Prof. Dr. Ursula Klingmüller studied Biology at the Universities Bayreuth and Heidelberg. During her Diploma and Graduate thesis at the ZMBH in Heidelberg in the group of Prof. H. Schaller she addressed virus-host-cell interactions of Hepatitis B viruses. As postdoctoral fellow she was funded by a stipend by the DFG and studied signal transduction through the erythropoietin receptor in the groups of Prof. L. Cantley, Harvard Medical School, and of Prof. H. Lodish, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, in Boston, USA. In 1996 she returned to Germany to head an independent Hans-Spemann-Junior Group at the Max-Planck-Institute for Immunbiology in Freiburg. In 2003 she was awarded a Theodor-Boveri-Group at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg and since 2007 heads the division „Systems Biology of Signal Transduction“ at the DKFZ. In 2011 she was appointed as W3-professor at the University of Heidelberg. In 2016 she was elected to the German Ethics Council.

Ursula Klingmüller has published more than 115 high rank publications. Her research combines quantitative analysis of information processing and cell fate decisions with mathematical modeling to unravel key regulatory mechanisms and predict strategies for effective intervention. Specifically, she addresses signaling pathways involved in liver regeneration and deregulated in liver cancer. Her group is advancing mass spectrometry based proteomics for systems medicine approaches with a particular emphasis on developing methods for the absolute quantification of signal transduction proteins and for the quantification of plasma proteins. 

In the LiSyM-Cancer consortium she is coordinator of the SMART-NAFLD network focusing on the crosstalk of signal transduction and metabolism and the relation to plasma markers as indicators for progression towards liver cancer. In addition she is project leader in C-TIP-HCC focusing on dynamic pathway modeling of TGFb signal transduction and remodeling of ECM in the context of cirrhosis.

Prof. Dr. Jens Timmer studied Physics at the Universities Oldenburg and Freiburg. During his Diploma and Ph.D. thesis at the Insitute of Physics in Freiburg in the group of Prof. Dr. J. Honerkamp, he addressed time series analysis in neurology and psychiatry and spent two years of research at the Department of Psychiatry of the University Hospital Freiburg. After his Ph.D., in 1994 he was group leader at the Center for Data Analysis and Modelling at the University Freiburg. After research visits to Boulder University, EPFL Lausanne, New York University, Humboldt University, Max-Planck Institute for Physics of Complex Systems Dresden, Potsdam University, and University Heidelberg, in 1998, he became Hochschulassistent – equivalent to Assistant Professor – at the Physics Department of the university of Freiburg. In the same year he was co-founder of the company The Scientific Consulting Group GmbH, which was split in 2007 into seleon GmbH and TNI medical AG. After his Habilitation in 1999, he was Hochschuldozent – equivalent to Associate Professor – at the Physics Department in Freiburg and was appointed there as a Full Professor for Theoretical Physics and Its Application in the Life Science in 2005. From 2009 – 2013, he was Co-Director of the School Life Science at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies and from 2012-2020 Executive Director of the Freiburg Center for Systems Biology. In 2011, he received the Hector Research Award.

Jens Timmer has published more than 350 high rank publications. His research comprises the development of mathematical methods for modelling especially in cell biology and application of these methods in close collaboration with experimental groups to answer specific biological questions. Specifically, he addresses signaling pathways involved in liver regeneration.

In the LiSyM-Cancer consortium, he is co-coordinator of the SMART-NAFLD network and project leader in C-TIP-HCC focusing on dynamic pathway modeling of cytokine and growth factor induced signal transduction to gain insights into mechanisms that are changed in fatty liver diseases.

Prof. Dr. Thomas Berg completed his medical training at the Universities of Tübingen, Freiburg and Berlin, Germany. He specialized in internal medicine in 2001 and in Gastroenterology and Hepatology in 2007 at the University Medicine Berlin, and became a lecturer in this subject in 2002. In 2002, Professor Berg took up the position of Associate Director and Professor of Medicine at the Department of Hepatology and Gastroenterology of Charité, Campus Virchow-Clinic, University Medicine in Berlin, where he was Head of the Liver Out-Patient Clinic and the Laboratory for Molecular Hepatitis and Viral Diagnostics. Since December 2009, he has been the Head of the Section of Hepatology at the University Hospital in Leipzig, Germany, and since October 2018 acting Director of the Clinic of Gastroenterology at the University Hospital, Leipzig.

