Masanori Arita
National Institute of Genetics / RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science, Japan

With a Ph.D in information science (1999), Arita works for a wide range of topics in bioinformatics. His contribution to metabolomics includes MassBank for sharing mass spectra (2006-2017), MS-DIAL for computational analysis (2015-2020), and MetaboBank for sharing raw data (2018-). He has been involved in various international activities for data sharing and standardization. Currently he is Head of DDBJ (DNA Data Bank of Japan) and a steering member of INSDC (International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration).

David Beale
Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia

Adjunct A/Prof. David Beale is a Senior Research Scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organisation’s (CSIRO) Environmental Systems Biology Team, delivering research outcomes and creating impact in applications of functional systems biology (i.e., metabolomics, lipidomics, and proteomics). A/Prof. Beale is a science domain and organizational leader of the 'Environmental Metabolomics & Systems Biology Integration' unit who develops high-throughput tools for detecting, quantifying, and tracking contaminants in the environment and assessing their biological impact (i.e., modes of action and adverse outcome pathways) using omics-based techniques in model and non-model species. A/Prof. Beale has transferred these tools and approaches to industrial and clinical applications outside his field of expertise, further growing his reputation as a national science leader with an emerging international profile in metabolomics and omics-based research.  

A/Prof. Beale is the outgoing Chair of the CSIRO Land & Water Science Council and the outgoing Vice President of the Australian & New Zealand Metabolomics Society (ANZMetSoc). His current roles include co-chairing the Society of Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) omics interest group and serving as an associate editor for its journal 'Environmental Toxicology & Chemistry' (Wiley Publishing). Additionally, he supervises postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers in the field of environmental metabolomics at several Australian and international universities.   

Sebastian Böcker
Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany

Sebastian Böcker holds the Chair for Bioinformatics at the Institute for Computer Science, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. He studied mathematics and did his PhD in biomathematics at Bielefeld University, focusing on theoretical phylogenetics. He then went to industry for three years, developing computational methods for the interpretation of DNA/RNA mass spectrometry data. He returned to Bielefeld University as an independent research leader, before he took up his current position in Jena. His research interests were originally mainly method-driven, combining combinatorics, algorithmics, stochastics and machine learning. On the application side, his research focuses on the annotation of small molecules from mass spectrometry data.  

Sebastian Böcker is an Emmy Noether fellow of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and also a fellow of the Alexander-von-Humboldt Society. SIRIUS and CANOPUS from his group were named "methods to watch" by Nature Methods in 2020 and 2023, respectively. In 2022, he and his group won the Thuringian Research prize.

Cristina Legido-Quigley
King’s College London, UK

Dr Cristina Legido-Quigley’s main area of interest is neurometabolism and how the brain copes with disease,  as well as finding clinical tests for healthy aging, Alzheimer's, cognition, diabetes and metabolic diseases. Her discoveries span fatty molecules that are important for cognition, small molecules that in liver alert to tissue damage, together with modulating molecular pathways for improving the treatment of diabetes. She is also researching algorithms for better personalised diagnoses in the clinic. 

She has been a group leader at King's College London since 2006. Before that she did a PhD and postdoc at Imperial College London, in 2006 presenting her postdoc work in bile acids in the Metabolomics Society conference in Boston. In 2018 she moved to Steno Diabetes Center, a hospital and research centre in Denmark to be the Head of Systems Medicine and moved back to Kings College London in 2023. She shares her findings in more than 150  publications  in the clinical and biotechnology fields.

Jun Ogawa
Kyoto University, Japan

Jun Ogawa is a professor of the Laboratory of Fermentation Physiology and Applied Microbiology in Division of Applied Life Sciences, Graduate School of Agriculture, Kyoto University. He studied applied microbiology and completed his doctorate in 1995 at Kyoto University and became an assistant professor at the same university. He was a visiting researcher at French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) (2006-2007) and has appointed as a full professor of the current position in 2009.  

He has published over 270 papers in applied microbiology such as bioprocess development, microbial metabolism analysis, and microbial enzyme engineering, microbial community analysis and functional development such as gut microbiota and rhizosphere microorganisms, etc. He was awarded "Oleoscience Award" by the Japan Oil Chemists' Society (2015 and 2020), "Society Award of Japanese Association for Food Immunology" (2018), "Ching Hou Biotechnology Award" (2020) and "Fellow" (2021) by American Oil Chemists’ Society, and "Chevreul Medal" by the French association for the study of lipids (2021).

Farhana Pinu
New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research Ltd, New Zealand

Farhana Pinu is a Science Group Leader of Biological Chemistry and Bioactives group, New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research Ltd (PFR) where she is responsible for managing four different teams that specialise in metabolomics, analytical and natural products chemistry. After completing her PhD from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, she joined PFR to work on a programme to develop fermentation technologies to produce lower alcohol wines using data driven approaches. Over the decade, she has contributed to some of the pioneering work involving the application of targeted and untargeted metabolomics in grape and wine research. 

Her current projects focus on the development and optimisation of metabolomics, lipidomics, flavoromics and imaging approaches mainly using mass spectrometry, to understand plant systems to identify new flavour traits in horticultural crops and also to study microbial metabolism linking to fermentation outcomes. Farhana was the President of Australian and New Zealand Metabolomics Society from 2020-2023.

Emma Schymanski
Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB), University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg

Professor Emma Schymanski is head of the Environmental Cheminformatics (ECI) group at the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB), University of Luxembourg and special advisor to the rector for Open Science and Research Data Management. She became Associate Professor and Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) ATTRACT Fellow in 2018 and full Professor in 2023 following a 6-year postdoc at Eawag, Switzerland and a PhD at UFZ, Leipzig, Germany. Before her PhD she was a consulting environmental engineer in Perth, Australia and holds a double degree in Chemistry and Environmental Engineering from UWA, Australia. 

She is involved in many collaborative efforts, with over 110 publications and a book. Her research combines cheminformatics and computational (high resolution) mass spectrometry approaches to elucidate the unknowns in complex samples, primarily with non-target screening, and relate these to environmental causes of disease. An advocate for FAIR and open science, she is involved in and organizes several European and worldwide activities to improve the exchange of data, information and ideas between scientists to push progress in this field, including the NORMAN Suspect List Exchange, MassBank, MetFrag, PubChemLite for Exposomics and the PubChem PFAS Tree. 

Xiayan Wang
Beijing University of Technology, China

Dr. Xiayan Wang is a professor of the Department of Chemistry at Beijing University of Technology. She graduated from the University of Science and Technology China with a doctorate in Analytical Chemistry. Her research interests include micro/nanoscale bioseparations and bioanalysis, microfluidic and nanofluidic analysis, single-cell metabolomics using mass spectrometry, and the development of new instruments for micro/nano-analysis.