Andy obtained his PhD from the University of London for the analytical and computational chemical analyses of the metabolic consequences of deacetylation/acetylation in N-acetylated anilines and the study of acyl migration in drug glucuronides.  He then worked as a postdoctoral research assistant at Imperial College London on a project with GlaxoWellcome to develop a proof of principal model for the assessment of hepatotoxicity in 7-day studies in preclinical models, the successful conclusion of which laid the groundwork for the Consortium on Metabonomic Toxicology (COMET).  He then took a Senior Fellowship investigating the use of magic-angle spinning (MAS) NMR spectroscopy as a means of assessing neuronal tissues for disease, disease model and drug toxicity markers.  After this role, he became an associate director for Metabometrix Ltd, a biotechnology spin-out company from Imperial College London, before eventually taking a senior research position at GlaxoSmithKline. His principal areas of research involve the application of high-resolution analytical instrumentation for the study of metabolic alterations in complex, multicellular organisms and the determination of the root-cause mechanisms of drug-induced toxicity. He is the secretary of the Metabolic Profiling Forum, a charitable organisation set up to run the Metabomeeting conference series, of which he is also a co-founder. He sits on the organising committee of the SMASH NMR conference and was co-chair of the 2007 meeting. 

Dr Julian L. Griffin is a Royal Society University Research Fellow and University lecturer at the Department of Biochemistry, Cambridge. He is also a group leader in the Cambridge Systems Biology Centre. A chemist by first degree, he gained his D. Phil in Biochemistry with Prof. Sir George Radda studying brain metabolism using ¹³C NMR spectroscopy. He held a Harvard Medical school/ Massachusetts General Hospital fellowship with Prof. Doug Lewandowski, studying cardiac metabolism by ¹³C NMR before joining Prof. Jeremy Nicholson’s group at Imperial College London as a NERC postdoctoral fellow and then Royal Society University Research Fellow. He is developing NMR and mass spectrometry based metabolomic tools for identifying metabolic biomarkers associated with disease, drug toxicity and understanding the control of metabolic pathways. He also has wide experience in multivariate statistical processes required to process the data. In addition he has used stable isotopes to follow metabolic fluxes both in vitro and in vivo. He is a chair of a sub-committee of the Metabolomic Standards Initiative which aims to define the information required to describe a metabolomic experiment. He is also a board member of the Metabolomic Society and has co-organized the first two Metabomeeting conferences of which he is a co-founder. He is on the editorial board of Biomarkers. He teaches chemistry and biochemistry to undergraduates and is also involved in developing a fourth year undergraduate course in systems biology as a Part 3 option in the Natural Sciences Tripos at the University of Cambridge.

Marc-Emmanuel Dumas is a CNRS Senior Research Lecturer at the European Centre for High Field NMR, Department of Chemistry, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France. His current research interests focus on metabonomics/metabolomics approaches to study major healthcare issues related to insulin resistance, aging and cancer in systems biology, chemical biology and genetical genomics contexts. Prior to this appointment in April 2007, Marc was educated in Rennes (Ecole Nationale Supérieure Agronomique, B.Eng., M.Sc., Ph.D.) and London (Imperial College London). Marc was a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in the Department of Biomolecular Medicine, Imperial College London (UK), where led the metabonomics workpackage of the Wellcome Trust funded Biological Atlas of Insulin Resistance consortium from 2002. Marc has taught on several courses on metabonomics/metabolomics. He has been involved in all aspects of metabonomics since 1998. On the analytical side, he has focussed on promoting multidimensional nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and metastable atom bombardment mass spectrometry (MAB-MS) metabonomic strategies in doping control during his PhD. On the statistical analysis side, he has developed feature selection models, pattern recognition models and metabolomic linkage analysis models for epidemiology and insulin resistance research.

Roy Goodacre is Professor of Biological Chemistry at the University of Manchester, UK.  His group’s main areas of research are broadly within analytical biotechnology, and in the combination of a variety of modern spectroscopies (including MS, IR and Raman) and advanced chemometrics and machine learning to the explanatory analysis of complex biological systems within a metabolomics and proteomics context.  Roy is the Editor-in-chief of the journal Metabolomics, onthe editorial board of the Journal of Analytical and Applied Pyrolysis, and currently co-editing an issue of Chemical Society Reviews on SERS with Prof Duncan Graham.  He is also one of the founding directors of the Metabolomics Society.