His clinical and translational research is focused on chronic viral hepatitis, liver transplantation, hepatocellular carcinoma, genetics in liver disease, and liver failure, and he participated in numerous national and international clinical trials. He is Vice Secretary of the European Associations for the Study of the Liver (EASL), Board member of the EASL International Liver Foundation (EILF) and Co-Editor of the Journal of Hepatology since 2014. He is also member of the American (AASLD), European (EASL), and German (GASL) Associations for the Study of the Liver, The European Society for Organ Transplantation (ESOT), The European Liver and Intestine Transplant Association (ELITA), German Transplantation Society (DTG), Working Group Internal Oncology (AiO), Working Group Gastroenterological Oncology (AGO), German Cancer Society (DKG), German Society of Gastroenterology (DGVS), and the representative of the DGVS in the foundation council of the German liver foundation. He has published more than 350 articles in peer-reviewed journals and more than 100 reviews and textbook contributions. His h-index is 72 (Scopus).

In the LiSyM-Cancer consortium he is co-coordinator of SMART-NAFLD representing the clinical partners in the project.

Prof. Dr. Steven Dooley is University Professor and Head of Section of Molecular Hepatology & Alcohol Associated Diseases in the Department of Medicine II at the Medical Faculty Mannheim, at Heidelberg University. Prof. Dooley graduated in Biology at the University at Kaiserslautern and did his PhD studies at the Institute of Human Genetics, University of Saarland in Homburg. His Postdoc research on Molecular Cancer Research took place at the Institute of Human Genetics at the same University. Later in 1998, he became Group Leader and Assistant Professor in the Department of Clinical Chemistry and Pathobiochemistry at the University Hospital RWTH Aachen. In 2004, he was appointed as a full Professor to Heidelberg University.

Prof. Dooley received the Gábor-Szász-Award of the Deutsche Vereinte Gesellschaft für Klinische Chemie und Laboratoriums-Medizin for outstanding scientific merits. He has over 200 publications and his work is supported by different grants from, among others, DFG, BMBF and EU. His research is dedicated to cellular processes that occur in the liver in response to damage, e.g. from alcohol abuse or malnutrition, specifically in the role of TGFβ family members, their signaling pathway regulators and target genes. His group is using molecular biology, cell biology, imaging and systems biology in cells, animal models and samples from human patients with liver disease to understand disease mechanisms and find new targets to be used for diagnosis or therapy.

In the LiSyM-Cancer consortium he is Coordinator of the C-TIP-HCC project and project leader in SMART-NAFLD.

Prof. Dr. Heike Bantel is a senior physician and professor of Translational Hepatology in the Department of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Endocrinology at Hannover Medical School. She received her medical training at the Universities of Göttingen and Tübingen, Germany, where she completed her doctorate in Medicine. Subsequently, she trained as a specialist in Internal Medicine at the University Hospital of Tübingen and Hannover Medical School, where she received her board certification. Professor Bantel specialized in Hepatology and Gastroenterology. Her key clinical focus is the treatment and care of patients with metabolic, autoimmune and viral liver diseases.

Professor Bantel’s research work primarily focus on basic and clinical aspects of cell death and senescence in chronic liver diseases and hepatocellular carcinoma. Her research group is interested in the identification of molecular mechanisms, which contribute to the development of liver fibrosis/cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). A further aim is the identification of novel biomarkers which allow the monitoring of disease progression and early detection of HCC. Her research has been honoured with numerous scientific awards.

In the LiSyM-Cancer consortium, Heike Bantel is co-coordinator and project leader in C-TIP-HCC.

Dr. Dirk Drasdo is head of the group for “Multi-cellular Systems Biology” co-localized at INRIA Paris-Rocquencourt in France, the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioinformatics, Universoty of Leipzig, Germany and IfADo, Dortmund, Germany.

