Genomics meets exposomics: advancing gene by environment science

Trevor Archer, Ph.D.

NIH Distinguished Investigator, Epigenetics & RNA Biology Laboratory, The National Institutes of Health, USA

Dr. Archer received a Ph.D. in Biochemistry in 1987 at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, after which he did postdoctoral training on chromatin gene transcription and steroid receptors at the National Cancer Institute, in Bethesda. In 1992, Dr. Archer joined the University of Western Ontario in Canada, as a National Cancer Institute of Canada Scientist. Dr. Archer was recruited to the NIEHS in 1999 as head of Chromatin Structure and Gene Expression. Subsequently Dr. Archer was appointed as Chief, Laboratory of Molecular Carcinogenesis in February 2003. In 2014 Dr. Archer became the founding chief of the new Epigenetics and RNA Biology laboratory at NIEHS. Dr. Archer has made numerous original and important contributions to the study of chromatin structure/function, epigenetics, and gene transcriptional regulation in breast cancer cells while publishing ~120 peer reviewed manuscripts.

David Balshaw, Ph.D.

Director of the Division of Extramural Research and Training, The National Institutes of Health, USA

David is a biophysicist by training with a Ph.D. from the Department of Pharmacology and Cellular Biophysics at the University of Cincinnati and post-doctoral training in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of North Carolina. He joined NIH as a Program Officer at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute in 2001 and moved to NIEHS in 2003. Over nearly two decades he has led several high impact programs at NIEHS and NIH particularly in the areas of ‘omics technologies and is an international leader in the field of exposomics.

Gergo Baranyi, Ph.D.

Senior Research Fellow, University College London, London, United Kingdom

Gergo is a Senior Research Fellow working with administrative and geospatial data linked to the British Birth Cohorts. His research focusses on the life-course impact of physical and social environments on cognitive and mental health, and on healthy ageing. Gergo has a wide range of international collaborations including the Max-Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Instituto de Salud Global de Barcelona (ISGLobal) in Barcelona, and Hungarian Demographic Research Institute in Budapest. As a psychologist with expertise in public health and geography, he has worked in academia in the UK and Germany and was a technical consultant at the World Health Organization on projects with environmental and mental health focus.

Robert Barouki, MD, PhD, Prof.

Professor of Biochemistry at Université Paris Cité Medical School and head of the Inserm Institute of Public Health

His research is focused on the impact of environmental contaminants on human health, in particular POPs and EDCs and more generally on the links between the exposome and health. He is involved in several EU projects: PARC (linking exposure to health), Heals and Neurosome (exposome), HERA (setting the research agenda in environment climate and health) Oberon (EDC testing), IHEN (setting the agenda for human exposome research) and EIRENE (european exposome infrastructure). He has also been involved in the networking of French and European research in the field of environment and health as well as in communicating scientific data to citizens. He is a corresponding member of the French Academy of Medicine and of several scientific councils at the European and French levels.

Jos Bessems, PhD. 

Researchers, VITO, Belgium

Focusing on human biomonitoring for chemical policy making. Internal exposure biomarkers reveal actual and total exposure 'under' various legislative frameworks (food, cosmetics, work, etc.) which may or may not result in health effects. Potential health risks linked to recycling materials containing substances of concern (legacy chemicals) are studied within the circular economy context. Follow us @https://www.eu-parc.eu Publication list is incomplete. See GoogleScholar orResearchGate for a complete list.

Clayton Bingham, Ph.D.

Program Officer, Scientific contact for Data Science, National Institutes of Health, USA

He began his career as a data scientist in information services before pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Southern California, where his research focused on hippocampal prostheses for treating temporal lobe disorders. His dissertation demonstrated how multi-scale models can predict hippocampal behavior under microelectrode-based stimulation, integrating electromagnetics, neural modeling, machine learning, bio-inspired algorithms, and high-performance computing. His postdoctoral work advanced understanding of the biological realism required in neural models to predict the therapeutic efficacy of subthalamic deep brain stimulation for essential tremor and Parkinson's disease.