Dr Warwick Dunn currently works as an Experimental Officer in the Manchester Centre for Integrative Systems Biology and previously as a Post-Doctoral Researcher in the chool of Chemistry. Research interests are focussed on the development and application of chromatography and mass spectrometry technologies to microbial, plant and mammalian metabolomic studies. Previously he obtained BSc and PhD Analytical chemistry based degrees at the University of Hull and BP Chemicals (Hull). His PhD was centred on development of mass spectrometry technologies for on-line monitoring of industrial liquid process streams. Subsequently he has employed organic and isotope ratio mass spectrometry techniques, combined with chromatography, in solving chemical and biological problems, in both industrial and academic environments.

Dr. Timothy Ebbels is a Lecturer in Computational Bioinformatics within the Department of Biomolecular Medicine at Imperial College London. With over 9 years experience in the field, Tim’s research focuses on the application of bioinformatics, chemometrics and machine learning to post-genomic data, in particular metabolic profiles. He obtained a BA in Natural Sciences (Physics, 1994) and a PhD in Astrophysics (1998) from the University of Cambridge. In 1998, he moved to Imperial College London to work on Bayesian methods for reconstruction of NMR metabolic profiles. In 2000 he became a founder member of the post-doctoral team on Consortium for Metabonomic Toxicology (COMET), a pioneering academic/industrial consortium designed to apply metabolic profiling to preclinical toxicology. As part of this work he developed new algorithms for autophasing NMR spectra and probabilistic classification of omics data. In 2003 he moved to University College London as a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow to work on modelling and visualisation of gene expression data and protein interaction networks. He returned to Imperial in 2005 and currently leads a group working on statistical and machine learning approaches to modelling post-genomic data, with particular emphasis on data integration models, multivariate time series analysis and NMR and MS data processing methods. Current projects include: COMET2 – the mechanistic follow up to the original COMET project, CARCINOGENOMICS – an EU consortium aiming to develop new screening methods for carcinogenicity, INTERMAP – a global investigation of the metabolic signatures of high blood pressure, a BBSRC project developing a hierarchical Bayesian model for metabolic profiles, a NERC funded project on data mining and integration tools for ecotoxicogenomics, and MRC and Wellcome funded studentships on statistical modelling in metabolomics. Tim was a co-organiser of Metabomeeting3, held at Imperial College London in December 2006.

Dr Hector Keun is a Lecturer in Biological Chemistry in the Department of Biomolecular Medicine, Imperial College London. He joined Imperial in 2001 after completing undergraduate and postgraduate degrees from Oxford Univesity in Chemistry and Biochemistry. Hector’s research programme centres on the application of metabolic profiling (metabonomics/metabolomics) to toxicology and oncology. He is currently investigating the potential of metabolic profiling to improve disease management in prostate, ovarian, and gastrointestinal cancers. These clinical projects are supported by laboratory research aimed at characterizing the disease and drug-resistance phenotypes in experimental models. Hector also continues to work on the Consortium for Metabonomic Toxicology (COMET) project (currently supported by Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Servier & Sanofi-Aventis) that has generated one of the largest resources of metabonomic data presently available in the world today.

Robert gained a PhD in plant biotechnology and enzymology (Edinburgh, 1984) and has subsequently ca 20 years research experience, including 10 years project / group management experience. He moved to The Netherlands in 1987 where he has since worked at the national research institute for plant science research, currently called Plant Research International. He has held posts as project leader, Cluster Leader and Head of Department in various fields of cell biology covering genetic manipulation and functional genomics. He is currently Deputy Business Unit Manager Bioscience [80 scientists + 40 temporary staff] and Cluster Leader Metabolic Regulation within Plant Research International. He is also Deputy Director and Programme coordinator of the Centre of Biosystems Genomics [5 year national programme, 100+ scientists, 110 projects]. His primary research activities are now centred on developing metabolomics technologies for application in plants for both science and industry (www.metabolomics.nl ). He is Coordinator of the EU project META-PHOR which started in October, 2006 and which is focused on developing novel metabolomics technologies and bioinformatics strategies for plants. He is on the Editorial Boards of J Plant Physiology, Molecular Biotechnology and is Associate Editor of the journal Metabolomics. He was Organiser of the First International Plant Metabolomics Congress, Wageningen, 2002 and is a Board Member of the International Metabolomics Society. He has ca100 publications of which ca. 75% are in peer-reviewed journals.

