Author: Activities Chair

Affiliation: King’s College London

Keywords: Spinal cord injury, Regeneration, Respiratory physiology, Neuroscience, Plasticity, Neurodegeneration

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27 million people world-wide have lived experience of a spinal cord injury, for which there is currently no cure. My pre-clinical and translational research aims to understand the mechanisms behind these physiological deficits and develop treatment strategies with the aims of restoring ‘normal’ breathing in clinical patients.

During my BSc at Imperial College London (UK), I worked at Eli Lilly (UK) as an electrophysiologist assessing the causes, and pharmaceutical treatments, of temporal lobe epilepsy. I became immersed in spinal cord injury research in 2006 during my PhD at the University of Cambridge (UK) where I helped assess viral therapeutics for this devastating disorder, a treatment which is now being developed for first-in-human trials. During my six years at Case Western Reserve University (USA) and the University of Leeds (UK), I gained additional expertise in respiratory and muscle physiology while focusing on the recovery of critical motor system function at chronic time points following injury. I joined King’s College London (UK) in 2018 as a King’s Prize Fellow where I forged my independent research group focusing on understanding the mechanisms of deficit and recovery throughout the spinal-motor-axis after spinal cord injury. This was shortly followed by a Wellcome Trust & Royal Society Sir Henry Dale Fellowship that started in December 2021. Within the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), I am also a Senior Lecturer, co-leading Stem Cell and Spinal Cord Injury MSc programmes and lecturing across BSc and MSc courses.

My lab is based in the Wolfson Centre of the IoPPN. I use a vast array of state-of-the-art approaches including respiratory and muscle physiology, X-ray videography, anatomy, neuroimaging, chemogenetics, pharmacogenetics, and neuromodulation to understand the systemic problems caused by traumatic injury to the central nervous system and subsequent targets for treatment strategies.

Affiliation: TU-Dresden, Institute of Scientific Computing & Dresden Center for Computational Materials Science

Keywords: Computational Materials Science, Condensed Matter Physics, Applied Mathematics, Scientific Computing, Scale-Bridging Materials Modeling

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Marco Salvalaglio is an Emmy Noether Group Leader at the Institute of Scientific Computing at TU Dresden. He is also an associated researcher at the Dresden Center for Computational Materials Science and the Dresden Center for Intelligent Materials. Physicist by training, he obtained his Ph.D. in materials science (and European Doctorate PCAM) at the University of Milano-Bicocca (IT) in 2016. The same year, he joined TU Dresden with a two-year Alexander von Humboldt fellowship and collaborated with the Leibnitz Institute IHP-Microelectronics in Frankfurt (Oder) as a guest scientist. He was invited as a Visiting Junior Fellow to the prestigious Hong Kong Institute of Advanced Studies (2019). In 2020, he was awarded the DFG Emmy Noether Programme Grant, which enabled him to establish his research group the following year.

Salvalaglio and his group perform interdisciplinary research at the intersection of materials science, solid-state physics, and applied mathematics, focusing on both the development of novel models and technology-relevant applications. He contributed to understanding elastic and plastic relaxation in three-dimensional crystalline heterostructures for optoelectronics applications. Moreover, he investigated their morphological evolution and self-assembly, shedding light on the basic mechanisms at play as well as their exploitation in bottom-up fabrication processes. Correlated disorder emerging from such phenomena is also an important subject of his studies. His group primarily works on the comprehensive study of defects, interfaces, and microstructures in single and polycrystalline systems with novel mesoscale approaches. In 2023, he was nominated by the editorial board of the IOP journal Model. Sim. Mater. Sci. Eng. as an MSMSE Emerging Leader. He was admitted to the Young Academy of Europe in March 2023.

Affiliation: Vytautas Magnus University Agriculture Academy

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Viktorija Vaštakaitė-Kairienė is a Vice-chair of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences Young Academy, a Chief Researcher at the Lithuanian Research Centre for Agriculture and Forestry Institute of Horticulture, and an Associate Professor at Vytautas Magnus University Agriculture Academy.

Viktorija defended her doctoral thesis, ‘The Photophysiological Aspects for the Management of Metabolites and Mineral Elements in Brassicaceae Microgreens’ in 2018. Currently, her work focuses on developing non-destructive methods of harmful organisms and applying biological and alternative plant protection products and technologies in horticulture. In addition, she is teaching students of plant physiology, morphology and mineral nutrition at various study levels.

Viktorija participates(-ed) in high-level R&D and other projects financed by the Research Council of Lithuania and with(-out) European Union funds and Lithuanian Business Support Agency projects. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Nature Research Centre in Lithuania (2020-2022). Viktorija had internships at the University of Agriculture in Krakow, Poland, Michigan State University in the USA, the University of Padova in Italy, Institute of Plant Physiology and Genetics of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. With co-authors, she published over 50 scientific publications, including three chapters in books by international publishers and a scientific study published by the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences. She has given over 60 presentations at national and international conferences in the USA, China, Turkey, Austria, Sicily, Latvia, Poland, Latvia, France, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Viktorija actively participates in the activities of the international societies EPSO, ISHS, and ASHS and seminars in Lithuania and abroad. She is an alumni council member of the Baltic-American Freedom Foundation. Since 2022 she is a Board member at the Young Academies Science Advice Structure (YASAS).