In 2023, he joined NIH as a Health Program Specialist supporting the BRAIN Initiative and contributing to the launch of the $45 million/year CONNECTS program. In 2024, he was appointed Program Director at the National Library of Medicine, where he leads a grants portfolio in biomedical informatics, artificial intelligence, and data science research and training.

Ewan Birney, Ph.D.

Deputy Director General of EMBL and Director of EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI)

Ewan Birney is Deputy Director General of EMBL and Director of EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). He completed his PhD at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and in 2000, he became Head of Nucleotide Data at EMBL-EBI, rising through the EMBL ranks ever since. Birney led the analysis of the Human Genome gene set, as well as mouse and chicken genomes. He also led the ENCODE project, focusing on non-coding elements of the human genome. His main areas of research include functional genomics, DNA algorithms, statistical methods to analyse genomic information, and use of images for chromatin structure.

Yin Cai

Healthcare & Life Sciences Innovation Leader | Precision Medicine Strategy | AI/ML | AWS

A visionary leader advancing precision medicine and healthcare innovation across EMEA through the transformative power of cloud technology and AI, his journey from life sciences research to strategic technology leadership reflects a deep passion for improving global healthcare through digital transformation. As AWS Business Development Manager for Healthcare in EMEA, she serves as a trusted advisor to healthcare authorities, hospital C-suite executives, medical research leaders, and technology builders. She brings a global perspective to healthcare innovation, combining scientific rigor, technological advancement, and strategic insight to help customers and partners shape the future of accessible and inclusive precision medicine through AI innovation.

Nilanjan Chatterjee, Ph.D.

Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, Johns Hopkins University, USA

Nilanjan Chatterjee is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Biostatistics and Genetic Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University, with appointments in the Department of Biostatistics in the Bloomberg School of Public Health and in the Department of Oncology in the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He was formerly the chief of the Biostatistics Branch of the National Cancer Institute's Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics. Chatterjee is known for his work in quantitative genetics, cancer research, big data, statistical methodology, genomics, gene-environment interaction, genetic association and genome-wide association studies.

Dr. Janine Felix

Associate professor at Department of Paediatrics, Erasmus MC, University Medical Center Rotterdam

Janine's research aims to understand the genetic and epigenetic mechanisms underlying the well-known associations of early-life exposures and later health. As Principal Investigator (PI) for Epigenetics in the Generation R Study, Janine uses epigenome-wide and genome-wide data from Generation R, working mostly within large-scale international consortia, such as the PACE (Pregnancy And Childhood Epigenetics) Consortium, with over 30,000 participants, in which she is the senior lead investigator on multiple projects. She is also the PI of the 6-partner international NutriPROGRAM Consortium, which studies early-life nutrition, DNA methylation and childhood cardiometabolic outcomes. Next to these, Janine is the work package lead for several Horizon2020-funded projects (DynaHEALTH, LifeCycle, LONGITOOLS) and the study coordinator of the Generation R Study.

Andrea Ganna, Ph.D.

EMBL-group leader at FIMM, Instructor at Harvard Medical School

Andrea is an EMBL-group leader at FIMM and an instructor at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. Previously he did his post-doc at the Analytical and Translation Genetic Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School/Broad Institute and his PhD at Karolinska Institute. His research interests lie on the intersection between epidemiology, genetics and statistics. Andrea have authored and co-authored both methodological and applied papers focused on leveraging large scale epidemiological datasets to identify novel socio-demographic, metabolic and genetic markers of common complex diseases. He has extensive expertise in statistical genetics and have been working with large-scale exome and genome sequencing data, focusing on ultra-rare variants in coding and non-coding regions. His research vision is to integrate genetic data and information from electronic health record/national health registries to enhance early detection of common diseases and public health interventions.

Greg Gibson, Ph.D.

