Speakers

Ewan Birney

EMBL-EBI, Cambridge, United Kingdom

Dr. Birney is the Head of Nucleotide data at the European Bioinformatics Institute, part of EMBL, sited in Cambridgeshire UK. He is best known for his work on genome analysis, in particular the Human, Mouse, Rat and Chicken genomes, and takes a broad overview across all domains of life. He is joint PI of the Ensembl project, which provides the Human and Mouse genomes to biological users on the Internet. He is also co-chair of the analysis group of the ENCODE project, an ambitious NIH-NHGRI funded project to identify all functional elements of the human genome.

Filippo Castiglione

National Research Council, Rome, Italy

Dr. Castiglione graduated in computer science in 1993 at the University of Milan. Before being a PhD student, he worked for the ST Microelectronics. He made his PhD in Scientific Computing in 2001 at the Center for Applied Mathematics of the University of Cologne, Germany. He has spent a long period as a PostDoc at the Institute for Medical Bio-Mathematics (IMBM), Tel Aviv, Israel. He has been visiting research fellow at the IBM - T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights (NY), at the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University, at the Department of Cell Biology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, and at the Zentrum fuer interdisziplinaere Forschung (ZiF) of the University of Bielefeld, Germany. He holds a Research position at the Istituto per le Applicazioni del Calcolo (IAC) "M. Picone" of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) in Rome. His research interests range from the study of complex systems in general to the modeling of biological systems, with particular interest in the immune system and related pathologies. He is currently involved as principal investigator in two EU-funded projects of the Virtual Physiological Human framework.

Rory B. Conolly

Dr. Rory Conolly is a Senior Research Biologist in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) National Center for Computational Toxicology in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Dr. Conolly received formal training in biology and toxicology and became interested in physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) models in the early 1980's. More recently, Dr. Conolly played a lead role in development of a biologically-motivated cancer risk assessment for formaldehyde. He continues to work on a refined version of this assessment. Other current interests include application of the methods of computational systems biology to toxicology. This effort includes the study of how relatively complicated protein interaction maps can be modularized to provide simpler but functionally accurate descriptions of signaling and regulatory behaviors.

Dr. Conolly received the U.S. Society of Toxicology's (SOT) Lehman Award for lifetime achievement in risk assessment in 2005. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology from 2004 until joining the U.S. EPA in 2005, President of the SOT Biological Modeling Specialty Section (2000 – 2001), President of the SOT Risk Assessment Specialty Section (1997 – 1998), a member of the SOT Risk Assessment Task Force (1998 – 2000), and is currently a member of the SOT Mixtures Task Force (2005 – present). Dr. Conolly is Adjunct Professor of Biomathematics at North Carolina State University.

He received a B.S. in Biology from Harvard College in 1972, a Ph.D. in Physiology/Toxicology from the Harvard School of Public Health in 1978, and spent a post-doctoral year at the Central Toxicology Laboratory of Imperial Chemical Industries, PLC, in Cheshire, England. In 1989, Dr. Conolly joined the Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology (CIIT, later called the CIIT Centers for Health Research). He worked at CIIT until 2005, when he joined EPA.

