KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

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Public Health & Clinical Research

Bio

Felipe Machado, PhD

The Role of Exercise to Optimize Body Composition and Promote Healthy Aging

Felipe V. C. Machado graduated in Physiotherapy from Londrina State University, Brazil, in 2016. He then obtained his MSc in Rehabilitation Sciences in 2018, continuing his research at the Laboratory of Research on Respiratory Physiotherapy (LFIP). In 2022, he earned his PhD in Health, Medicine, and Life Sciences from Maastricht University, within the Department of Respiratory Medicine, in collaboration with Ciro—a rehabilitation center in the Netherlands specializing in the treatment of individuals with respiratory diseases. His doctoral research focused on the prevalence and impact of body composition abnormalities in patients with chronic respiratory diseases.
Currently, Felipe is a postdoctoral researcher at Hasselt University, specializing in exercise physiology, body composition, pulmonary, and cardiac rehabilitation. He has presented his research at international scientific conferences, including the European Respiratory Society (ERS) Congress and the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Preventive Cardiology Congress, and has authored over 30 peer-reviewed scientific manuscripts in high-impact journals.
Beyond research, Felipe is actively involved in mentoring MSc students, teaching exercise physiology and rehabilitation for cardiopulmonary and metabolic disorders at Hasselt University, and fostering collaborative research aimed at optimizing physical activity and exercise-based rehabilitation strategies. He is also a regularly invited international speaker, contributing to scientific events across different countries.
His work continues to advance evidence-based interventions to improve exercise capacity, body composition, and quality of life in individuals with chronic diseases.

Omics & Bioinformatics

Bio

Maarten van den Berge, MD PhD

Nasal transcriptome signatures reflect the lower airways
in T2-high and low asthma

Maarten van den Berge is a Pulmonologist and full professor at the University Medical Center Groningen, the Netherlands. He is involved in clinical and translational research with a focus on applying multi-omics analyses to unravel the mechanisms underlying the pathogenesis of asthma and COPD. He is a member of the ERS and associate editor for Respirology. Maarten van den Berge supervises more than 20 PhD candidates and published more than 300 manuscripts in international peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Biomedical Therapeutics

Bio

Sergi Bermúdez i Badia, PhD

Harnessing VR and Physiological Data for Precision Rehabilitation

Dr. Sergi Bermúdez i Badia is an Associate Professor with Habilitation at the University of Madeira, specializing in Virtual Reality, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Rehabilitation, and Cyberpsychology. He holds a Telecommunications Engineering degree from UPC and a Ph.D. from ETHZ. Dr. Bermúdez i Badia has conducted research at EPFL, ETHZ, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and Carnegie Mellon University. He currently leads the NeuroRehabLab research group (https://neurorehablab.arditi.pt/) at the University of Madeira/ARDITI and serves as the Scientific Director of The Quality-of-Life Technologies Center of Madeira. Dr. Bermúdez i Badia has served as the President of the International Society for Virtual Rehabilitation. He has an extensive publication record, numerous awards, and has been involved in research projects covering healthcare technologies, resulting in prototypes deployed in real-world settings.

Molecular & Cellular Mechanisms: Organic Systems

Bio

Manuel Collado, PhD

Cellular reprogramming as a strategy to improve health

Manuel Collado obtained his BSc and PhD from the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (UAM). After his PhD, he moved first to London, UK, to work as a postdoc at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research at the St Mary´s Branch, part of Imperial College School of Medicine, and then he moved to New York, USA, to join Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He returned to Spain to join Manuel Serrano´s lab, first at CNB and later at CNIO, both in Madrid. After almost 11 years in Serrano´s lab, Collado became group leader at the Health Research Institute of Santiago de Compostela, IDIS, where he established the Cell Senescence, Cancer and Aging lab in 2012. He recently got a permanent position as tenured senior scientist for the Spanish Research Council, CSIC, that he used to move his laboratory to the Center for Molecular Medicine and Chronic Diseases (CiMUS) of the University of Santiago de Compostela.
His work has been devoted mainly to the study of cell senescence where he has made high impact contributions such as the original description of oncogene-induced senescence in vivo (Nature 2005), the existence of developmentally-programmed cell senescence during embryogenesis (Cell 2013) or the senolytic activity of Cardiac Glycosides (Nat Comm 2018). He also worked on the process of cellular reprogramming, a field in which he has also made important contributions, such as describing the role of the Ink4/Arf locus as a barrier to cell reprogramming (Nature 2009), or more recently the incompatible cell fates of cancer and pluripotency (CD&Dis 2024).
Collado is the president of the Spanish Society of Cell Senescence, SENESCEL, and a steering committee member of the International Cell Senescence Association, ICSA.

Immunology and Host-Microbe Interactions

Bio

Eva Herker, PhD

Lipids go Viral: on the Function of Lipid and Lipid Droplets in Flavivirus Infection

Eva Herker studied biochemistry at the Universities of Potsdam and Tübingen. During her PhD at the Institute of Physiological Chemistry, University of Tübingen, she investigated cell death mechanisms and aging processes in yeast. Supported by a Human Frontier Science Program Fellowship, she started working on virus-host interactions of hepatitis C viruses as a post-doc at the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology (San Francisco, USA). After leading a junior research group at the Leibniz Institute for Virology in Hamburg from 2011 to 2018, she was appointed as Professor of Molecular Virology at the University of Marburg. Her research group investigates virus-host interactions, focusing on the interplay between flaviviruses, lipid droplets, and lipid metabolism (www.herker-lab.org). She is also the spokesperson of a DFG-funded research unit on lipid droplet heterogeneity (www.for5815.de), which studies the structural and functional diversity of these organelles.