Consortium

Team

 

Steering Committee

Prof. Jānis Kloviņš

Prof. Janis Klovins is the director of LBMC and head of one of the largest groups at LBMC, the Group of Human Genetics and Molecular Medicine. He has more than 20 years of experience in molecular biology, biobanking and genetic epidemiology. He established Latvian Genome Centre, the main genotyping and sequencing facility in Latvia, is a current director of BMC and was one of the initial co-founders and head of Latvian Genome Database (LGDB) biobank comprising more than 33000 participants. Prof. Klovins has led over 20 scientific projects and participated in international collaborations. He will perform the study design, supervision of research work, writing and drafting the papers for the project.

Prof. Eran Segal

Prof. Eran Segal is a Professor at the Computer Science and Applied Mathematics Department at the Weizmann Institute of Science. He has a B.Sc. in Computer Science (summa cum laude, 1998, Tel-Aviv University), and a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Genetics (2004, Stanford University). He completed an independent postdoctoral research position at Rockefeller University, New York, and took a faculty position at the Weizmann Institute since 2005. Prof. Segal heads a multi-disciplinary team of computational biologists and experimental scientists at the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science. He received an ERC starting grant in 2007 and currently holds an PF7 consolidator ERC grant. Prof. Segal received several awards and honors for his work, including the Overton prize, awarded annually by the International Society for Bioinformatics (ICSB) to one scientist for outstanding accomplishments in the field of computational biology, and the Michael Bruno award. He was recently elected as an EMBO member and as a member of the young Israeli academy of science. He published more than 100 research articles in international, peer-reviewed journals, of which more than 20 appeared in Science, Cell, or Nature and its sub-
journals. One of his Nature papers was ranked #6 in MolecularBiologyand #9Bioinformatics and
Computational Biology in the all-time rankings of the Faculty of 1000 website our of >100,000 papers published by January 2015.

Prof. Charlotte Ling

Prof. Charlotte Ling is an international leading expert in diabetes epigenetics, is frequently invited to lecture at international meetings and recently received an European Research Council (ERC) grant. Her successful group includes 6 postdocs and 3 PhD students. They have long experience in epigenetics, bioinformatics, clinical medicine as well as cell and animal experiments related to T2D.

Prof. Ewan Pearson

Prof. Ewan Pearson is Professor of Diabetic Medicine at the Division of Cardiovascular & Diabetes Medicine at the University of Dundee. His research interests are in stratification of diabetes based upon drug response; difference in aetiology or difference in progression rate of diabetes. He established that patients with particular monogenic forms of diabetes could be treated differently to ‘normal’ diabetes – e.g. HNF1A MODY (Pearson et al. Lancet 2003) and KCNJ11 neonatal diabetes (Pearson et al. NEJM 2006) and was the first to publish a GWAS of drug response in diabetes pharmacogenomics of diabetes drug response (Zhou et al. Nature Genetics 2011) and now leads the Metformin Genetics Consortium which has recently identified that variants in SLC2A2 are robustly implicated in metformin response (Zhou et al. Nature Genetics 2016) but that loss of function variants in the organic cation transporters are not (Dujic et al. Clin Pharm Therapeutics, 2016) are not.. Ewan is the academic lead for the €46M IMI‐DIRECT project on stratification of diabetes, and holds Wellcome Trust New Investigator award.

Management board

Jānis Kloviņš - (WP1, WP5), Project Manager

Prof. Janis Klovins is the director of LBMC and head of one of the largest groups at LBMC, the Group of Human Genetics and Molecular Medicine. He has more than 20 years of experience in molecular biology, biobanking and genetic epidemiology. He established Latvian Genome Centre, the main genotyping and sequencing facility in Latvia, is a current director of BMC and was one of the initial co-founders and head of Latvian Genome Database (LGDB) biobank comprising more than 33000 participants. Prof. Klovins has led over 20 scientific projects and participated in international collaborations. He will perform the study design, supervision of research work, writing and drafting the papers for the project.

Dāvids Fridmanis (WP3)

Dr. Davids Fridmanis defended his bachelors (2003), masters (2004) and PhD (2011) thesis in University of Latvia on molecular, functional and evolutional research of Melanocortin receptors. During his studies on several occasions he received FEBS short term fellowships for conduction of his research at Neuroscience department of Uppsala Biomedical Centre, University of Uppsala. After the establishment of the Genome Centre he became the head of genetic analysis division and currently holds the place within the LBMC purchase committee. In parallel to these activities Davids is also a head of small, newly formed LBMC research group that focuses on functional research of G-protein coupled receptors, and the head of LBMC Bioinformatics Core facility. Davids Fridmanis has 30 peer-reviewed international publications.