Richard Corley

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, Washington, USA

Dr. Corley is currently a Laboratory Fellow in the Biological Monitoring & Modeling Group, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). He received his Ph.D. in Environmental Toxicology from the University of Illinois in 1985 before joining The Dow Chemical Company's Toxicology Research Laboratory; initially as a Post-Doctoral Fellow in physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) modeling, and later as a scientist and group leader of the chronic toxicology and inhalation toxicology groups. Since joining PNNL in 1996, Dr. Corley has worked to establish a multi-disciplinary research program in pharmacokinetic modeling and multi-scale computational toxicology. In that capacity, he continues to serve as a principle investigator or collaborator in industry- and government-sponsored studies to develop, validate, and apply PBPK models to reduce the uncertainties in human health risk assessments. He currently directs a NIH/NHLBI-funded Bioengineering Research Partnership focused upon the development and validation of 3D, computational fluid dynamics models of the respiratory system for gas, vapor and particle exposures, environment-disease interactions, and improvements in pulmonary drug delivery. He is an Associate Director and Principle Investigator of a NIH/NIEHS U54 Center for Novel Biomarker Discovery to develop new, modified protein biomarkers of inflammation and oxidative stress associated with the interactions between obesity and exposures to mainstream and sidestream cigarette smoke and other environmental agents, and the development of deployable biomarker measurement platforms for widespread screening of populations under the NIH-wide Genes and Environment Initiative. He is also an Associate Director and Principle Investigator of a NIH/NIEHS Superfund Basic Research Program to develop a PBPK model for the trans-placental carcinogen, dibenzo[a,l]pyrene. He has >65 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters, >100 abstracts or proceedings, >75 technical reports, and >50 invited presentations in toxicology, dosimetry modeling, and risk assessment. His service activities have included membership on several committees, working groups, or advisory panels for the NAS, EPA, ILSI, ATSDR, ACC, OTA, and CIIT; the editorial board of Toxicol. Appl. Pharmacol.; appointed (Program Committee) and elected (Biological Modeling Specialty Section Officer) capacities for the Society of Toxicology; and as an ad hoc reviewer on NIH grants.

Vittorio Cristini

The University of Texas Health Science Center Houston, TX, USA

Vittorio Cristini, PhD, associate professor of Health Information Science, Biomedical Engineering and Systems Biology at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, is a leading expert and researcher in the fields of complex fluids, microfluidics, complex (bio)materials, mathematical/computational modeling of cancer, angiogenesis, chemotherapy and nanoparticle-based treatment. In addition to being selected as an editor for Cancer Research, he has published several book chapters and over 60 journal articles and was recently featured in Forbes Magazine in an article entitled, "Can Mathematics Cure Cancer." His research is and has been supported by the Cullen Trust for Health Care, the National Science Foundation, the National Cancer Institute, the Department of Defense, the State of California, the State of Texas, Orqis Medical, Dekk-Tec, and Merck. A native of Italy, Dr. Cristini holds a PhD in Chemical Engineering from Yale University and graduated Laurea Summa cum Laude in Nuclear engineering from the University of Rome. In 2006, he was selected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Nanomedicine. In addition to his position at the University of Texas Health Science Center, Dr. Cristini holds appointments at the University of Texas at Austin and at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

Dirk Drasdo

University of Leipzig, Germany

Dirk Drasdo (Dr. rer. nat. habil.) is senior researcher (Directeur de Recherche) at INRIA, the National French Institute for Computer Science and Control, at Paris-Rocquencourt, France and heads the group on "Multi-cellular Systems" co-localized at the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioinformatics of the University of Leipzig, Germany and at INRIA, France. He works on multiscale modeling of tissues, particularly by agent-based models and applied to tumor growth, liver regeneration and early development. Among others he is currently involved in two EU projects and two German national projects related to Systems Biology. He held a faculty position at the department of Mathematics and the Center for Systems Biology at University of Warwick, UK, and research associate positions at the Max-Planck-Institutes for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig, Germany and Colloid and Interface Science in Golm, Germany, as well as at the Institute for Medical Informatics, Statistics and Epidemiology at the Medical Faculty of Leipzig University, Germany. He has a Habilitation degree in Computer Science from the University of Leipzig, a PhD in Physics from the University of Göttingen, Germany, prepared at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biophyscial Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany, and a master degree in Physics from the Technical University of Aachen, Germany. His former biology-related work topics included sequence alignment and network inference.

