Anna M. MICHALAK

Opening Lecture

Dr. Anna M. Michalak is a faculty member in the Department of Global Ecology of the Carnegie Institution for Science and a Professor in the Department of Earth System Science at Stanford University. Prior to joining Carnegie, she was the Frank and Brooke Transue Faculty Scholar and Associate Professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, with appointments in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Department of Atmospheric Oceanic and Space Sciences. She holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Stanford University, and a B.Sc.(Eng.) in Environmental Engineering from the University of Guelph, Canada.

Dr. Michalak studies the cycling and emissions of greenhouse gases at urban to global scales – scales directly relevant to informing climate and policy – primarily through the use of atmospheric observations. She also explores climate change impacts on freshwater and coastal water quality via influences on nutrient delivery to, and on conditions within, water bodies. Her approach is focused on the development of spatiotemporal statistical data fusion methods that optimize the use of limited in situ and satellite data. 

Her core interests in water lie in disentangling anthropogenic influences on inland and coastal water quality, and especially in understanding the interplay between the impacts of local- to regional-scale actions (e.g., land use, land management) and the impacts of global action (e.g., climate change). Several factors explain the lack of understanding of the role of climate in water quality impairments, including the relative complexity of underlying processes, the mismatch in the primary spatiotemporal scales of focus between scientific communities, and the difficulty in assessing historical conditions. Dr. Michalak’s research group is leveraging space-based and in situ observations to identify consistent responses across systems, characterize controls on observed water quality impairments, diagnose extreme events, and explore management implications. Overall, her work makes it possible to develop and test novel hypotheses about the role of climate and what the future may hold.

Dr. Michalak is the lead author of the U.S. Carbon Cycle Science Plan, a former Editor of the journal Water Resources Research, and Chair of the scientific advisory board for the European Integrated Carbon Observation System. She is the recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (nominated by NASA), the NSF CAREER award, and the Leopold Fellowship in environmental leadership. 

Mireille CHINAIN

Plenary Speaker

Mireille Chinain is a research scientist at the Louis Malardé Institute (ILM) - UMR 241 EIO in Tahiti (French Polynesia), where she has been Head of the Laboratory of Toxic Micro-Algae since 2000, assisted by a staff of 10. The current mandate of this public laboratory is to increase the monitoring and the prevention of Ciguatera Poisoning (CFP) in French Polynesia, a seafood-borne poisoning with significant socio-economic impacts on the populations in the endemic areas. Her laboratory is also the only one entirely devoted to ciguatera research in the Pacific.

Dr.Chinain graduated from the Université des Sciences et Techniques du Languedoc in Montpellier (France) in 1989, and has been researching and working on the ciguatera since 1990. Her initial research work focused on the eco-toxicology and diversity of the ciguatera-causing dinoflagellate Gambierdiscus. Of note, she was the first to utilise genetic sequencing in the taxonomic determination of this genus, leading to the description of 3 new species of Gambierdiscus in French Polynesia as early as 1999. She also pioneered the in vitro culturing of Gambierdiscus at ILM. Her laboratory currently uses highly toxic strains of Gambierdiscus for the mass-production of algal ciguatoxins. As a result of the continuous purification efforts initiated a few decades ago, the Louis Malarde Institute now holds a unique bank of purified CTXs standards.

Over the last ten years, her laboratory has expanded its expertise to the epidemiological survey of CFP in French Polynesia in collaboration with the Public Health Directorate (www.ciguatera-online.com). Following the successful implementation of a variety of algal and toxin-based detection techniques in the laboratory, Dr. Chinain and her team have been carrying out regular field work throughout the French Polynesian lagoons and the Pacific since 2007, within the framework of risk assessment and management programs, the objective being to provide local communities with information about the areas and marine products most at risk of ciguatera in affected lagoons. These initiatives have led to the significant decrease of incidence rates in several CFP ‘hot-spots’, an outcome she considers as one the most rewarding aspects of her work as an ocean scientist. Living closely with the local communities also provided the opportunity to learn about some of the traditional knowledge and practices, a source of inspiration for modern research (e.g. the use of traditional remedies to treat ciguatera). Dr. Chinain’s laboratory is also actively involved in community-based educational initiatives, and skill transfer interventions aimed at increasing public awareness of the ciguatera and also at promoting and disseminating basic CFP knowledge in the Pacific.

