The CRUK Convergence Science Centre between Imperial College London and The Institute of Cancer Research, in collaboration with our international partners, arrange a monthly international seminar ‘Converging on Cancer’ on the topic of interdisciplinary cancer research. Our partners are Technical University of Munich (TUM), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Biotech Research and Innovation Centre (BRIC – University of Copenhagen) and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).
On the first Thursday of each month, we bring together speakers from across these institutions to present their research and how they use convergence science to answer cancer-related questions.
This session will be chaired by Prof Joachim Weischenfeldt from the BRIC, University of Copenhagen.
Speakers
Professor Axel Behrens, Scientific Director, CRUK Convergence Science Centre
Professor Axel Behrens is the Scientific Director of the CRUK Convergence Science Centre, an innovative partnership between Imperial College, the Institute of Cancer Research, and Cancer Research UK with a mission to bring together engineering, physical sciences, life sciences and medicine to develop innovative ways to address challenges in cancer research to benefit cancer patients.
He is also a senior team leader at the Institute of Cancer Research and full professor at Imperial College London, and Honorary Professor at London University College (KCL) and Sun-Yat-Sen University (Shenzhen, China).
He received his PhD degree in Molecular Genetics from Vienna University and completed his postdoctoral training in the University Hospital in Zurich (Switzerland). Behrens’ lab focuses on the biology of stem cells and their function in cancer.
Professor Ali Miserez, School of Materials Science & Engineering, Nanyang Technological University
Ali Miserez is a Full Professor of Biomimetic and Bioinspired Materials at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), which he joined in 2009, with joint appointments in the School of Materials Science and Engineering and the School of Biological Sciences. He obtained his PhD (2003) from EPFL (Switzerland) in the field of composite and mechanics of materials. From 2004 to 2009, he was a post-doctoral fellow at UC Santa Barbara, where he expanded his research towards biomimetic engineering and biochemistry of extracellular tissues. Miserez’s research aims at revealing the molecular, physico-chemical, and structural principles from unique biological materials, and at translating their molecular design into novel biomimetic materials, including for healthcare applications. At NTU, he is currently the founding Director of the “Center for Sustainable Materials”.
His interdisciplinary research has been published in about 150 articles in a wide range of journals
across the Physical and Life Sciences, including in Science, Nature Materials, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Chemical Biology, Nature Chemistry, Biomacromolecules, ACS Nano, Acta Biomaterialia, Advanced Materials, J. Biological Chemistry, Polymer Chemistry, etc. He has delivered numerous invited talks, including at Gordon Research Conferences in the field of bioinspired materials, biointerfaces, biomineralization, and intrinsically disordered proteins.
Who can attend?
Researchers, students and anyone with an interest in convergence science relating to cancer research across our partnered institutions are welcome to register. Please email icr-imperial-convergence.centre@imperial.ac.uk if you have any questions.