His main research topic is modeling of multi-cellular tissue organization. He established center-based models of growing tissues in various applications. In these models cells are mimicked as individual agents, parameterized by measurable biophysical and biokinetic parameters. More recently he and his group established a process chain parameterizing single-cell-based tissue models out of image data in collaboration with the group of J.G. Hengstler (IfaDo). With a modeling guided experimental strategy they were able to predict a previously unrecognized order mechanism during liver regeneration and very recently to deduce the necessity for an ammonia sink mechanism after drug induced liver damage which subsequently could be identified.

Before his position as “Directeur de Recherche” (1st class, research institution - equivalent of a full professor position) at INRIA he has hold a faculty position at the Mathematics Dept. 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, and Colloid and Interface Science in Golm, as well as at the Institute for Medical Informatics, Statistics and Epidemiology at the Medical Faculty of Leipzig University; he has a habilitation in Computer Science (University of Leipzig), a PhD in Physics (MPI for Biophys. Chemistry and Univ. of Göttingen), and master degree in Physics from the RWTH Aachen. He has been or is PI in several EU as well as national German or French projects on tissue organisation.

In the LiSyM-Cancer consortium Dirk Drasdo is co-coordinator of the project C-TIP-HCC.

Prof. Dr. Jochen Hampe is a Professor of Gastroenterology and heads Gastroenterology and Hepatology at the Medical Department 1, University Hospital Dresden at the TU Dresden, Germany. He was trained as a physician for Internal Medicine and Gastroenterology at the Charité University Hospital Berlin and the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel. Prof. Hampe studied medicine at the Humboldt University Berlin and the Imperial College London supported by a scholarship of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

Jochen Hampe received postdoctoral training at the Department of Gastroenterology of the University of California at San Diego and at Axys Pharmaceuticals in San Diego, California. His research interests include the genetics functional epigenomics of complex liver diseases such as alcoholic and non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, liver cirrhosis and hepatobiliary transport. Prof. Hampe received the Theodor Frerichs Award of the German Society for Internal Medicine and the Siegfried Thannhauser Award of the German Gastroenterological Association.

In the LiSyM-Cancer consortium Jochen Hampe is coordinator of the Deep-HCC project.

Prof. Dr. Marino Zerial graduated in biology at the University of Trieste in 1982 with a thesis on lysosomal storage disorders. He conducted post-doctoral experiences at the Institut J. Monod (Paris) on the organization of the human genome and at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, EMBL (Heidelberg) on the biosynthesis and endocytosis of the tranferrin receptor. He became EMBL research Group Leader in 1991, when he started his work on the molecular regulation of endocytosis. In 1998, he became Max Planck Director and co-founder of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, MPI-CBG, Dresden.

Marino Zerial has made key contributions towards the understanding of the molecular mechanisms of endocytosis. Particularly, his work on Rab5 as a master regulator of endosome biogenesis established key principles that are now textbook knowledge.

In the past few years, Zerial’s group has performed a systems analysis of endocytosis using quantitative multi-parametric image analysis, revealing design principles of the endocytic network that are important for signalling. Zerial and colleagues have been developing methods for a multi-scale analysis of tissue organization and function, using the mouse liver as model system.

For his scientific contributions, he was awarded the 1994 FEBS Anniversary Prize, the Chiara D’Onofrio Prize (1999), and the prestigious Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize (2006). Marino Zerial was elected EMBO Member in 1996 and is Honorary Professor at the Medical Faculty, University of Technology, Dresden.

For information about his research, see http://zerial.mpi-cbg.de/

In the LiSyM-Cancer consortium Marino Zerial is co-coordinator and project leader in the Deep-HCC project.

Dr. Lutz Brusch is a research group leader at the Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing of Technische Universität Dresden, Germany. He studied physics and did his PhD in physics at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany and, as a postdoc, worked at the Centre de Bioingénierie Gilbert Durand in Toulouse, France and the Riken Omics Science Center in Yokohama, Japan. His research interests are hepatobiliary transport and spatio-temporal pattern formation during liver disease and regeneration. He is also fostering collaborative approaches to modeling and simulation through modeling languages and standardized model exchange following the FAIR principles (https://MultiCellML.org). He is heading the development of Morpheus (https://Morpheus.gitlab.io), a widely used open-source modeling and simulation framework for the study of multi-scale and multicellular systems, with a public model repository (https://Morpheus.gitlab.io/model) and the parameter estimation tool FitMultiCell (https://FitMultiCell.gitlab.io). He was awarded the Otto Hahn Medal by the Max Planck Society. In the LiSyM-Cancer consortium Lutz Brusch is co-coordinator of the Deep-HCC project.

