Professor Harald zur Hausen studied Medicine at the Universities of Bonn, Hamburg and Düsseldorf and received his M.D. He worked as postdoc at the Institute of Microbiology in Düsseldorf, then as Assistant Professor in the Virus Laboratories of the Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, senior scientist at the Institute of Virology of the University of Würzburg, and as Chairman and Professor of Virology at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. In 1977 he moved to a similar position to the University of Freiburg. From 1983 until 2003 he was appointed as Scientific Director of the Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum (German Cancer Research Center) in Heidelberg.

Professor zur Hausen has a special interest in infection-induced malignancies. He showed the role of papillomaviruses in cervical cancer and discovered a larger number of novel virus types.

He received numerous national and international awards, including the Robert-Koch-Prize, the Charles S. Mott Prize of the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation, and the Federation of the European Cancer Societies Clinical Research Award, the William B. Coley Award for Distiguished Research in Basic Immunology of the Cancer Research Institute, the Prince Mahidol-Award, and the Warren Alpert-Prize of the Harvard University.

Harald zur Hausen holds seven Honorary Degrees. He is an elected member of various academies, such as LEOPOLDINA, Academia Europaea, Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, Polish Academy of Sciences, Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), and of research organizations including EMBO and HUGO.

He has memberships in Editorial Boards of several journals and is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Cancer. In October 2008, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

The Bazeley Oration honours Dr Val Bazeley's contribution to Australian Microbiology and is made possible with the continued support of CSL

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Kjelleberg is internationally recognised for his studies on bacterial adaptive responses, bacterial signalling and communication, bacterial biofilm biology, and chemically mediated interactions between bacteria and marine sessile organisms. His research approach includes molecular-based studies of the mechanisms by which bacteria respond to prevailing conditions, as well as environmental genomics of natural microbial consortia. Kjelleberg has published more than 230 original papers in international refereed scientific journals and 30 books and book chapters. He has established a large portfolio of patents resulting from strong collaborative research across microbiology, biofilm biology, marine ecology and chemistry. This intellectual property has been utilised by a number of biotechnology industries. His research leadership is reflected in his presidency and board membership of the International Society of Microbial Ecology. Kjelleberg and his colleagues at the Centre for Marine Bio-Innovation, of which he is Director, also serve as research providers to several companies and organisations nationally and internationally.

Centre for Marine Bio-Innovation (University of New South Wales, Australia)

Advanced Environmental Biotechnology Centre (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)

International Society of Microbial Ecology

The Rubbo Oration honours Professor Sydney Rubbo's contribution to Australian Microbiology and is made possible with the continued support of the Rubbo Trust - University of Melbourne

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Dr Hartland obtained her PhD in 1996 from the University of Melbourne funded by an Australian Postgraduate Award.  In 1998, Dr Hartland was awarded a NHMRC/Royal Society Howard Florey Fellowship, which enabled her to spend two years in the Department of Biochemistry, Imperial College London where she began to study the virulence mechanisms of enteropathogenic and enterohaemorrhagic E. coli.

In April 2000, Dr Hartland joined the Department of Microbiology, Monash University where she established an independent research laboratory investigating the pathogenesis of infections caused by E. coli and Legionella. In 2007, Dr Hartland relocated to the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Melbourne. In 2009, she was awarded an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship and promoted to Associate Professor.

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Professor Simon Foster
Molecular Biology and Biotechnology
University of Sheffield, United Kingdom


My research has 2 main foci.  Firstly we work on a number of projects concerning the pathogen Staphylococcus aureus ranging from development of a vaccine, through understanding its interaction with the human host to unravelling the basic mechanisms of growth and division.   The second main area of study is associated with the determination of the structure, architecture and dynamics of the bacterial cell wall.  For many years we have analysed the structure of cell wall peptidoglycan, but have recently begun to employ atomic force microscopy to elucidate the architecture of this essential polymer.  This has revealed novel features, which allow peptidoglycan to determine cell shape and maintain cellular integrity.

http://www.shef.ac.uk/mbb/staff/foster
http://krebs.group.shef.ac.uk

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Professor Mark Harris
Molecular Biology
University of Leeds, United Kingdom


After undergraduate study at Plymouth Polytechnic, I undertook my PhD at the Institute of Virology in Glasgow, working with Ron Hay on adenovirus DNA replication.  I then did a post-doc at the NERC Institute of Virology in Oxford working on baculoviruses with Bob Possee, and subsequently moved back to Glasgow to the Department of Veterinary Pathology where I worked on the HIV-1 Nef protein with Jim Neil.