Professor of Biology and Director, Center for Integrative Genomics, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

Greg Gibson is Professor of Biology and Director of the Center for Integrative Genomics, Georgia Tech.  He received his BSc majoring in Genetics from the University of Sydney (Australia) and PhD in Developmental Genetics from the University of Basel.  After transitioning to quantitative genetic research as a Helen Hay Whitney post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University, he initiated a program of genomic research as a David and Lucille Packard Foundation Fellow at the University of Michigan.  He joined the faculty at Georgia Tech in Fall of 2009, after ten years at North Carolina State University where he developed tools for quantitative gene expression profiling and genetic dissection of development in the fruitfly Drosophila.  He is now collaborating with the Center for Health Discovery and Well Being on integrative genomic analyses of the cohort.  Dr Gibson is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and serves as Section Editor for Natural Variation for PLoS Genetics.  He has authored a prominent text-book, a "Primer of Genome Science" as well as a popular book about genetics and human health, "It Takes a Genome".

Geoffrey Ginsburg, PhD.

Chief Medical and Scientific Officer at All of Us, NIH, USA

Dr. Geoffrey S. Ginsburg is the founding director for Genomic Medicine at Duke and assumed his current position in the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy in 2004. He is also the founding executive director of the Center for Personalized Medicine established in the Duke University Health System in 2010. Dr. Ginsburg’s research interests are in the development of novel paradigms for developing and translating genomic information into medical practice and the integration of personalized medicine into health care.

Rima Habre, SCD

Associate Professor of Population and Public Health Sciences and Spatial Sciences

Dr. Habre is an Associate Professor in Environmental Health and Spatial Sciences at USC, jointly appointed in the Department of Population and Public Health Sciences, Keck School of Medicine, and the Dornsife Spatial Sciences Institute. A native of Beirut, Lebanon, her doctoral training is in in Environmental Health at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, with expertise in exposure science and air quality. Her lab uses cutting edge, real-time environmental and geo-location sensors, remote sensing, and geospatial analysis to investigate environmental links to disease. Her lab’s research is transdisciplinary in nature and focused on two major, interconnected themes: 1) Advancing precision environmental health by developing state-of-the-art exposure science (or “exposomics”) methods; and 2) Understanding the health effects of co-exposure to complex air pollution mixtures and social stressors across the life course, in vulnerable populations, and in light of climate change, especially for unregulated pollutants (e.g. ultrafine particles, wildfire smoke) and microenvironments (e.g. indoors).

Maya Kasowski, MD-PhD.

​Assistant professor of Pathology, of Medicine and, by courtesy, of Genetics, Stanford University, USA

She is a clinical pathologist and assistant professor in the Departments of Medicine, Pathology, and Genetics (by courtesy) at Stanford. She completed her MD-PhD training at Yale University, followed by residency training and a post-doctoral fellowship in the Department of Genetics at Stanford University. Her experiences as a clinical pathologist and genome scientist have fueled her passion for applying cutting-edge technologies to primary patient specimens to characterize disease pathologies at the molecular level. The core focus of her lab is to study the mechanisms by which genetic variants influence disease risk through their effects on intermediate molecular phenotypes.

Jana Klánová, PhD., Prof.

Professor of environmental chemistry at Masaryk University in Brno, director of the RECETOX Centre and Coordinator of EIRENE RI

Jana is the director of RECETOX, the European Centre of Excellence for exposome research at Masaryk University in Brno. She also leads EIRENE, the European research infrastructure on human exposome, added to the European Strategic Forum for Resarch Infrastructures (ESFRI) Roadmap in 2021. She has a background in environmental chemistry and a long-term experience in the development of sampling and analytical methods, building global monitoring networks and longitudinal population cohorts, and harmonizing related data. She collaborates with the Unined Nations Environment Programme and the WHO.

Adam Lewandowski, BSc (Hons), MSt, DPhil, FESC

Deputy Chief Scientist for UK Biobank and an Associate Professor of Cardiovascular Science, Oxford University, UK

Adam Lewandowski is Deputy Chief Scientist for UK Biobank and Associate Professor of Cardiovascular Science at the Clinical Trial Service Unit and Epidemiological Studies Unit (CTSU). He studied biological sciences at the University of Guelph, completed a Master’s in Healthcare Data at Cambridge, and earned a DPhil in Cardiovascular Medicine at Oxford. His research focuses on early cardiac and vascular changes in young people at risk of cardiovascular disease, with an emphasis on how early-life conditions such as preterm birth or hypertensive pregnancy impact long-term cardiovascular health. Before joining UK Biobank in 2024, he held a British Heart Foundation Fellowship at Oxford, where he advanced deep phenotyping approaches using MRI and echocardiography. At UK Biobank, he helps shape scientific strategy, including future enhancements like the Brain Health study and repeat assessments.