Dagmar Kulms is Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Head of Experimental Dermatology at the Department of Dermatology at Carl Gustav Carus University Hospital of Dresden, Germany. Between 2004 and 2012 she was Assistant Professor for Molecular and Cellular Biology at the Department of Cell Biology and Immunology at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. Prof. Kulms studied Biology at the University of Gießen, and obtained her PhD at the Medical University to Lübeck in 1995. Between 1997 and 2003 she was a postdoc at the Department of Dermatology at the University of Münster, where she obtained her Habilitation on “Molecular Cellbiolgy” in 2004. Dagmar Kulms heads a translational research group at the National Center of Tumor Diseases (NCT) Dresden, that investigates molecular mechanisms underlying therapy resistance of malignant melanoma metastasis. She has a strong track record in melanoma related signal transduction combining cell- and molecular biological studies with systems biological analysis, aiming to elucidate mechanisms of therapy-resistance of melanoma and to identify combinatorial systems biomarkers to predict treatment responsiveness to tailor therapeutic strategies for individualized medicine. Dagmar Kulms was recently awarded the Oskar Gans Prize in Experimental Dermatology, and received numerous stipends and awards during her career, including the graduate stipend of the Novartis-Foundation and the Albert Kligman Fellowship. She has served on a number of advisory boards (e.g. Spemann Graduate School of Biology and Medicine (SGBM), Freiburg), and has organized various international conferences on cell death and cancer (e.g. of the European Cell Death Organization (ECDO))

Jörg Stelling is a Professor of Computational Systems Biology at the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering of ETH Zurich and has a recognized expertise in computational approaches to biological systems. He heads an interdisciplinary research group that focuses on developing and applying computational methods and mechanistic mathematical models to study complex cellular networks, to elucidate their operating principles, and to enable their rational re-design in contexts such as biomedical applications. A particularly relevant area of research deals with detailed systems dynamics that are, for example, required to understand the integration of cellular regulation across metabolism, signal transduction, and gene regulation. We aim at developing advanced methods and models for detailed network analysis that cope with the prevailing uncertainty due to a lack of experimental data and biological knowledge. Jörg Stelling has published approximately 100 peer-reviewed scientific papers in different areas ranging from applied mathematics to biology, including in high ranked journals such as Nature, Science, Cell, PNAS, and others. He has been invited speaker at more than a 100 international meetings and has organized several international meeting (e.g. EMBO). He has served and is serving on a number of evaluation panels (e.g., EU, Volkswagen Foundation), advisory boards (e.g., BBSRC Strategy Panel for Integrative Biology), and editorial boards (e.g., PLOS Computational Biology). https://csb.ethz.ch/

Dr. Paul Monga is an Academic Physician with an interest in furthering our understanding of many aspects of liver health and disease. After completing his medical training and internship in India, he did his post-doctoral training in Gastroenterology, Hepatology & Molecular Biology at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Washington D.C., learning about liver development and signal transduction. He joined the University of Pittsburgh in the Department of Pathology in 1999 for his second postdoctoral fellowship where he trained in the areas of liver regeneration and liver tumors. In 2001 he became faculty head and was appointed on tenure stream in 2003. He currently is the UPMC Endowed Chair for Experimental Pathology, and Professor of Pathology and Medicine. He serves as the Vice Chair and Chief of the Division of Experimental Pathology. He is the founding director of the Pittsburgh Liver Research Center (PLRC), an NIDDK-funded Silvio O Conte Digestive Diseases Research Core Centers. whose members study regenerative medicine, chronic liver injury and tumorigenesis. He is also the program director of a NIH-funded T32 predoctoral training grants on Regenerative Medicine and serves as the Assistant Dean and co-Director for the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP).

For the last 20 years, Dr. Monga’s lab has been focused on elucidating the cellular and molecular underpinnings of hepatic pathophysiology especially of liver development, repair, and tumorigenesis focusing on innovations in regenerative therapies and cellular reprogramming.