Panos Georgopoulos

Rutgers University Environmental and Occupational Health Science Institute Piscataway, NJ, USA

Panos G. Georgopoulos, Ph.D. is Professor of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of NJ - Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. He is also a member of the Graduate Faculties of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers University, and of the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute (EOHSI), which is a joint institute of UMDNJ-RWJMS and Rutgers. At EOHSI he established and directs the Computational Chemodynamics Laboratory (CCL), a state-of-the-art facility for informatics and modeling of complex environmental and biological systems. Furthermore, he directs the NJDEP-funded Ozone Research Center and co-directs the USEPA-funded Center for Exposure and Risk Modeling (CERM), both at EOHSI. He is Associate Director of the USEPA-funded environmental bioinformatics and Computational Toxicology Center (ebCTC), a research consortium of UMDNJ-RWJMS, Princeton and Rutgers Universities and USFDA's Center for Toxicoinformatics, and is Co-Director of the Bioinformatics, Biostatistics and Computational Toxicology Core for the NIEHS Center for Environmental Exposures and Disease (CEED) at EOHSI. His research interests involve the development and application of novel mathematical and computational methods for diagnostic and mechanistic studies of multipathway physicochemical transport and fate processes taking place in environmental and biological systems. The aim of this research is to improve the understanding and quantification of human exposure, biological mechanism-based dosimetry, and risk assessment, for environmental toxics; and to develop a consistent mechanistic computational framework for source-to-dose modeling of toxicant dynamics. Dr. Georgopoulos received his M.S. and Ph.D. Degrees in Chemical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and his Dipl. Ing. from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece.

James Glazier

Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

Dr. Glazier received his B.A. in Physics and Mathematics from Harvard University and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Chicago. His research focuses on experimental and computational approaches to pattern formation in embryology. He has held an NSF/JSPS postdoctoral fellowship in biophysics at the Research Institute of Electrical Communication, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan, and faculty appointments at the University of Notre Dame and Indiana University, Bloomington, where he is founding director of the Biocomplexity Institute, Professor of Physics and Adjunct Professor of Informatics and Biology. He is Chair of the Division of Biological Physics of the American Physical Society, an Editor of Nonlinearity, Journal of Computational and Nonlinear Dynamics, and Mathematical Biosciences and Engineering, a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics (London) and co-founder of the biotechnology startup, SpheroSense Technologies, Inc.

C. Anthony Hunt

University of California San Francisco, CA, USA

C. Anthony Hunt is Professor of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. He earned B.S. degrees in Chemistry and Applied Biology, served as an aviator in the U.S. Navy, earned a Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Chemistry, and worked as discovery scientist before joining the UCSF faculty. Circa 1995 he transitioned his research from a novel therapeutics wet-lab focus to a computational focus to better understand individual response variability, gain insight into why promising in vitro observations often fail to translate to in vivo, and why promising in vivo observations often fail to translate to patients. He now directs the BioSystems Group (biosystems.ucsf.edu). Its primary goal is development and use of new modeling and simulation methods (M&S) to gain deeper insight into those issues. A current focus is advancing M&S methods to better understand networked mechanisms responsible for emergence of important epithelial morphogenic (normal and abnormal) and pharmacological phenomena in vitro and in vivo. Prof. Hunt is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists. He has been granted twelve U.S. patents, all related to his earlier work on novel therapeutics. Four have earned net returns for the University, including an enabling patent for Doxcil and one of UC's first RNAi patents (the products of which are now in early clinical trials). Prof. Hunt led the statewide effort that resulted in creation of the very successful UC Discovery Grants Program. He has been an active contributor to the evolution of UCSF's new generation of interdisciplinary graduate training programs, including chairing establishment of the Biological and Medical Informatics Program.