In 1994 I obtained an MRC Senior AIDS Research Fellowship and subsequently moved to Leeds in 1997, taking up a Lectureship post in the Department of Microbiology.  Whilst retaining an interest in HIV, my lab has moved over almost entirely to the study of hepatitis C virus, focussing on mechanisms of virus replication and virus-host interactions.  My funding comes from research councils, the Wellcome Trust and industry.

I am currently an editor of Journal of General Virology and serve on both the Virus Division Committee and Council of the Society for General Microbiology.

http://www.fbs.leeds.ac.uk/staff/profile.php?tag=Harris

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Professor Barbara Howlett
School of Botany
University of Melbourne, Parkville VIC


My main research interests are fungal genetics and fungal diseases of plants. Most of the research involves Leptosphaeria maculans, the fungus that causes blackleg disease of canola. My approach ranges from developing plant disease management strategies, to jointly leading an initiative with French scientists to sequence and annotate the 16,000 genes of this fungus. My research team has pioneered the development of genetic and molecular techniques for the blackleg fungus to understand how the fungus causes disease. We use molecular markers to monitor populations of the blackleg fungus for changes of virulence. We also study sclerotinia stem rot of canola. Many findings are of major significance to fungal biology and plant disease. I also am analyzing genes involved in the biosynthesis of an important class of toxins (epipolythiodioxopiperazines) in a range of filamentous fungi, including animal and plant pathogens. These toxins include sirodesmin in L.maculans and gliotoxin in Aspergillus fumigatus. We are analysing regulation and evolution of toxin gene clusters in fungi.

http://www.botany.unimelb.edu.au/blackleg/index.html

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I became fascinated with Biology and Genetics as an undergraduate researcher with Elizabeth Jones at Carnegie Mellon University, where I am now a Professor Biological Sciences.  I went on to PhD studies at MIT with Boris Magasanik, and worked on yeast glutamine synthetase.  I did a postdoc with Ira Herskowitz at UCSF, focusing on the control of meiosis by the yeast mating type locus.  I took a position as Assistant Professor of Microbiology at Columbia University Medical Center (P&S) in 1987, and stayed until 2008, having become Acting Chair and Harold S. Ginsberg Professor of Molecular Pathogenesis.

My research focuses on pathogenicity of C. albicans and signal transduction in C. albicans and S. cerevisiae.  I was introduced to C. albicans genetics during an all-too-short sabbatical with Myra Kurtz at Merck in 1995.  I have served as course co-director of the MBL Molecular Mycology summer course since its inception in 1997.

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Professor Patrice Nordmann is the Chief of the Dept of Bacteriology- Virology at the hospital Bicetre and Professor in Clinical Microbiology at the South-Paris Medical School (South-Paris University).

He has MD and PhD degrees from Paris University. He has been trained also as a postdoc in molecular genetics and biochemistry in the US (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and in Switzerland (University of Basel). He has founded a research unit at the Bicetre hospital since 1997 (INSERM unit in 2008), on molecular genetics, epidemiology and biochemistry of emerging resistance mechanisms mostly in Gram negatives.

His group has identified many of the currently widely spread antibiotic resistance determinants. He is member of the editorial board of Emerging Infectious Diseases, Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy and Future in Microbiology. He is the co-author of more than 355 peer-reviewed publications (ISI Web of Knowledge Microbiology: 36th /2569). He is the recipient of several awards, the latest being the Infectious Diseases prize from the French Research Foundation in 2007.

Professor Patrice Nordmann's atttendance at ASM 2010 Sydney is made possible with the support of AstraZeneca

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Professor Thomas Silhavy
Molecular Biology
Princeton University, New Jersey USA


Thomas J. Silhavy is the Warner-Lambert Parke-Davis Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University.  Silhavy is a bacterial geneticist who has made fundamental contributions to several different research fields.  He is best known for his work on protein secretion, membrane biogenesis, and signal transduction.  Using Escherichia coli as a model system, his lab was the first to isolate signal sequence mutations, to identify a component of cellular protein secretion machinery, and an integral membrane component of the outer membrane assembly machinery, and to identify and characterize a two-component regulatory system.  Current work in his lab is focused on the mechanisms of outer membrane biogenesis and the regulatory systems that sense and respond to envelope stress and trigger the developmental pathway that allows cells to survive starvation.  He is the author of more than 200 research articles and three books.

