Programme

Michael Paul Snyder is an American genomicist, professor, and former chair of genetics at Stanford University School of Medicine. He also serves as the director of the Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine.

Snyder’s research focuses on “omics”, the study of genomes, transcriptomes, proteomes, and other high-throughput omics datasets. His lab has contributed to understanding the genomes and transcriptomes of yeast and humans. The lab also pioneered the use of multi-omic longitudinal profiling to monitor health.

Participation is tentatively confirmed and pending final approval.

André Uitterlinden is Professor of Complex Genetics at the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam – The Netherlands – where he holds positions in 3 departments: Internal Medicine, Epidemiology, and Clinical Chemistry. His research is focusing on genetic factors for common traits and disease, including anthropometry, endocrine traits & disorders, and locomotor disease such as osteoporosis and osteoarthritis. 

At Erasmus MC he is also heading the Genomics Core Facility, which is one of Europe’s largest genomics facility. It provides services for DNA isolation, genotyping and sequencing, and is the coordinating center for the European GSA consortium handling >850.000 samples for array genotyping.

As a PI (Principal Investigator) and member of the MT, he is coordinating molecular genetic analyses in 2 major cohort studies at Erasmus MC: the Rotterdam Study (20,000 elderly subjects) and the Generation R birth-cohort (n=10,000 children +15,000 parents).

He is collaborating with many (large) international epidemiological study populations and involved in several consortia, e.g., GEFOS, Reprogen, CHARGE, GIANT, MiBioGen. He is a member of the Research Steering Committee of the CHARGE consortium and was director of the Netherlands Consortium for Healthy Aging (NCHA). He has co-authored over 1060 papers (H-index 125) and is leading annual courses on complex genetics at Erasmus MC. He is coordinator of the Genome of Europe project. 

Participation is tentatively confirmed and pending final approval.

Marek Vácha is a Czech Roman Catholic priest, theologian, molecular biologist, bioethicist, educator, writer, and Scout. He specialises in evolutionary biology, as well as medical and environmental ethics.

He serves as the parish priest of the Lechovice parish. From 2007 to 2025, he also served as a parochial vicar (chaplain) of the Roman Catholic Academic Parish at the Church of the Most Holy Saviour. Between 2007 and 2024, he held the position of Head of the Department of Ethics and Humanities at the Third Faculty of Medicine, Charles University, where he also served as Chairman of the Academic Senate from 2010 to 2022.

Jaroslav Doležel is founder of the Centre of Plant Structural and Functional Genomics of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He specializes in plant genome organization, function, and evolution. He pioneered flow cytometry for estimating ploidy and genome size, contributing to its standardization. He also established chromosome genomics, combining flow cytometric chromosome isolation with genomic techniques to aid in genome sequencing and gene cloning in complex crops. Additionally, he developed a program for studying banana heredity and established a genotyping center to characterize and preserve the genetic diversity of cultivated and wild banana species.