Peter Hunter

University of Auckland, New Zealand

Prof. Hunter completed an engineering degree in 1971 in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (now Engineering Science) at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, a Master of Engineering degree in 1972 (Auckland) on solving the equations of arterial blood flow and a DPhil (PhD) in Physiology at the University of Oxford in 1975 on finite element modeling of ventricular mechanics. His major research interests since then have been modelling many aspects of the human body using specially developed computational algorithms and an anatomically and biophysically based approach which incorporates detailed anatomical and microstructural measurements and material properties into the continuum models. The interrelated electrical, mechanical and biochemical functions of the heart, for example, have been modelled in the first ‘physiome' model of an organ. As the current co-Chair of the Physiome Committee of the International Union of Physiological Sciences he is helping to lead the international Physiome Project which aims to use computational methods for understanding the integrated physiological function of the body in terms of the structure and function of tissues, cells and proteins. He is currently a Professor of Engineering Science and Director of the Bioengineering Institute at the University of Auckland, Director of Computational Physiology at Oxford University and holds honorary or visiting Professorships at a number of Universities around the world. He is on the scientific advisory boards of a number of Research Institutes in Europe, the US and the Asia- Pacific region. He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society (London and NZ), the World Council for Biomechanics, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and the International Academy of Medical & Biological Engineering. He is currently secretary-general of the World Council for Biomechanics and President of the Physiological Society of New Zealand.

Ananth Kadambi

Entelos, Inc. Foster City, CA, USA

Dr. Kadambi is Senior Scientist, in silico Research and Development Predictive Science and Technology at Entelos Inc.

Robert J. Kavlock

Bob Kavlock received his PhD in Biology from the University of Miami in 1977 and has been with the US Environmental Protection Agency since that time. Since 2005, he has been the director of the newly formed Computational Toxicology Research Program within EPAs Office of Research and Development (ORD). The mission of the NCCT is to provide improved hazard and risk identification for assessment of environmental chemicals through the development of tools such as ToxRefDB, ToxCast, and ACToR Prior to that time he spent 15 years as the Director of Reproductive Toxicology Division in NHEERL/ORD. In 2007 he was the recipient of ORDs Statesmen of the Year Award. He has published more than 170 scientific papers, 16 book chapters, and edited three books, including a co-editor of the Global Assessment of the State-of-the-Science of Endocrine Disruptors (WHO, 2002). He is a past president of the Teratology Society and is active in the Sciety of Toxicology. He was a member of the ALTX4 Study Section of NIH (1997-2001), holds adjunct appointments at Duke University and North Carolina State University, and is a member of the editorial boards of Environmental Health Perspectives, the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, and Birth Defects Part B: Developmental and Reproductive Toxicity.

Thomas Kepler

Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC, USA

Dr. Kepler, Division Chief of Computational Biology of the Department of Bioinformatics and Biostatistics at Duke University, is a Professor of Bioinformatics and Biostatistics. He was recruited to Duke from the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he was Vice President of Academic Affairs. Dr. Kepler is a key collaborator of HVI vaccine development teams, and as well a key collaborator for investigators performing basic immunology research. He is an expert in mathematical and statistical approaches to the immune system.

Andres Kriete

Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Andres Kriete, Ph.D., Associate Professor for Bioinformation Engineering, is head of a joint Bioinformatics Initative between the Coriell Institute, Camden, NJ and Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA. At Drexel's School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems (homepage) he is a core faculty at the Center of Integrated Bioinformatics. He is affiliated with the Drexel Institute of Basic and Applied Protein Science, the Greater Philadelphia Bioinformatics Alliance, and initiated an interdisciplinary systems biology working group.
At the Coriell Institute Andres Kriete directs the Biocomputing Laboratory. The role of the laboratory is to acquire, standardize, store, integrate and analyze a wide spectrum of digital biological data. This includes exhaustive image based phenotyping of cells (cytomics) and tissues as well as genomics based profiling methodologies. Integration of such data using novel systems biology approaches will support to a better understanding of complex interactions at the different levels of biological organization, specifically in aging research. Related experimental work focusses on fibroblast cell strains and the EGF/MAPK pathway.

Thomas Knudsen

Dr. Knudsen is Developmental Systems Biologist at the US EPA's Computational Toxicology Research Program. His Ph.D. is in Anatomy from Thomas Jefferson University and postdoctoral training in Cell Biology at the Children's Hospital Research Foundation in Cincinnati and in Developmental Biology at Emory University. Dr. Knudsen joined NCCT in 2007 following tenure as Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at the University of Louisville, Birth Defects Center. His research focuses on developmental processes and toxicities leading to birth defects. At NCCT, he is leading efforts on EPA's new Virtual Embryo project that aims to integrate experimental data, knowledge of embryology, and computational models to predict chemical effects on embryo development. The project's long-term goal is to support improved assessment of the public and ecological health implications of environmental stressors during prenatal and developmental exposures. In addition to his research at EPA, Dr. Knudsen serves on several editorial boards and is currently Editor in Chief of Reproductive Toxicology and Past-President of the Teratology Society.