Professor Silhavy received his BS in Pharmacy (summa cum laude, 1971) from Ferris State College and his MS (1974) and PhD (1975) in Biological Chemistry from Harvard University.  As a graduate student with Winfried Boos he helped characterize the role of periplasmic binding proteins in sugar transport.  As a postdoctoral fellow with Jonathan Beckwith at Harvard Medical School he helped establish gene fusions as an experimental tool.  He served as an Instructor of Microbiology at Harvard Medical School for two years, and he worked at the NCI Frederick Cancer Research Facility for five years where he was Director of the Laboratory of Genetics and Recombinant DNA.  He came to Princeton in 1984 as a founding member of the Department of Molecular Biology.

In recognition of his scientific accomplishments Silhavy was awarded an honorary Doctor of Sciences degree from his alma mater, Ferris State College (1982), was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology (1994), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2004), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2005), and he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2005) and an associate member of EMBO (2008).  In 1999 he received an NIH MERIT award, and he received the Novitski Prize for creativity from the Genetics Society of America in 2008.  His commitment to teaching is evidenced by the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton (1993), the Graduate Microbiology Teaching award from the American Society for Microbiology (2002), and the Graduate Advising Award at Princeton (2003).

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Professor Patrick Woo
Department of Microbiology
University of Hong Kong

Professor Patrick CY Woo obtained his medical degree in The University of Hong Kong in 1991. He joined the Department of Microbiology of The University of Hong Kong in 1997, and became Professor of Microbiology in 2006. Professor Woo has established himself as one of the leaders in the field of emerging infectious diseases, novel viruses, bacteria and fungi and novel causes of unexplained infectious disease syndromes, as well as microbial genomics.

Notable examples of novel viruses discovered in Professor Woo’s laboratory include human coronavirus HKU1, bat SARS coronavirus and other bat and avian coronaviruses. Professor Woo is currently an appointed member of the Coronavirus Taxonomy Study Group of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses.

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Assistant Professor Randall Olsen
Department of Pathology
The Methodist Hospital Research Institute, Houston, Texas USA

Randall J. Olsen, M.D., Ph.D., is the Associate Medical Director of Microbiology at The Methodist Hospital and an Assistant Member of The Methodist Hospital Research Institute in Houston.  He is also an Assistant Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College.

Dr. Olsen received his Ph.D. (Pathology and Microbiology, 2001) and M.D. (2003) from the University of Nebraska.  His research, focused on the use of inhibitory antibody fragments to modulate the sarcomagenic activity of transcription factors encoded by human retroviruses.  After completing a clinical pathology residency and a hematopathology fellowship, he joined the faculty of The Methodist Hospital Research Institute.

In collaboration with his mentor, Professor James M. Musser, M.D., Ph.D, Dr. Olsen’s laboratory works primarily on group A Streptococcus.  It uses genome-wide investigative strategies to understand the molecular genetic events underlying clone emergence and strain genotype-patient phenotype relationships.  In particular, his research has recently sought to identify the virulence factors that contribute to necrotizing fasciitis (“flesh-eating”) capacity.  The long-term goal is to leverage this newfound knowledge to develop new diagnostic tools, vaccine strategies and therapeutic agents that will improve patient care.

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Professor Liping Zhao

Professor Liping Zhao got his PhD in 1989 from Nanjing Agricultural University and worked in Cornell University as visiting scholar from 1993-1995. He is currently associate dean for School of Life Sciences and Biotechnology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He is a Board member of the International Society for Microbial Ecology.

His team is one of the few pioneers in China to apply molecular and genomic tools for systems understanding and manipulation of complex microbial communities in human and animal guts, as well as in soils, wastewater treatment plants, and oilfields. Their current focus is the relationship between nutrition and gut microbiota for onset and progression of chronic disease such as obesity and diabetes, and how traditional Chinese medicine and medicinal foods may modulate this relationship for achieving Preventive healthcare.

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