Over the last ten years, Dr. Chinain’s team has developed successful partnerships with many national and international groups involved in ciguatera research (IRD, NOAA, Ifremer, IAEA, Cawthron, GDR Phycotox, etc.). Dr. Chinain has also been (co)-administering several research projects with a total funding of over 4 millions Euros.

Dr. Chinain is the recipient of the 2010 Tyge Christensen Award (International Phycological Society), the 2006 Albert Sézary Award (Académie Nationale de Médecine de Paris) and the 2005 Tregouboff Award in Marine Biology (Académie des Sciences de Paris).

William GERWICK

Plenary Speaker

William H. Gerwick received his B.S. in Biochemistry at UC Davis (1976) and Ph.D. in Oceanography at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (Bill Fenical, 1981), did postdoctoral studies at the University of Connecticut (Steven Gould, 1981–82), was Professor of Chemistry at the University of Puerto Rico (1982–84) and then moved to the College of Pharmacy, Oregon State University (1984–2005) as Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences. In 2005 he moved to become Professor of Oceanography and Pharmaceutical Sciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, UC San Diego, and in 2011 was promoted to Distinguished Professor. Gerwick has received a number of honors, including President of the American Society of Pharmacognosy (2002); Chair, US-Japan Symposium on Marine Natural Products Chemistry (2003); UCSD Chancellor's Associates Faculty Award for Excellence in Science and Engineering (2011); and American Society of Pharmacognosy, Farnsworth Research Achievement Award, presented at Copenhagen, Denmark (2016), coChair of the US-China Summit on Marine Biotechnology in 2014 and 2018, and recipient of the Scheuer Award in Marine Natural Products Science presented at the Gordon Research Conference on Marine Natural Products, March 2018.

Dr. Gerwick’s research focuses on exploring the unique natural products of marine algae and cyanobacteria for useful biomedical properties.  These chemically prolific organisms are sources of numerous highly unusual metabolites, and the Gerwick group has been involved in their discovery and evaluation in the areas of cancer, inflammation, infectious disease including tropical diseases such as malaria, Chagas’ disease and leishmaniasis, neurochemical pathways, as well as agricultural uses.  From macrophytic algae, his group did pioneering work to discover that these life forms not only make polyunsaturated fatty acids, but also metabolize to intriguing structures related to the prostaglandins and other bioactive lipids. In recent years, his group has focused on tropical filamentous marine cyanobacteria, uncovering that they are extraordinarily rich in diverse nitrogen containing lipids.  The Gerwick group has also examined the pathways of biosynthesis of many of the compounds they have discovered over the years, and pioneered the characterization of their origins at the molecular genetic and genomic levels. His group has also contributed to the development of novel analytical technologies for accelerating the pace of natural products research, such as several widely utilized NMR pulse sequences (e.g. the HSQMBC), the MS2-based method of Molecular Networks and a new Artificial Intelligence approach to recognizing NMR spectra known as Small Molecular Artificial Recognition Technology (SMART).

Laure GUILLOU

Plenary Speaker

Laure Guillou received her PhD in 1999, obtained a European Marie Curie fellowship to work at the CSIC in Barcelona (Spain) for two years, and then got a permanent position at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). She currently co-heads the ECOMAP team at the Roscoff Biological station, a group of > 50 scientists, students and technicals, all working on marine planktonic ecology, from bacteria to large unicellular predators. She is editor for Protist since 2012, in the editorial board of Harmful Algae since 2014 and in the Program committee of the International Society of Protistologists.

She is a specialist in marine protistology, mainly working on taxonomy, ecology and evolution. These last years, she worked on biopathogens (parasites) regulating toxic dinoflagellate blooms, aiming to understand the complexity and resilience of such interactions in the field over various temporal and geographical scales. She has pioneered the introduction of molecular techniques and high throughput sequencing techniques to work on protistean diversity, detection in field and bloom dynamics. Her current scientific interests concern processes underlying the dinoflagellate-parasite interaction, including the ones explaining the host resistance and the parasite specificity, and more generally how microalgae and their parasites (and their genomes) interact with each other within a complex and fluctuating environment. As microalgae and their parasites may reflect models close to human and animal pathogens, she is also exploring how medicinal knowledge can help marine ecologists, and vice versa.

Thomas HARTUNG

Plenary Speaker

Thomas Hartung, MD PhD, is the Doerenkamp-Zbinden-Chair for Evidence-based Toxicology with a joint appointment for Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore. He holds a joint appointment as Professor for Pharmacology and Toxicology at University of Konstanz, Germany; he also is Director of Centers for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT, http://caat.jhsph.edu) of both universities with the portal AltWeb (http://altweb.jhsph.edu).