Patrik Kolar

European Commission, Brussels, Belgium

Patrik Kolar, PhD has been leading the Unit for Genomics and Systems Biology Research at the Directorate General for Research of the European Commission since 2007. His Unit is responsible for the implementation of the High – Throughput technologies development, Large-scale Data Gathering (functional genomics, proteomics, structural biology) and Systems Biology research activities within the 7th European Framework Programme for Research (2007 – 2013). Before joining the European Commission he worked as a Science Counsellor at the Permanent Representation of Slovenia to the EU (2004 – 2007) in Brussels, as a Research Consultant (2000 – 2004) and as Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Chemistry and Chemical Technology of the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia (1996 – 2000). He obtained his PhD at the University of Ljubljana (1995) and performed his Postdoctoral studies of the University of Karlsruhe, Germany (1997-1998).

Olivier Lorentz

Institut de la Vision, Paris, France

Dr. Lorentz received his B.A. in Biochemistry from University Louis Pasteur (Strasbourg France) and his Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Biologist in 1997. 2001-2008: Dr. Lorentz is managing EU projects within the FP5 (PRORET, PROAGERET), FP6 (EVI-GENORET) and FP7 (RETICIRC). Since 2009, Dr. Lorentz is the Scientific Program Director of the "Institut de la Vision" located in Paris (www.fondave.org).

Konstantinos Marias

FORTH, Hereklion, Crete, Greece

Dr. Konstantinos Marias currently holds a Principal Researcher position at the Institute of Computer Science, ICS-FORTH, Greece. Previously he worked as a Research Assistant in the Medical Vision Laboratory, University of Oxford, UK. He completed his PhD in the field of Medical Physics and Image Analysis in 2000 at UCL Medical School, London, UK and also holds Msc in Eng. Degrees from Imperial College, London and NTUA, Athens, Greece. His research interests include multi-modal medical image analysis and modelling. He has participated in many EC funded projects and currently coordinates Contra Cancrum, an EC project dedicated to multi-level cancer therapy modelling. He has published more than 40 papers in related International journals and conferences and is an active member of IEEE EMBS.

Erik Mosekilde

The Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby

Erik Mosekilde is professor of physics at The Technical University of Denmark and coordinator of BioSim, the European Network of Excellence in "Biosimulation – a New Tool in Drug Development". Erik Mosekilde holds a PhD and a Dr. Sci. degree in experimental and theoretical physics. He started to work in Systems Biology and mathematical modelling of cellular and physiological systems in the mid 1970's and has published about 180 scientific papers and a number of books on modelling of biological systems and on application of nonlinear dynamics to physical, technical, economic and biological systems. Much of his work in Systems Biology has been devoted to studies of oscillatory phenomena in the pressure and flow regulation in the kidney, but he has also been involved in work on respiratory control, insulin absorption from subcutis, pulsatile insulin secretion, electrophysiological phenomena in pancreatic cells, HIV vaccine development, bone remodelling, and intercellular communication.

Richard Newman

Crowley Davis Research, Eagle, ID, USA

Mr. Newman has 20 years experience in software engineering, technology management, and commercial product development. He earned his BS in Computer Science from Boise State University and his MBA at the University of Washington.

Timothy Otter

Crowley Davis Research, Inc.