Another major focus of his lab is to understand the basis of liver tumors especially hepatoblastoma (HB), hepatocellular cancer (HCC) and cholangiocarcinoma (CCA). Using molecular and bioinformatic information from clinical tumors, his group has generated innovative animal models to address biology and therapies with the goals of enabling precision medicine in liver tumor space. Studies from his group have yielded many important biological, diagnostic and therapeutic insights into various categories of liver tumors.

Peter ten Dijke received his Ph.D. degree in 1991 from Wageningen University, The Netherlands based on his research on the identification of the third isoform of TGF-β performed at Oncogene Science, Inc., New York, USA. He did his postgraduate studies with Kohei Miyazono and Carl-Henrik Heldin at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (LICR), Uppsala, Sweden. In 1994, he became group leader at LICR and in 1999 he moved to the Netherlands Cancer Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. In 2005 he moved to the Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, The Netherlands, and is currently a professor of molecular cell biology at Leiden University. His laboratory studies how subverted TGF family signaling is involved in cancer, vascular and bone diseases. His research is focused on unraveling the mechanisms by which transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β) family members elicit their multifunctional cellular effects and how perturbation in their signal transduction pathways contribute to human diseases. Previous research from his group and other laboratories have now firmly established the intracellular signaling cascade of TGF-β via serine/threonine kinase receptors and SMAD transcriptional effectors. However, how this pathway is (mis)regulated in cancer and other diseases, remains not well understood. New research lines have been developed at the interface of biology and chemistry that are different from contemporary methods, with the aim to redirect signaling responses with synthetic molecules for therapeutic gain.

Dr. Wells is Professor of Medicine and Vice-Chief for Research in the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology of the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Bioengineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. She received a medical degree from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and carried out postdoctoral research at Harvard University and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Sciences.

Her area of research expertise is in interactions between cells, matrix proteins, and mechanical factors as regulators of fibrosis and tissue behavior, particularly in the liver and bile ducts. She has been a leader in defining the role of mechanical forces in liver and biliary wound healing and fibrosis and directs an interdisciplinary research group with ongoing studies of the role of mechanics in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, hepatocellular carcinoma, and biliary atresia.

Dr. Wells is a former Associate Editor of Gastroenterology and was one of two founding Associate Editors of the new American Gastroenterological Association journal Cellular and Molecular Gastroenterology and Hepatology. She is Co-Director of a multi-site National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center, the Center for Engineering MechanoBiology (CEMB), that focuses on bringing together researchers from the physical and biological sciences in studying mechanobiology. She is also the Associate Director of the Penn NIDDK-funded (DDRCC P30) Center for Molecular Studies in Digestive and Liver Diseases.

Prof. Dr. Reinhard Schneider is a full professor for bioinformatics at the University of Luxembourg. He is heading the Bioinformatics Core facility and is deputy director at the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) and since 2017 heading the ELIXIR node in Luxembourg. Between 2004-2010 he was a Team Leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, where he led the “Data Integration and Knowledge Management” group. Before he was co-founder and CIO in the LION bioscience AG and CEO of LION bioscience Research Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts, establishing an IT based knowledge management system for Bayer. Till 1997 he was a postdoc in the biocomputing department at the EMBL, where he studied various aspects of protein structures and became an expert in HPC. He received his Ph.D. in biology at the University of Heidelberg and has over 200 research papers published with over 16 thousand citations.

He is a member and fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology where he served 7 years as treasurer.

He is chair of the scientific advisory board of the German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure (de.NBI). Beside other assignments he also serves in the scientific advisory boards of the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS), the Zuse Institute (ZIB) and the Supercomputer Center Barcelona. He is also involved in several start-ups in Luxembourg and Germany.