CAAT hosts the secretariat of the Evidence-based Toxicology Collaboration (http://www.ebtox.org), the Good Read-Across Practice Collaboration, the Good Cell Culture Practice Collaboration, the Green Toxicology Collaboration and the Industry Refinement Working Group. As PI, he heads the Human Toxome project (http://humantoxome.com) funded as an NIH Transformative Research Grant.

He is the former Head of the European Commission’s Center for the Validation of Alternative Methods (ECVAM), Ispra, Italy, and has authored more than 500 scientific publications, which were cited more than 22,000 times.

His scientific contributions include: a cell model of liver inflammation replacing animal testing, an alternative pyrogen test based on human hole blood accepted by FDA, EurPharm, ISO and USP, work on Gram-positive pyrogens and bacterial infections, the study of the anti-inflammatory properties of G-CSF and its clinical use, contributions to the validation of alternative test methods (20 OECD test guidelines), the initiation of Good Cell Culture Practice, Good-Read-Across-Practice and Evidence-based Toxicology, the development of human mini-brains from induced pluripotent stem cells and computational tools for predicting toxicity.

Erik JEPPESEN

Plenary Speaker

Erik Jeppesen received his MSc degree from University of Copenhagen in 1978 and his DSc degree in 1998. At present he is a full professor in Freshwater Ecology at Aarhus University. His research interest is aquatic ecology with special emphasis on the biological structure and interac­tions with the nutrient dynamics and climate in lakes and streams. Lake restoration, lake-re-establishment, paleoecology and ecosystem modelling are other major research fields. He works at present especially with trophic dynamics in lakes and streams from the high Arctic to the tropics with a climate change perspective. He has been heading or WP leader of numerous Danish and international projects including 8 large-scale EU project and he collaborates at present with > 100 groups in North and South America, Europe, Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Turkey, China, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa. He has been initiator of the inter-university platform “Water and Environment” at the Sino-Danish University Centre” in Beijing, and now vice PC and PI of this theme at the Centre. Initiator of the platform “Environment and Climate” of the Danish University initiative – “Building stronger universities in developing countries”. He has >475 international peer-reviewed papers and 18 international peer-reviewed book chapters, two monographs and >100 reports and papers in Danish. He was co-author of chapters in the key climate assessments: IPCC 2007 and the ACIA (Arctic Climate Impact Assessment) 2005.His H-index is 76 (ISI-web) and 94 (Google) and he is one of the most cited aquatic ecologists (Google >38500 and ResearchGate >149.000 reads). He was member of the IPCC2007 panel that received the Nobel Peace Award 2007 and he received the prestigious Naumann-Thienemann medal from SIL (International Society of Limnology) in 2010 for outstanding research in limnology. He was elected in 2017 as Honary Doctorate at Estonian University of Life Sciences. He has given more than 70 plenary talk at international conferences since 2008 and supervised or co-supervised >70 MSc theses, 45 PhD theses and 7 EU Marie Curie grantsholders. He has been in the editorial board of Ecosystems since 1997, the advisory board of Aquatic Health and Management since  2001, the advisory board of Journal Hydrobiologia since 2007, the editorial board of Freshwater Biology since 2008 and the editorial board of  The Journal of Lake Sciences since 2009,of Inland Waters since 2010 a

Elena LITCHMAN

Plenary Speaker

Elena Litchman received her MS from Moscow State University in Russia and her PhD from the University of Minnesota, USA.
She held postdoctoral positions at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Maryland, EAWAG in Switzerland and the Institute for Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University.  She is currently a MSU Foundation Professor at Michigan State University, USA. She is a recipient of the US NSF CAREER Award (2009), PECASE Award (2010), MSU Foundation Professorship (2016) and the Petersen Foundation Excellence Professorship Award, Germany (2017).
Elena Litchman’s research interests are in community ecology of phytoplankton and other microbes. Over the last 10 years, Litchman and her group developed and applied the trait-based framework to understand community structure and dynamics of phytoplankton, including cyanobacteria, and their ecosystem impacts in both marine and freshwater environments, publishing numerous papers in diverse journals. Besides developing trait-based approaches, during the last decade Litchman published extensively on other topics in limnology and oceanography, such as harmful algal blooms, invasive cyanobacteria, Lake Baikal phytoplankton, physical limnology of inland lakes and using mobile sensors in aquatic environments.