She is awarded a scholarship for young scientists, a prize and a certificate of merit from the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, and a National scholarship from the World Federation of Scientists.

Affiliation: Slovak Academy of Sciences

Keywords: Mechanochemistry, ball milling, metal chalcogenides, silver nanoparticles, eggshell, nanomaterials, solid-state chemistry, X-ray diffraction, nitrogen adsorption

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Matej Baláž graduated in Chemistry at P. J. Šafárik Unviersity in Košice (Slovakia) in 2011 and got his PhD. degree in Metallurgy at the Institute of Geotechnics, Slovak Academy of Sciences in 2015. He currently serves as an independent researcher and a vice-head of the Department of Mechanochemistry at the institute.

Matej is well-established in the field of mechanochemistry applying the high-energy ball milling for the production of nanocrystalline materials (mainly metal chalcogenides and silver nanoparticles) and the treatment of eggshell waste. Mechanochemistry represents an environmentally sound alternative to the traditional solution-based chemistry as it offers a one-step, solvent-free solid-state methodology to access the desired compounds without the need to use toxic solvents, external heating or pressure.

Matej’s reseach work has been awarded more times on a national level, e.g. he was listed in the ranking of “Top 30 under 30 Slovaks” (member of top 5 in the category “Science”) in the magazine Forbes Slovakia (2016), winner of the competition “Young researcher of Slovak Academy of Sciences under 35 years” (2016), winner of a competition “Scientist of the year 2018” in the category “Young researcher” in Slovakia (2018), he finished 3^rd in the competition Falling Walls Lab Slovakia (2020) and he is the finalist of the ESET Science Award in the category “Exceptional young scientist” (2021). He has been also awarded by the Slovak Academy of Sciences for active popularization of science to the public (2021). The recognition of his work at the international level is documented e.g. by having more invited lectures on international conferences e.g. in USA, Italy or France and serving as an invited lecturer at Al-Farabi Kazakh National Unviersity (Almaty, Kazakhstan). He also serves as a Short-term Scientific Missions coordinator and a Task Force leader in the COST Action CA18112: Mechanochemistry for Sustainable Industry.

Affiliation: Sapienza University of Rome

Keywords: Machine learning, Geometry processing, Computer vision, Artificial intelligence

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Full profile: Emanuele Rodolà is Full Professor of Computer Science at Sapienza University of Rome, where he leads the GLADIA group of Geometry, Learning and Applied AI, funded by an ERC Grant and a Google Research Award.

Previously, he was Assistant and then Associate Professor at Sapienza (2017-2020), a postdoc at USI Lugano (2016-2017), an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at TU Munich (2013-2016), and a JSPS Research Fellow at The University of Tokyo (2013). He is an ELLIS fellow, has received a number of research prizes, has been serving in the program and organizing committees of the top rated conferences in computer vision, machine learning and graphics, founded and chaired several successful workshops.

His research interests lie at the intersection of geometry processing, graph and geometric deep learning, computer vision, language and sound processing, and has published more than 100 papers in these areas.

Affiliation: Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague

Keywords: Bio-surface science, biointerfaces surface chemistry, functional coatings, antifouling materials, biosensors, cell-on-a-chip applications

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Hana received Ph.D. in biophysics at Charles University in Prague. In 2006 – 2008, she worked as a postdoctoral research fellow in the Chemical Engineering Department at University of Washington, Seattle. In 2008, she joined the Institute of Photonics and Electronics of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague as a research scientist. In 2019, she has established a new research group – Laboratory of Functional Biointerfaces in the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. Her biointerface research focuses on fundamentals of surface-mediated biomolecular interactions, and development of next-generation functional antifouling coatings, biosensors and biomimetic systems for bioanalytical and biomedical applications.

Affiliation: AMOLF, Amsterdam

Keywords: Solar Cells, Perovskite, Materials Science, Sustainability

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Bruno Ehrler is leading the Hybrid Solar Cells group at AMOLF in Amsterdam since 2014 and is also a honorary professor at the University of Groningen since 2020. His group focuses on perovskite materials science, both on the fundamental level, and for device applications. He is recipient of an ERC Starting Grant and an NWO Vidi grant, advisory board member of the Dutch Chemistry Council, recipient of the WIN Rising Star award, senior conference editor for nanoGe and science board member of the Netherlands Energy Research Alliance.

Before moving to Amsterdam, he was a research fellow in the Optoelectronics Group at Cambridge University following post-doctoral work with Professor Sir Richard Friend. During this period, he worked on quantum dots, doped metal oxides and singlet fission photovoltaics. He obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Professor Neil Greenham, studying hybrid solar cells from organic semiconductors and inorganic quantum dots. He received his MSci from the University of London (Queen Mary) studying micro-mechanics in the group of Professor David Dunstan.