings in more than 200 scientific publications in the biotechnology and medical fields (https://legido-quigley-lab.com/research.html to browse main publications).