Prof. Dr. Ron M.A. Heeren obtained a PhD degree in technical physics in 1992 at the University of Amsterdam on plasma-surface interactions. He was the research group leader at FOM-AMOLF for macromolecular ion physics and biomolecular imaging mass spectrometry in the period 1995-2015. Between 2001-2019 he lectured on the physical aspects of biomolecular mass spectrometry as a professor at the chemistry faculty of Utrecht University and was part of the Netherlands Proteomics Center. In 2014 he was appointed as distinguished professor and Limburg Chair at Maastricht University. He is scientific director of M4I, the Maastricht MultiModal Molecular Imaging institute on the Brightlands Maastricht Health campus. There, he heads the division of imaging MS. He was awarded the prestigious 2019 Physics Valorization prize by the Dutch organization for scientific Research, NWO and the 2020 Thomson medal of the international mass spectrometry foundation. In 2021 he was elected as a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, KNAW. His academic research interests are mass spectrometry based personalized medicine, translational molecular imaging and “omics” research, high-throughput bioinformatics and the development and validation of new mass spectrometry based molecular imaging techniques for the life sciences. He is actively involved in the development of molecular imaging education, instrumentation engineering and the improvement of the Dutch national large scale research infrastructure.

Wolfram Goessling, MD, PhD is the Robert H. Ebert Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is an oncologist and gastroenterologist who treats patients with chronic liver disease and liver cancer. In his laboratory, Dr. Goessling seeks to identify the molecular signals that regulate liver development, regeneration and cancer formation using zebrafish and other model systems. He received his MD and doctorate from the University of Witten/Herdecke in Germany. He trained in Internal Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, served as Chief Medical Resident, and completed fellowship training in Hematology/Oncology at the combined Dana-Farber/Partners program and in Gastroenterology at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Goessling is the HMS Director of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and Chief of the Gastroenterology Division at the Massachusetts General Hospital, where he holds the Jules L. Dienstag, MD and Betty and Newell Hale Endowed Chair in Gastroenterology.

Beat Müllhaupt is Head of Hepatology and Vice Chair of the Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Coordinator of the Swiss Hepato-Pancreato-Biliary (HPB) Center and member of the Transplantation Center at the University Hospital Zürich. He is specialized in acute and chronic liver diseases, acute liver failure and transplant hepatology. Beat Müllhaupt studied medicine at the Universities of Fribourg and Basel and completed his medical training at several clinics in Switzerland. He gained a research fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco at the Veteran Administration Medical Center and Department of Medicine. He proceeded as a senior physician in gastroenterology and hepatology at the University hospital Zürich and became Head of Hepatology in 2004. From 2003 he was associate professor at the University of Zürich and became professor in 2010. Since 2017 he is Vice Chair of the Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at the University Hospital Zürich. Beat Müllhaupt's research focuses on chronic viral infections of the liver, liver transplantation and fox and dog tapeworm disease. The focus here is on studies of the epidemiology and natural history of these diseases in the context of current therapeutic options. He is member of the American (AASLD), European (EASL), and Swiss (SASL) Associations for the Study of the Liver and was board member of SASL from 2003-2018. Furthermore he is member of Foederatio Medicorum Helveticorum (FMH), Medical Society of the Canton Zürich (AGZ) and Swiss Association for Gastroenterology (SGG) where he was board member (2006-2014), vice president (2014-2016) and co-president (2016-2020). Beat Müllhaupt is the Programme director of the LiSyM-Cancer network. In this position he is following up on the research activities in the consortium and is supporting cross-network consortial cooperation to mediate synergies. Another aspect is the communication with young scientists as well as with the public to increase the outreach of liver systems medicine research.

Interview with Beat Müllhaupt (by BMBF, in German)

Susan Eckerle is an experienced research project manager. She has graduated in human biology at Philipps University Marburg and did her PhD studies in molecular pathology of human lymphoma cells at the Senckenbergische Institute for Pathology, Medical Centre of the Johann Wolfgang-Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main and the Institute for Cell Biology (Tumor Research), University Medical Centre Essen-Duisburg. After working as Medical Affairs Manager in the Pharmaceutical Industry providing internal and external medical-scientific support on biologics for the treatment of rheumatological and orphan diseases, she has gained broad practical experience in the scientific-administrative coordination of third-party funded, interdisciplinary, clinical-scientific studies and collaborative projects as the study manager of the interdisciplinary, DFG-funded collaborative study on Cardiac and Vascular Late Sequelae in Long-term Survivors of Childhood Cancer (CVSS-study), as clinical scientific study coordinator for GPOH, GBA, BMBF, Foundation funded research projects in the Department of Paediatric Hematology and Oncology at the University Medical Center Mainz, the BG Unfallklinik Frankfurt/Main and in Prof. Steven Dooley's Molecular Hepatology group at the University Medical Center Mannheim. Susan Eckerle also completed the certified qualification EU-Fundraiser for EU-funding-acquisition at emcra GmbH, Berlin. Through her assignments Susan Eckerle has gained profound and diverse experience in the preparation, implementation and organisation of research collaborations and network management, cooperation and communication with partners and stakeholders as well as contract and financial management, applications and reporting, development of study documents, ethics, data protection and compliance in studies.

