professor Warwick (RICK) DUNN

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Rick holds a chair in  Analytical and Clinical Metabolomics at the University of Liverpool. He  graduated from the University of Hull with a BSc(Hons) degree in  Analytical Chemistry and Toxicology and a PhD in collaboration with BP  Chemicals focussed on the development of interfaces to couple mass  spectrometry to chemical process plants for online monitoring. After his PhD he worked in a number of analytical chemistry roles in  industry (Croda Chemicals and Huntingdon Life Sciences) and academia  (Rothamsted and University of Sheffield) before moving to the University  of Manchester in 2003 to work as a post-doctoral researcher focused on  metabolomics in the group of Professor Douglas Kell and subsequently in  the group of Professor Roy Goodacre. Rick obtained a lectureship in 2011 at the University of Manchester  and moved to a lectureship at the University of Birmingham in 2013 and to his chair at the University of Liverpool in 2021. He leads the Analytical and Clinical Metabolomics Group which applies UHPLC-MS and GC-MS-based untargeted and targeted metabolomics to study metabolism in mammals in relation to health and disease across the lifecourse. He has worked in the field of metabolomics for more than 20 years with metabolite annotation/identification being a core theme in his research and application of metabolomics. 

Claire O’Donovan is Head of Metabolomics at EMBL-EBI where she leads the team responsible for MetaboLights. She is particularly interested in how the scientific community can exploit the interoperability of genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics which are constantly evolving. Prior to stepping into this role in early 2017, Claire led the Protein Function Content team at EMBL-EBI for many years, providing essential resources to the biological community through the biocuration of UniProt, the Gene Ontology Annotation project (GOA) and the Enzyme Portal. After gaining a Honours Bsc in Biochemistry and a postgraduate diploma in Computer Science from UCC, Ireland, Claire joined EMBL in 1993, and has been integral to the evolution of the biocuration field and the development of databases at EMBL-EBI and in international consortia.

Prof Tim Ebbels obtained his PhD in astrophysics from the University of Cambridge and in 1998 moved into bioinformatics via postdoctoral work at Imperial College London. His group focuses on the application of bioinformatic, machine learning and chemometric techniques to post-genomic data, with a particular emphasis on computational metabolomics. He has worked on projects ranging from environmental monitoring, through molecular epidemiology, to toxicogenomics and high-performance computing infrastructures. Key areas of interest are data processing, data integration, visualisation, network analysis, time series and metabolite annotation. He is particularly known for the ‘BATMAN’ software for analysing complex metabolic NMR spectra. Tim is an active member of the metabolomics community, having served as a Director of the international Metabolomics Society from 2012-2018 (Secretary from 2014-16). He has co-organisedseveral international conferences (international scientific committee Metabolomics 2014-17) and is a co-founder of the London Metabolomics Network. He has contributed to numerous community-wide efforts aimed at improving the quality and reusability of metabolomics data, and is an editorial board member for BMC Bioinformatics and the Journal of Chemometrics. He has a strong commitment to postgraduate education, serving as Director of the MRes in Biomedical Research at Imperial College (>900 students trained), leading its Data Science stream and leading the Data Analysis short course at the Imperial’s International Phenome Training Centre. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and Lifetime Honorary Fellow of the Metabolomics Society.

Pieter's work aims to develop new mass spectrometry based methods to  understand the chemistry of microbes, our microbiome and their  ecological niche. In short, we develop tools that translate the chemical  language between cells. This research requires the understanding of  (microbial) genomics, proteomics, imaging mass spectrometry, genome  mining, enzymology, small molecules structure elucidation, bioactivity  screening, antibiotic resistance and an understanding of small molecule  structure elucidation methods. The collaborative mass spectrometry  innovation center that he directs is well equipped and now has twelve  mass spectrometers, that are used in the studies to investigate capture  cellular chatter (e.g. metabolic exchange), metabolomics, metabolism and  to develop methods to characterize natural products. These tools are  used to defining the spatial distribution of natural products in 2D, 3D  and in some cases real-time. Areas of recent research directions are  capturing mass spectrometry knowledge to understand the microbiome, non  invasive drug metabolism monitoring, informatics of metabolomics,  microbe-microbe, microbe-immune cells, microbe-host, stem cell-cancer  cell interactions and diseased vs. non-disease model organisms and the  development of strategies for mass spectrometry based genome mining and  to detect and structurally characterize metabolites through crowd source  annotation of molecular information on the Global Natural Products  Social Molecular Networking at http://gnps.ucsd.edu through  the NIH supported center for computational mass spectrometry that is  co-developed with Nuno Bandeira. A more detailed biography can be found  in this Nature article http://www.nature.com/news/the-man-who-can-map-the-chemicals-all-over-your-body-1.20035

Dr Wanchang Lin is a postdoctoral research associate in Professor Warwick Dunn's group at the University of Liverpool, working on metabolite annotation/identification and data analysis. His research interests focus on data analysis for metabolomics and lipidomics data and implementation of automated workflow and software package using R, Python and Matlab languages. He completed his PhD at the University of Derby and subsequently held PDRA, experimental officer and bioinformatician positions at

Aberystwyth University, University of Manchester, University of Cambridge and Imperial College London for metabolomics data analysis. His recent research activities include development of Galaxy tools for metabolomics analysis and network analysis for multi-omics data.