Mark's research group has helped to pioneer the development and application of both NMR spectroscopy and high resolution Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance (FT-ICR) mass spectrometry in the emerging field of environmental metabolomics. The primary goals of his research are to characterise the metabolic stress responses of fish and aquatic invertebrates to toxicants, diseases and other environmental stressors. His work has application both in chemical risk assessment as well as environmental monitoring.

Dr Derek Stewart is the Head of the Plant Products and Food Quality Programme, (formerly Quality Health and Nutrition), at the Scottish Crop Research Institute (SCRI).  Following training as a synthetic organic chemist he worked at Fison’s Pharmaceuticals for several years before moving to SCRI as part of the Unit for Industrial Crops.  Subsequently he has worked on a wide range of phytochemical, food and nutritional research projects. He leads the SCRI component effort within the EU projects SAFEFOODS, NOFORISK, BARELEYBREAD and BRAINHEALTHFOOD and is the project coordinator of DEVELONUTRI (sister to META-PHOR), a project focussed on the application and validation of high throughput technologies to changes in the nutritional values of plant foods throughout the food chain. He is the principal investigator on several national projects focussed on metabolic profiling, health and nutrition (including intervention trials) in relation to fruit, vegetables and processed foods. In addition, his other metabolomics projects include those addressing germplasm biodiversity, trait development and plant-pathogen interactions.  He has published widely on all aspects of phytochemistry, analysis and plant-derived bioactivity (>70 referred publications).  Dr Stewart is a Scottish committee member of the Nutrition Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry

Dr Olivier Cloarec graduated in Organic and Analytical Chemistry from the Université de Bretagne Occidentale (Brest). After a working as head of analytical chemistry at the Centre of Documentation, Research and Experimentation on Water Accidental Pollution (CEDRE) he obtained a PhD in Analytical chemistrywent at L'école de Mines d'Alès.. He subsequently joined Jeremy Nicholson research group at Imperial College London as a postdoctoral research associate in the Bio-Atlas of Insulin Resistance (BAIR) project funded by the Wellcome Trust. His research has been focused on data analysis and especially on visualization and interpretation of results from multivariate data analysis. He has published more the 20 papers in the field of metabonomics. Now working as Head of Bioinformatics at Technologie Servier he is part of the Pharmacokinetics and Metabolism Centre, tasked with leading and supporting the development of multivariate data analysis for genomics and metabonomics with application in metabolism and pharmacokinetics, pharmacogenomics and clinical research.

After a B.Sc. in Pharmacology at the University of Sheffield, Andrew joined Imperial College London and through his PhD and post doctoral work he focussed on combining transcriptomic and metabolomic approaches to characterise models of drug induced hepatotoxicity and insulin resistance. From 2005 Andrew has worked for BlueGnome where he leads the metabolic biomarker discovery service and works on development of novel methods for the analysis and visualisation of high dimensional biology data. His current scientific interests are multiplatform data fusion and the development of molecular diagnostics.

Steve obtained his PhD from Imperial College, London, focusing on the measurement of drug-enyzme binding kinetics via bioaffinity chromatography. Since then he has developed an interest in LC and GC/MS methods, focusing mainly on the metabolic profiling approach, the mesauremnet of small molecules in bio-fluids/plant extracts. He has worked as a post-doctorate in the department of Biological Chemistry at Imperial College, London, and also at Umea university, Sweden under the supervision of Thomas Moritz and Stefan Marklund. He is currently part of the Bio-analytical department at the Nestlé Research Centre, Lausanne Switzerland, where he is working on MS method development for metabolic profiling and targeted approaches.

Since joining AstraZeneca in 1999 as an associate team leader in DMPK, Eva has specialised in drug metabolism and biofluid analysis using NMR spectroscopy.  She obtained her PhD from the University of London in metabolite identification and drug toxicity by the application of HPLC-NMR and NMR spectroscopy.  Subsequently she undertook metabolomic and drug metabolism studies of ecotoxicology in earthworms as a postdoctoral research associate at Imperial College London before commencing her current position.    

Chris Taylor gained his Ph.D. by studying simulations of evolving populations at the University of Manchester, staying on afterwards as a postdoc working on the PEDRo proteomics data model and associated resources. This resulted in him, his boss and some of his co-workers being sucked into the activities of the Proteomics Standards Initiative and through into the wider bioscience data standards 'movement'. Chris moved to the EBI in 2003, where he remains, now on NERC funds channelled through the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Oxford, chiefly as a coordinator of the MIBBI project.