CHAIR: Professor Iain Mattaj, Director General, EMBL European Molecular Biology Laboratory

Iain Mattaj is the Chair of the ISAB and has been Director General of the EMBL since 2005. He obtained his PhD in 1979 from the University of Leeds and went on to do postdoctoral work at the Friedrich Miescher Institute and the Biocenter, Basel, Switzerland. Iain has been at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg for 22 years where he spent five years as a Group Leader, followed by nine years as Programme Coordinator of the Gene Regulation Programme. Subsequently Iain acted for six years as Scientific Director of EMBL before becoming Directore General three years ago.

Iain has received many international awards for his research, including The Louis-Jeantet Prize in 2001, and he is a Fellow of both The Royal Society and The Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Professor Susan Gasser, Functional implications of nuclear organization

Susan Gasser obtained her PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Basel, Switzerland. She has been Director of the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland since 2004. She is also Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of Basel, Switzerland

Susan's research aims to understand how nuclear and chromosomal context establishes and maintains patterns of gene expression and replication origin usage. Susan has received numerous awards, including in 2006 the Gregor Mendel Medal of the Charles University of Prague.

Professor Frank Grosveld, Professor Dept of Cell Biology, Erasmus Medical Centre, Rotterdam

Frank Grosveld is a molecular biologist whose research interests are in the regulation of transcription during development with emphasis on transcription factor networks and genomic interactions regulating red blood cell differentiation. He obtained his PhD at McGill University, Montreal and after completing two postdoctoral periods with Charles Weissmann (Zurich) and Richard Flavell (Amsterdam and London) he started his own research groups at the National Institute for Medical Research, Mill Hill, London.

He is presently a professor and Head of the Department of Cell Biology at the Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam where he started Harbour Antibodies BV in 2006. He is a fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Science.

Professor Nicholas Hastie, Director of the MRC Human Genetics Unit, Edinburgh

Nick Hastie is the Director of the MRC Human Genetics Unit where Nick's laboratory works within the Comparative and Developmental Genetics Section. The MRC's Human Genetics Unit, formerly The Clinical & Population Cytogenetics Unit, was established in 1967 and is situated at the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh. It is one of the largest MRC research establishments (the largest research Unit) supporting approximately 220 scientists, support staff, fellows, Ph.D. students, and visiting workers, of whom about 130 are directly funded by the MRC.

Nick is a prominent member of the UK research community whose research concentrates on human developmental biology and particularly the childhood kidney cancer called Wilms' tumour. Nick is a Fellow of both The Royal Society and The Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Professor Tim Hunt, Cell Cycle Control

Tim Hunt obtained his PhD at Cambridge and went on to do Post-doctoral work at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine New York and at the Department of Biochemistry, Cambridge. In 1990 he joined Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now CRUK) and is currently Principal Scientist at the Cell Cycle Control Laboratory,
at the CRUK London Research Institute.

His research aims to understand how cyclin-dependent protein kinases (CDKs) trigger cell cycle transitions, and how the timing of cyclin proteolysis is regulated.

Tim Hunt is a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 2001 Tim was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his discovery of cyclins and the regulation of the cell cycle.

Professor Ron Laskey, CRUK Hutchison/MRC Research Centre, Darwin College, Cambridge

Ron Laskey started his career at Oxford, followed by post-doctoral posts on the scientific staff of Imperial Cancer Research Fund and the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. In 1983 he moved to the Charles Darwin Chair in the University of Cambridge, first in the Department of Zoology, then in the Wellcome CRC Institute and now as Director of the MRC Cancer Cell Unit in the Hutchison/MRC Research Centre.

Ron and his coworkers have made many important contributions to the field of gene expression and molecular biology, including the discovery of "importins", which are receptors for the signals that direct proteins to the cell nucleus. Ron Laskey is a Fellow of Darwin College and a Fellow of the Royal Society. His work has been recognised by awards from several countries, including the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine in 1998.

Professor Fiona Watt, Epithelial Cell Biology (Skin)

Fiona Watt received her DPhil at Oxford in 1979 and did postdoctoral work at MIT, Cambridge, USA. Between1987 and 2006 she was a group leader at the Cancer Research UK, London Research Institute. Since 2005 Fiona has been Deputy Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Stem Cell Research and Deputy Director of the CR-UK Cambridge Research Institute.

Fiona's research aims to understand how the proliferation, differentiation and tissue assembly of epidermal stem cells and their progeny are controlled, and how these processes are perturbed in cancer. Fiona Watt is a Fellow of the Royal Society.