Tim Otter, PhD is a cell physiologist and Vice President, Life Sciences, at Crowley Davis Research in Eagle, ID (http://www.cdres.com/ ) where he serves as Principal Investigator for "High Fidelity Computer Modeling of Epithelial Tissue", a TATRC-sponsored cross-disciplinary project that develops emergent tissue models and virtual tissues for biomedical research. Prior positions include Buchanan Professor of Biology at the College of Idaho, Assistant Professor at the University of Vermont, and Senior Research Associate at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology.  Tim earned his ScB in Aquatic Biology at Brown University and his PhD in Cell Biology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Stephen Payne

University of Oxford, United Kingdom

Dr Stephen Payne gained his PhD degree at the University of Oxford in 2001 and has been a University Lecturer there since 2006. His research interests lie in physiological modelling and signal/image analysis, with particular interest in the flow of blood in the brain. He is also currently working on the EU project 'IMPPACT', developing physiological models of tissue death for applications in optimising the treatment of liver tumours.

Herbert Sauro

University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

Andreas Schupert

Bayer Technology Service, Leverkusen, Germany

Prof. Andreas Schuppert, Bayer Technology Services (BTS), Leverkusen, is a physicist by training and holds a PhD in mathematics as well as a diploma degree in economics. He is engaged in the field of data- based modeling in chemical engineering sciences and biological systems and has managed various application and research projects. His current research interests are the development of combined mechanistic and data based modeling methods for computational biology as well as multi-scale pattern recognition algorithms for -omics modelling. He is head of the Competence Center "Computational Solutions" at BTS and holds a chair for data-based modeling in computational engineering sciences at RWTH Aachen University.

Imran Shah

Dr. Imran Shah is a scientist at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) Computational Toxicology Research Program where he provides leadership and guidance in the development of computational, systems-based models to support improved assessment of the public and ecological health implications of environmental stressors. Dr. Shah received a B.S. in Physics from the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine in London, U.K., and a Ph.D. in Computational Biology from George Mason University. From 2001 to 2004, Dr. Shah was the director of the doctoral program in bioinformatics in the School of Medicine at the University of Colorado in Denver. Before joining EPA, he was employed at Icoria, a biotechnology company, where he led the development of computational systems approaches to discover biomarkers of liver toxicity from large-scale data streams. Dr. Shah is leading the NCCT Virtual Liver project, a multiscale computational model of chemical-induced chronic toxicity.

Richard Superfine

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

Richard Superfine, Bowman and Gordon Gray Professor of Physics and Astronomy at UNC-CH, received his B. S. in physics from Lehigh University and worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories for three years before moving to Berkeley to obtain his Physics Ph.D. in laser studies of molecular surfaces. Since arriving at UNC Chapel Hill, Superfine has studied nanodevices in the form of carbon nanotubes and in biology. He directs an NIH center on Computer Integrated Systems for Microscopy and Manipulation, and is principal investigator of the Virtual Lung Project which brings together biophysical and biochemical measurements of mucus clearance together with computational modeling to create an integrated, predictive model for lung defense.

Marco Viceconti

Istituto Ortopedico Rizzoli, Bologna, Italy

Marco Viceconti has a MS in engineering from the University of Bologna and a PhD from the University of Firenze. He started his research career in the USA, where he worked as visiting researcher at the University of Florida and at the University of Wisconsin. Since 1989 he works at the Istituto Ortopedico Rizzoli in Bologna, Italy, where he is currently the Technical Director of the Medical Technology Lab. He is also the Director of the BioComputing Competence Centre, a private no-profit organisation established in partnership with the CINECA supercomputing centre. His main research interests are related to the development and validation of medical technology. In his career he published over 200 papers, 140 of which are indexed in Medline. He serves as reviewer for 17 international scientific journals, including Journal of Biomechanics, Medical engineering & Physics, and Clinical biomechanics, for which he is also member of the Editorial Board, and for various grant agencies, including the European Commission. He served as President of the European Society of Biomechanics and as member of the Council of the European Alliance for Medical and Biological Engineering and Science (EAMBES). He is the promoter and animator of community initiatives such as the Europhysiome initiative , and the Biomed Town community. He is currently the coordinator of the VPHOP integrated project, a large European research consortium that is developing simulation-based technology for predicting the risk of bone fracture in osteoporosis patients.