Allan CEMBELLA

Yasumoto-award 2016 Lecture

Emerging Chemical Ecology Paradigm or New Plankton Paradox: Phycotoxins as Allelochemical Drivers of Harmful Algal Dynamics 

Allan Cembella
Alfred-Wegener-Institut, Helmholtz Zentrum für Polar-und Meeresforschung, Am Handelshafen 12, 27570 Bremerhaven, Germany

Marine phytoplankton produce a wide array of potent phycotoxins, with toxicity defined primarily with respect to mammalian cell targets. Among eukaryotic microalgal species a chemically diverse array of potent bioactive secondary metabolites are produced, including linear and macrocyclic polyethers, tetrahydropurine alkaloids and neurotoxic secondary amino acids. These phycotoxins are typically defined in terms of mammalian cell targets, where the bioactive mechanisms as ion-channel effectors or enzyme inhibitors are generally well known. Early hypotheses of their functional importance to the producing species generally stressed their critical role in chemical defence – as agents in the watery arms race for survival and dominance in the plankton. Laboratory studies have shown that simple bilateral species competition experiments with toxigenic versus non-toxigenic strains often contradict or fail to support the acute toxicity hypothesis as a general mechanism. Many allelochemicals are poorly chemically defined, but are structurally and functionally unrelated to classic phycotoxins, and also exhibit potent biological activity (cell lysis, immobilization, membrane disruption) against co-occurring species. Recent evidence indicates that chemical ecological interactions can affect and even regulate processes such as competition, predator-prey relationships and chemical communication. The bewildering variation in toxin composition and biosynthetic capacity within and among populations of certain species implies a possible alternative resolution to the Hutchinson plankton paradox, as driven by resource limitation and competition. In this scenario, chemical diversity and toxin interactions could contribute to the maintenance of contemporaneous disequilibrium (hence high diversity) but not necessarily by eliciting an acute lethal toxic response. Benthic dinoflagellate species are heavily overrepresented among toxigenic eukaryotic microalgae, particular as producers of polyketide-derived ion-channel effectors. The chemical ecological role of these polyether toxins remains elusive and poorly defined, but competition for substrate space and defensive function against predators or bacterial biofouling are plausible scenarios. The biosynthetic pathways for polyether toxins, synthesised via modular polyketide synthase genes, have been elucidated in a few cases. Further molecular analysis of the respective gene clusters will assist in defining phylogenetic affinities and eventually the functional role of these toxins in pelagic and benthic ecosystems.

Michael A. QUILLIAM

Yasumoto-award 2016 Lecture

The Evolution of Algal Toxin Measurement Science

Michael A.. Quilliam
National Research Council of Canada, Halifax, Canada

There is little doubt over the importance of monitoring algae and shellfish for the presence of toxins – peoples’ lives trulydepend on a comprehensive and flawless system for such operations. International trade is also dependent upon accurate measurementof restricted substances in shellfish. From the 1950s until recent years, the mouse bioassay was the primary method. The limitationsof this method were well recognized, so efforts were started by researchers such as Rapoport, Shimizu, Oshima, Sullivan andYasumoto in the late 1970s to develop chemical analytical methods with greater selectivity, sensitivity and reliability. A majorproblem they encountered was the lack of calibration standards for the various toxins, which made it very difficult not only to developmethods but to implement them widely in regulatory laboratories. In 1987, a project was initiated at the National Research Council ofCanada (NRCC) in Halifax and a team of researchers was assembled. The main goal of the project was to produce certified referencematerials for algal toxins. In late 1987, a new toxic event called Amnesic Shellfish Poisoning occurred and the research teamidentified domoic acid as the cause. A calibration solution certified reference material (CRM) was quickly produced and a liquidchromatography (LC) method was developed and implemented into monitoring programs worldwide. Also produced was a musseltissue matrix CRM, which helped with analytical quality control. The success of these developments has been proven by the fact thatthere have been no cases of human poisoning by domoic acid since that first event. Over the next thirty years, a wide range of CRMscovering most classes of algal toxins have been developed at the NRCC. Following the CRMs was an explosion of new methods,ranging from LC through immunoassays and biochemical assays, developed by many research groups. The development of LC-MSprovided a major breakthrough and this technique is now used worldwide in most toxin research and regulatory laboratories. LC-MSalso led to discovery of many new toxins, further complicating the challenge of toxin monitoring. This talk will review somehighlights over the last thirty years and provide some indications of future directions in the field of toxin measurement science.