Alison A. Motsinger-Reif, Ph.D.

Chief, Biostatistics & Computational Biology Branch and Principal Investigator, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, USA

Her lab develops and extends methods to detect gene–gene and gene–environment interactions. These include Multifactor Dimensionality Reduction and Grammatical Evolution Neural Networks. She and her team also design methods for dose–response curve modeling using evolutionary algorithms, as well as approaches for variable selection and dimensionality reduction in genome-wide association studies. Their work includes association mapping to identify genes linked to differential responses to pharmaceutical agent exposure, studied both in clinical trials and in cell line models. She also collaborates with multiple investigators to understand complex human diseases, compare disease etiology across species, and perform gene mapping for a range of common, complex conditions. As Chief of the NIEHS Biostatistics & Computational Biology Branch, she oversees a dynamic and talented staff engaged in biostatistical and computational methods development, software development, study design, and collaborative real data applications.

Gary Miller, PhD.

Adrienne Block Professor of Environmental Health Sciences (in Molecular Pharmacology and Therapeutics), Vice Dean for Research Strategy and Innovation, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, USA

Dr. Miller is a leader in the field of exposomics, which studies the comprehensive and cumulative effects of physical, chemical, biological, and psychosocial mediators that impact biological systems. He has helped develop high-resolution mass spectrometry methods to provide an -omic scale analysis of the human exposome. He serves on the advisory panel to the National Institutes of Health All of Us Research Program and on the National Environmental Health Sciences Advisory Council. Dr. Miller is the founding editor of the journal Exposome. He previously served as the Editor of Toxicological Sciences.

Bogdan Pasaniuc, PhD. 

Director, Center for Computational Biomedicine, Institute for Biomedical Informatics, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania

Dr Pasaniuc leads the computational genomics for precision health research group within the department of Genetics and Institute for Biomedical Informatics. The group develops statistical and computational methods to understand the genetic basis of disease, focusing on under- represented populations, integrative genomics, and biobank studies. Dr Pasaniuc is interested in innovative ML/AI methods to integrate genetics with multi-omic profiles (e.g., epigenetic/transcriptomic) and electronic health records to identify causal genes and pathways for human diseases. Dr Pasaniuc introduced transcriptome-wide association studies (TWAS) using predicted gene expression as a principled approach to identify disease genes for many traits such as Schizophrenia, Ovarian Cancer and Prostate Cancer. His main research interest is in precision health using genomics to predict health outcomes; to stratify patients based on their genetic profiles; to identify undiagnosed rare diseases; and to translate computational algorithms to the clinic. 

Chiraq Patel, PhD. 

Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard University  

Chirag Patel is an associate professor of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard University. His long-term research goal is to address problems in human health and disease by developing computational and bioinformatics methods to efficiently reason over high-throughput data streams spanning molecules to populations. His groups aims to dissect inter-individual differences in human phenomes through strategies that integrate data sources that capture the comprehensive clinical experience, the complex phenomena of environmental exposure (e.g., high-throughput measures of the exposome), and inherited genomic variation. He is co-coordinating center for exposomics NEXUS and leads the data science hub of the center.

Krystal Pollit, PhD.

Assistant Professor of Epidemiology (Environmental Health Sciences) and Chemical and Environmental Engineering, Yale University, USA

Her research applies exposomic approaches to investigate the influence of environmental factors on disease. She emphasizes the need for robust, reliable, reproducible, and rigorous analytical and computational techniques to operationalize the exposome framework in population studies. Her work has focused on overcoming the technical challenges of systematically and comprehensively measuring environmental chemicals using high-resolution mass spectrometry. Her team has pioneered technologies for exposomics, including a wearable passive sampler (the Fresh Air wristband) to assess personal exposure to thousands of environmental contaminants such as pesticides and phthalates, as well as software for non-targeted analysis (FluoroMatch) to expand coverage of emerging chemicals in environmental and biological matrices.

Elliot Price, PhD.