Cate is a Senior research technologist at the University of Liverpool and has greater 20 years experience of applying metabolomics to microbial and mammalian systems. She is passionate about training the next generation of metabolomics researchers and is co-director of the Liverpool Centre for Metabolomics Training.

Michael T. Judge completed a BSc in Cell/Molecular Biology at Appalachian State University (Boone, NC, USA), where he worked in plant molecular biology. He recently finished his PhD in Genetics at the University of Georgia (Athens, GA, USA) where he worked on continuous in vivo monitoring of fungal metabolism using NMR. Michael joined the MARIANA team in early 2022 and is working with Tim Ebbels at Imperial College London. He is developing approaches to computational annotation and reusability of 1D NMR metabolomics data. In his free time, Michael enjoys weightlifting, electronic music, barbecues, and documentaries. 

Cecilia Wieder is a final year bioinformatics PhD candidate at Imperial College London, supervised by Prof. Timothy Ebbels and Dr. Rachel Lai. Her PhD research focuses on using biological pathways to model, integrate, and help interpret complex -omics (particularly metabolomics) datasets. She employs a wide variety of data science techniques to gain insights from pathway-based models, from machine learning to network analysis. Her overarching research interest lies in developing methods for the integration of high-dimensional multi-omics datasets, as well as creating and disseminating open-source software for this purpose.

Dr. Thomas Payne is a curator within the Metabolomics Team at EMBL-EBI responsible for MetaboLights. As a curator, he ensures the submission and reuse of quality metabolomics data through close interaction with the metabolomics community, the development of standards and the provision of training. He is particularly interested in the integration of metabolomics with other omics fields. He worked previously as a Bioinformatic/Computational Research Associate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln centre on the large-scale, computational analysis of metabolomics, lipidomics & proteomics data. He has a PhD in Metabolic Phenotyping from Imperial College London under the supervision of Professor Jeremy Nicholson.

Felix Amaladoss is a software developer with Metabolights Team at EMBL-EBI. He is responsible for maintaining and delivering the MetaboLights repository as a service. He worked previously in Software Development Operation Team at EMBL-EBI where he was responsible for developing software services for EMBL-EBI and for the Life Science community outside the EBI. Before he moved to EMBL-EBI, he worked for a number of information technology companies through which he gained domain knowledge in various fields such as health care, telecom, and cloud computing.

Callum Martin is a software developer with the MetaboLights team at EMBL-EBI. He helps in maintaining the MetaboLights repository, as well as contributing to workflow and pipeline development and working with external partners to aid data sharing. He is interested in making use of new technology to provision access to and gain insight from the data held in the repository. Prior to his role at EMBL-EBI he worked for government contractors helping to deliver world first software solutions for mission focused suppliers. He is an avid climber, runner, skier and has 3 dogs.

Dr. Ozgur Yurekten is a software developer with the MetaboLights team at EMBL-EBI where he is redeveloping the repository infrastructure and supporting workflow development. He received his B.S. degree in Computer Engineering from Baskent University in Ankara, Turkey, and his M.Sc. and PhD. degrees in Computer Engineering from Gazi University, Ankara, Turkey. He worked as chief researcher at TUBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) for more than 20 years. He participated in many software development, cybersecurity, and digital transformation projects. He has proficiency in software engineering, software design, cybersecurity, software defined networks, project management, digital transformation, and enterprise architecture. He has hands-on experience in secure SDLC and tools, DevOps tools, agile methodologies, containerization technologies, and databases.

Dr. Noemi Tejera is a curator within the Metabolomics Team at EMBL-EBI responsible for MetaboLights. As a curator, she ensures the submission and reuse of quality metabolomics data through close interaction with the metabolomics community, the development of standards and the provision of training. She completed her PhD at La Laguna University (Tenerife, Spain), where among other techniques, became proficient in the use of GC-FID for the quantification of fatty acids and set up an HPLC method to analyze carotenoids. Upon finishing her PhD, she joined the Department of Pharmacology at Vanderbilt University (US) as a postdoctoral fellow. During this time she worked in the identification and characterization of novel lipid mediators and studied the oxidative metabolites of curcumin, using HPLC and LCMS. After this, she joined the Department of Nutrition at the University of East Anglia (Norwich, UK), where was part of several studies in lipid metabolism and a clinical trial that investigated the impact of several factors on flavonoids’ metabolism in humans. From 2018 to March 2023, she applied her analytical chemistry expertise in the development and validation of metabolic models on Staphylococcus epidermidis and Campylobacter.