2025 PLENARY SPEAKERS
Frank Hu, MD, MPH, PhD Lipidomics and Precision Nutrition in Cardiometabolic Disease Prevention.
Frank Hu, MD, MPH, PhD, is the Fredrick J. Stare Professor of Nutrition and Epidemiology and Chair of the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is also Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. His major research interests include epidemiology and prevention of cardiometabolic diseases through diet and lifestyle; gene-environment interactions and risk of obesity and type 2 diabetes; nutritional metabolomics in type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease; and nutrition transition, metabolic phenotypes, and cardiovascular disease in low and middle-income countries. Dr. Hu serves as Director of Dietary Biomarker Development Center and Co-director of Obesity Epidemiology and Prevention Program at Harvard. Dr. Hu is the recipient of the Kelly West Award for Outstanding Achievement in Epidemiology by the American Diabetes Association in 2010. He was named the American Heart Association’ Ancel Keys Memorial Lecturer in 2018. He has published a textbook on Obesity Epidemiology (Oxford University Press) and peer-reviewed papers with an H-index of 318. Dr. Hu served on the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, USDA/HHS. He has served on the editorial/advisory board of The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, Diabetes Care, and Clinical Chemistry. Dr. Hu a member of National Academy of Medicine.
Ann Hellstrom, MD, PhD Guarding Preterm Vision: The Role of Fatty Acids in Retinopathy of Prematurity
Professor Ann Hellström is an outstanding researcher in the field of pediatric ophthalmology. She is world-famous for her work on retinopathy of prematurity (ROP), a leading cause of childhood blindness. She has approached the research field of ROP using several techniques, developing innovative and reliable tools to optimize the prediction of infants at risk, demonstrating important mechanisms of pathogenesis, discovering new, innovative therapies to prevent ROP, and evaluating these in clinical trials. Since 1987, Professor Hellström has published over 265 papers in international scientific journals, including Lancet, Nature Medicine, PNAS, Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science, JAMA Ophthalmology, and Pediatrics. She has an H-index of 73 with over 19.250 citations. Professor Hellström has a different approach to interventions for ROP than those currently applied. Instead of late-stage treatment of ROP, the research focuses on improving care during the first few weeks of life to promote the growth of vascular and neural tissues in the retina and brain, thus avoiding the development of a large avascular zone and subsequent abnormal vessel growth.
Anette Mullertz, PhD Application of Lipids for Oral Delivery of Small Molecular Drugs and Peptides
Anette Müllertz is professor in oral drug delivery and industrial relations at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark (UCPH) and head of Bioneer:FARMA, a business unit of Bioneer A/S, which is a research-based, non-for-profit service provider within the area of biomedicine and pharmaceutical development. She is heading the Physiological Pharmaceutics Research Group at UCPH, focusing on oral lipid-based drug delivery systems and predictive biopharmaceutics tools. She has 250 publications in international, peer-reviewed journals with 15,000 citations. She is / has been supervising 12 post docs, 54 PhD students and numerous master students, primarily at the University of Copenhagen. She is a Fellow at the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (2022), Fellow at the Controlled Release Society (2023) and recipient of the AAPS Lipid Based Drug Delivery Award (2005).
Stephanie Colombo, PhD
Blue Transformation of Food Systems for Sustainable Production of Lipids and Fatty Acids
Dr. Stefanie Colombo is an Associate Professor at Dalhousie University and Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Aquaculture Nutrition. Her research focuses on understanding nutrition in farmed fish, to improve aquaculture sustainability and productivity. She has published over 80 scientific papers and 5 book chapters. She has been an invited keynote speaker at several national and international conferences. She has received the Dalhousie’s President’s Research Excellence Award for an Emerging Investigator and the Faculty of Agriculture’s Early Career Research Excellence Award, as well as Innovator of the Year by the Aquaculture Association of Nova Scotia. In 2023, she was honoured as a member of the New College of the Royal Society of Canada.
Paul S. Bernstein, MD, PhD
The Role of Very-Long-Chain PUFAs in Retinal Health and Disease
Paul S. Bernstein, MD, PhD joined the faculty of the Moran Eye Center of the University of Utah in 1995 where he currently divides his time equally between clinical and basic science retina research and a clinical practice devoted to medical and surgical treatment of diseases of the retina and vitreous with special emphasis on macular and retinal degenerations. Dr. Bernstein did his undergraduate, MD and PhD training at Harvard University, his ophthalmology residency at Jules Stein Eye Institute of UCLA, and his vitreoretinal fellowship at Massachusetts Eye & Ear Infirmary. Dr. Bernstein’s current research interests focus on the biochemistry and biophysics of nutritional interventions against inherited and acquired ocular disorders. Dr. Bernstein has authored over 200 peer-reviewed research articles and reviews, and he has served as a reviewer for numerous journals, foundations, and institutes. Dr. Bernstein currently serves as the Vice-Chair for Research at the Moran Eye Center and was vice-president of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) from 2016-2017.
Julijana Ivanisevic, PhD
Unleashing the Potential of Lipidomics for Population Health Research
Julijana Ivanisevic is a Head of the Metabolomics and Lipidomics Platform and Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Biology and Medicine, University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Julijana joined UNIL in 2015 following a postdoctoral training at The Center for Metabolomics and Mass Spectrometry at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California (led by Prof. Gary Siuzdak). She received her PhD in chemical biology at the Aix-Marseille University, France, in 2011. The aim of my team at UNIL is to develop new analytical approaches and apply them to biomedical and clinical research to advance our knowledge on cardiometabolic health and improve our health span with aging. To this end, we are involved in longitudinal, metabolome-wide association studies of Swiss population (CoLaus, Complete Health and Heart cohort) in collaboration with clinicians and statistical geneticists.