Junior PI - Human Exposome, RECETOX, Masaryk University, Czech Republic

Elliott Price is a postdoc within the Human Exposome research group of Prof. Jana Klánová. Elliott and his team focus on the development of high-resolution mass spectrometry methods to profile environmental chemicals and metabolites in human biospecimen. Application of these methods is hoped to provide a more in-depth characterisation of chemical exposure and associated biological responses. Greater characterisation is vital to further understanding about the influence of environmental chemicals on health and phenotype. Elliott gained his PhD and undertook postdoctoral research in the Fraser Lab at Royal Holloway University of London, where he focussed upon metabolic profiling of the tropical tuber crop, yam (Dioscorea spp.). He then joined MUNI in 2019 as a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Sports Studies & RECETOX.

Dr. Nicholas Rattray

Reader (Associate Professor) in Clinical Metabolism, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow

His primary research interests focus on metabolic changes across the human life course, with emphasis on energy metabolism and biomarker detection. He is developing a research theme spanning pregnancy, frailty, and ageing-related clinical projects, supported by novel analytical approaches to quantify pathways critical to biochemical energy production. His portfolio includes studies on frailty metabolism, early diagnostic biomarkers, placental energy metabolism, ageing, and the metabolic basis of cancer, complemented by statistical and informatics tools that link metabolite data to biochemical pathways, genomic studies, and epidemiological models. His lab has expertise in cellular models of disease and ageing, targeted and untargeted mass spectrometry pipelines, automation of data workflows, and imaging mass spectrometry, with a strong focus on energy metabolites.

Dimosthenis A. Sarigiannis

Professor, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece

Denis received his PhD at University of California, Berkeley, USA. He is an Associate Professor of Environmental and Health Issues at the Department of Chemical Engineering, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Visiting Professor at the University of Pavia, and senior scientist at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (currently on leave). At the European Commission, he has held leadership roles including Scientific Coordinator of the IHCP, Action Leader for Consumer Product Safety and Human Exposure, and Strategy Manager of the IHCP. He was a principal contributor to the REACH Regulation and the Environment and Health Action Plan and currently serves on the Health and Environment Working Party and the Health Security Committee. His research focuses on integrating biology-based modeling with toxicogenomics to understand health risks from environmental chemical mixtures. He is also secretary-general of MESAEP and has contributed to numerous international projects including HEIMTSA, HENVINET, TRANSPHORM, and INTERA.

Sylvain Sebert, Ph.D.

Professor of Life-course Epidemiology, Research Unit of Population Health, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oulu

Sylvain Sebert is a professor of Life-course Epidemiology at the University of Oulu. He is leading the life-course epidemiology research group at the population health research unit and chairing the Northern Finland Birth Cohort executive board. He is also the Programme Director for the International Master of Epidemiology and Biomedical Data Science. His research interests include the exposome, obesity, epidemiology, climate change and health. 

Kári Stefánsson, Ph.D.

Geneticist, Founder and CEO of deCODE genetics, University of Iceland, Iceland 

Kari Stefansson MD, PhD is a founder and CEO of the Icelandic biotechnology company deCODE genetics. He pioneered the use of population genetics in the study of human diversity, how human diversity is generated through diversity in the sequence of the human genome and how diversity in the sequence of the genome is generated through de novo mutations, recombinations and gene conversions. The population approach he advanced in Iceland has served as a model for large scale genome projects around the world. His work has been published in over 700 scientific papers and includes discoveries of variants in the sequence of the germline genome that affect the risk of a large number of common diseases (ca. 100). Before founding deCODE in 1996 Dr. Stefansson was a professor of neurology, neuropathology and neuroscience at Harvard Medical School and before that he held the same positions at the University of Chicago, Pritzker School of Medicine.

Chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential men of the year for 2007 (Time100 list for 2007), chosen 2007 by Newsweek as one of the 10 most important biologists of the 21 century, Chosen by BusinessWeek as one of the stars of Europe in 2000 at the forefront of change, on the Reuter´s/Thompson´s list of the world´s 10 most cited scientists of 2010, Clarivate Analytics 2016,  2017 and 2018 Highly Cited Researcher in molecular biology and genetics, Clarivate Analytics 2019 and 2020 Highly Cited Researcher Cross-Field.