In LiSyM-Cancer Susan Eckerle is Project and Communication Manager and together with Ina Biermayer works in the team to support the Director, the Data Management and Leadership Team to enable cross-network consortial cooperation and to mediate synergies so that the milestones of the individual networks and the consortium as a whole can be successfully achieved. Concurrently, she supports Steven Dooley as Scientific Project Manager with coordination and administrative management of the C-TIP-HCC network.

Ina Biermayer studied Biology at the University of Freiburg, Germany with research stays in Bergen, Norway and Rehovot, Israel. She did her PhD studies at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg, Germany and was involved in the previous network "LiSyM". She studied the characterization of diet-induced non-alcoholic liver diseases with a focus on proteome analyses and application of mathematical modeling of signal transduction. She was involved in the grant application process for LiSyM-Cancer and is thus familiar with the scientific background of the network. She has many contacts within and upon the network.

In LiSyM-Cancer Ina Biermayer is Project and Communication Manager and together with Susan Eckerle works in the team to support the Director, the Data Management and Leadership Team to enable cross-network consortial cooperation and to mediate synergies so that the milestones of the individual networks and the consortium as a whole can be successfully achieved.

Wolfgang Müller studied physics and computer science to diploma level, followed by a doctoral thesis about searching images by their visual similarity and a habilitation on search in distributed systems. After a brief stay in industry, rewriting a large public-facing web application, he joined the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS gGmbH, a private, not-for-profit research institute) as group leader of the Scientific Databases and Visualisation Group (SDBV).

The SDBV is an interdisciplinary group whose research and development is concerned with diverse flavors of management of scientific data. SDBV is responsible for the data management within LiSyM-Cancer. It is the German part of FAIRDOM, a transnational data and model management project, and part of the de.NBI-SysBio, the systems biology part of the German Network for Bioninformatics Infrastructure. For these large-scale projects SDBV develops together with its collaboration partners the SEEK platform, a system for exchanging and storing data, models and other information in Systems Biology. SDBV members are active in the data management (GI/GMDS), biocuration (ISB) and bio data standards (STRENDA, COMBINE) communities.

LiSyM-Cancer data management is coordinated by Wolfgang Müller, and is based on the FAIRDOM SEEK, openBIS, OMERO, interfacing with REDCap (running in Leipzig), and openBIS (running at DKFZ). It is building on the achievements and lessons learned within the Virtual Liver and LiSyM Networks. 

Dr Olga Krebs is a Research Assistant at HITS. She studied Biology and Biochemistry at the State Kazakh University in Almaty (Kazakhstan) and got her Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics from the University Of Belorussia, Minsk.  She worked in wet lab for 19 years and changed than to “dry lab” as data requirements analyst for National Genome Research Network (NGFN) at the German Cancer Reserach Center. Since 2003 she is working in Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS)  supporting researchers in making their data FAIR – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. In LiSyM Cancer she is responsible for project data management: user support and training, data structuring and curation, standards development and application, communication with users and SEEK developers.

Maja Rey studied Biology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany and did her PhD studies at the Max-Planck-Institute for Cell Biology in Ladenburg in the Department of Molecular Phytopathology. After a PostDoc position at Heidelberg Institute of Plant Sciences working on genetic engineering of plant metabolism she joined the Scientific Databases and Visualisation (SDBV) group at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS) as a research associate in 2010 being involved in the LiSyM-Cancer predecessor project Virtual Liver.

Within LiSyM-Cancer she is working as part of the central data management team to support the members of the network in managing, storing and sharing their data and metadata according to the FAIR principles by using FAIRDOM-SEEK, openBIS, OMERO, REDCap and openBIS. Besides that she is working for de.NBI-SysBio, the systems biology part of the German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure as a biocurator of the biochemical reaction kinetics database SABIO-RK and as a community worker for the data management platform FAIRDOMHub.