Our Seminar Series - Upcoming & Historic

Oglesby Lecture Theatre

Evangelia Petsalaki

13th May 2025. 14:00

Evangelia Petsalaki's research group studies human cell signalling in healthy and disease conditions. The group uses interdisciplinary approaches, including data-driven network inference, modelling of cell processes and data integration, to understand how different environmental or genetic conditions affect cell signalling responses leading to diverse cell phenotypes. Evangelia has a PhD in structural bioinformatics from EMBL and the University of Heidelberg (2009) and did her post doctoral work at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute in Toronto, Canada (2010-2016).

Oglesby Lecture Theatre

Pierre Guermonprez

21st May 2025. 14:00

Pierre Guermonprez is trained as a life science engineer. Pierre Guermonprez obtained his PhD at Pasteur Institute in 2000 and became a staff scientist at CNRS in 2004. Pierre Guermonprez performed his postdoctoral training under the supervision of Sebastian Amigorena at Curie Institute in Paris and Michel Nussenzweig at Rockefeller University in New York. Pierre Guermonprez has been group leader and faculty at King’s College London, U.K. from 2012 to 2020 and group leader at University of Paris Medical School, INSERMu1149 up to 2023. Pierre Guermonprez has investigated various aspects of dendritic cell biology including development, antigen presentation to T cells and their role in immune responses against cancer and infections. Pierre is now Principal Investigator, Dendritic cells and adaptive immunity at Institut Pasteur.

Oglesby Lecture Theatre

Eiji Hara

6th June 2025. 14:00

Dr. Hara received his Ph.D. from Tokyo University of Science in 1993. After working at Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratories, U.K. (Postdoctoral Fellow), Cancer Research UK-Paterson Institute, U.K. (Group Leader) and the Institute for Genome Research, University of Tokushima (Professor), he was appointed Division Chief in the Cancer Institute, Japanese Foundation for Cancer Research in 2008. He took his current position at The Research Institute for Microbial Diseases from 2015.

Oglesby Lecture Theatre

Joan Seoane

10th June 2025. 14:00

Joan Seoane is a Group Leader and Director of the Translational Research program at the Vall d'Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO) within the Vall d'Hebron University Hospital since 2011. In 1998, Joan obtained his PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Barcelona. Previously, in 1993, he obtained his BSc degree in Chemistry. Joan joined the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) in New York as a post-doctoral fellow in 1998. From 1998 to 2001, he worked as a Research Fellow and subsequently, from 2001 to 2003, as a Research Associate. He was appointed ICREA Research Professor in 2004 and joined VHIO. In 2007, he became a member of the EMBO Young Investigator program and the recipient of a European Research Council (ERC) grant in 2008. Later, he obtained two ERC Proof of Concept grants (2011, 2013). In 2008, he became Board member of the European Association of Cancer Research (EACR) and Professor of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. In 2016, he became Secretary General of the EACR.

Oglesby Lecture Theatre

Stefan Knapp

24th June 2025. 14:00

Prof Stefan Knapp studied Chemistry at the University of Marburg (Germany) and at the University of Illinois (USA). He did his PhD in protein crystallography at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm (Sweden) (1996) and continued his career at the Karolinska Institute as a postdoctoral scientist (1996-1999). In 1999, he joined the Pharmacia Corporation as a principal research scientist in structural biology and biophysics. He left the company in 2004 to set up a research group at the Structural Genomics Consortium at Oxford University (SGC). From 2008 to 2015 he was a Professor of Structural Biology at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine (NDM) at Oxford University (UK) and between 2012 and 2015 he was the Director for Chemical Biology at the Target Discovery Institute (TDI). He joined Frankfurt University (Germany) in 2015 as a Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry and the Buchmann Institute of Molecular Life Sciences. He remains associated to the SGC as a visiting Professor at Oxford and he is also adjunct Professor of the George Washington University. Since 2017 he is the CSO of the newly founded SGC node at the Goethe-University Frankfurt. His research interests are the rational design of selective inhibitors that target protein kinases as well as protein interactions modules that function as reader domains of the epigenetic code.

Oglesby Lecture Theatre

Mikaël Pittet

1st July 2025. 14:00

Mikael Pittet completed his PhD thesis in Immunology at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and graduated from the University of Lausanne in 2001. He pursued his research at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, in Boston, United States, where he was named Samana Cay MGH Research Scholar in 2015, Director of the Center for Systems Biology Cancer Immunology Program in 2016, and full Professor at Harvard Medical School in 2019. He joined the Faculty of Medicine at UNIGE in 2020where he is appointed Full Professor in the Department of Pathology and Immunology, holding the ISREC Foundation Chair in Onco-Immunology. He is also a member of the Translational Research Centre in Onco-haematology of UNIGE Faculty of Medicine, and a consultant in the Department of Oncology of the University Hospitals of Geneva (HUG). His research laboratory is physically located in Lausanne in the Agora Cancer Research Center, which assembles interdisciplinary research groups to translate advances in cancer research to the clinic. His research focuses on uncovering how the immune system controls cancer and other diseases, and how it can be harnessed for therapy. Pittet’s work has identified how cancers are regulated by various immune cells, including cytotoxic T cells, regulatory T cells, macrophages, monocytes, neutrophils, and dendritic cells. These cells are considered as drug targets in cancer immunotherapy.