Shamil Sunyaev, PhD.

Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School, Professor of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital

Shamil Sunyaev is a computational genomicist and geneticist. Research in his lab encompasses many aspects of population genetic variation including the origin of mutations, the effect of allelic variants on molecular function, population and evolutionary genetics, and genetics of human complex and Mendelian traits. He developed several computational and statistical methods widely adopted by the community. Sunyaev obtained a PhD in molecular biophysics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and completed his postdoctoral training in bioinformatics at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). He is an Institute Member at Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He also co-organizes the Boston Evolutionary Genomics Supergroup.

Anne Thessen, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, Genetics, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill

Her research uses semantic technologies and knowledge graphs to integrate and analyze heterogeneous data at scale to understand the environmental component of disease. She focuses on identifying meaningful environmental measures for patient records, including combining satellite observations, EHRs, genetic data, geolocated exposure histories, and companion animals as disease sentinels, as well as applying AI to study gene–environment interactions and public health impacts of environmental changes. Her work addresses complex diseases such as Parkinson’s, asthma, kidney disease, parasitic infections, and seasonal allergies, especially in the context of climate change.

She serves as Associate Director of Translational Environmental Science at TISLab, developing data standards for linking environmental and patient data. She is a Multi-PI for the Data Management Core in BioData Catalyst, a member of the Environmental Health Language Collaborative Executive Committee, and has contributed to projects including the NCATS Biomedical Data Translator and the GenoPhenoEnvo Project.

Nick Timpson, MSc(Oxon), PhD(Bristol), PGCHE, FMedSci

Professor of Genetic Epidemiology, Bristol Medical School, ALSPAC PI

Nic’s research applies genetic epidemiology to explore causal relationships between modifiable risk factors and complex health outcomes. He is PI of the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) and affiliate programme lead at the MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit, where he focuses on body mass index (BMI) as a risk factor. His work combines genetic epidemiology, metabolomics, proteomics, clinical trials, and microbiome studies to examine causal pathways and the role of genetic variation in health outcomes.

He has contributed to strategic population-based research, including COVID-19 studies in collaboration with UK longitudinal cohorts. Most recently, he became Director of Population Research UK (PRUK), a national resource funded by UKRI to maximize the use of UK longitudinal studies across social, economic, and biomedical science.

André Uitterlinden, Prof., Dr., PhD.

Head of Population Genomics / Head of Human Genomics Facility, ERASMUS MC

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.

Roel Vermeulen, Prof., Dr.

Professor , Veterinary Medicine, Department Population Health Sciences, Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences (IRAS), Utrecht University

Roel Vermeulen is Professor of Environmental Epidemiology and Exposome Science at Utrecht University and the director of the Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences (IRAS) at Utrecht University and the UMC Utrecht. He holds a professor position at the Julius Center, Department Public Health Healthcare Innovation and Medical Humanities (UMC Utrecht) and a Visiting Professorship at Imperial College London, UK. His scientific research focuses on environmental risk factors for non-communicable diseases with a strong emphasis on integrating epidemiology, high quality exposure assessment, and molecular biology into multidisciplinary investigations.

Richard Woychik, Ph.D.

Director, NIEHS & NTP and Principal Investigator, The National Institutes of Health, USA

Dr. Rick Woychik was named Director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Toxicology Program on June 7, 2020, after serving as Deputy Director since 2011. He is a molecular geneticist with a Ph.D. in molecular biology from Case Western Reserve University and postdoctoral training with Dr. Philip Leder at Harvard Medical School. He spent almost 10 years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory rising in the ranks to become head of the Mammalian Genetics Section and then director of the Office of Functional Genomics. In August 1997, he assumed the role of vice chairman for research and professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Case Western Reserve University. In 1998, he moved to the San Francisco Bay area, first as the head of the Parke- Davis Laboratory for Molecular Genetics and then as chief scientific officer at Lynx Therapeutics. He returned to academics as the president and CEO of The Jackson Laboratory in August 2002 and served in that role until January 2011.