Monta Ustinova (WP4)

MSc. Monta Ustinova is one of the assistants for Principal Investigator in the currently ongoing clinical trial in LBMC. In addition, she has previously gained expertise in RNAseq data analysis, and is one of the certified specialists performing mice experiments in newly established animal facility at the LBMC. Monta has participated in multiple scientific projects related with personalized medicine and as a secretary of Latvian Association of Human Genetics she is improving the communication between the scientific community and physicians.

Ewan Pearson (WP2)

Prof. Ewan Pearson is Professor of Diabetic Medicine at the Division of Cardiovascular & Diabetes Medicine at the University of Dundee. His research interests are in stratification of diabetes based upon drug response; difference in aetiology or difference in progression rate of diabetes. He established that patients with particular monogenic forms of diabetes could be treated differently to ‘normal’ diabetes – e.g. HNF1A MODY (Pearson et al. Lancet 2003) and KCNJ11 neonatal diabetes (Pearson et al. NEJM 2006) and was the first to publish a GWAS of drug response in diabetes pharmacogenomics of diabetes drug response (Zhou et al. Nature Genetics 2011) and now leads the Metformin Genetics Consortium which has recently identified that variants in SLC2A2 are robustly implicated in metformin response (Zhou et al. Nature Genetics 2016) but that loss of function variants in the organic cation transporters are not (Dujic et al. Clin Pharm Therapeutics, 2016) are not.. Ewan is the academic lead for the €46M IMI‐DIRECT project on stratification of diabetes, and holds Wellcome Trust New Investigator award.

Līga Vonda (Finance officer)
Sonia García-Calzón (Project Coordinator from ULUND)
Caroline Glen (Project Coordinator from UNIVDUN)
Miri Klein (Project Coordinator from WEIZMANN)
Vita Rovīte (WP2)

Dr. Vita Rovite is a researcher in Latvian Biomedical Research and Study Centre (LBMC) and Head of national biobank – Genome Database of Latvian population (LGDB). She has experience in study design and research studies using human biological materials from 2010, as well as experience in studies of genetics and functional aspects of endocrinological and other multifactorial disease development. As a Head of national biobank, V. Rovite coordinates sample and data obtainment for numerous projects and works with ethical issues and data protection implementation. She also is involved in activities of Latvian National Node of BBMRI-ERIC and participates in national ELSI working group that has developed Latvian National Biobank Act draft.

Valdis Pīrags (WP4)

Prof. Valdis Pirags,, MD is one of the leading endocrinologists in Latvia, head of the Clinic of Internal Medicine at the Pauls Stradiņš Clinical University Hospital in Riga, and has more than 25 year research experience in clinical research, genetics and epidemiology of endocrine diseases. Prof. Pirags as a principal investigator has conducted numerous clinical trials (phase II-IV), international and national research projects predominantly dedicated to the investigation of T2D pathogenesis and treatment.

Ilze Elbere (WP5)

MSc. Ilze Elbere has experience working with bacterial DNA from stool samples, preparing 16S rRNA and metagenomic libraries for NGS, as well as performing bioinformatics analysis. She is one of the assistants for Principal Investigator in the currently ongoing clinical trial in LBMC. In addition, Ilze is the head of LBMC Student’s Council, which is the only students council associated with a research institution in Latvia, and which is responsible for creating and supervising educating activities for young researchers at the LBMC, and organization of communication activities for various target groups.

Eran Segal (WP3)

Prof. Eran Segal is a Professor at the Computer Science and Applied Mathematics Department at the Weizmann Institute of Science. He has a B.Sc. in Computer Science (summa cum laude, 1998, Tel-Aviv University), and a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Genetics (2004, Stanford University). He completed an independent postdoctoral research position at Rockefeller University, New York, and took a faculty position at the Weizmann Institute since 2005. Prof. Segal heads a multi-disciplinary team of computational biologists and experimental scientists at the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science. He received an ERC starting grant in 2007 and currently holds an PF7 consolidator ERC grant. Prof. Segal received several awards and honors for his work, including the Overton prize, awarded annually by the International Society for Bioinformatics (ICSB) to one scientist for outstanding accomplishments in the field of computational biology, and the Michael Bruno award. He was recently elected as an EMBO member and as a member of the young Israeli academy of science. He published more than 100 research articles in international, peer-reviewed journals, of which more than 20 appeared in Science, Cell, or Nature and its sub-
journals. One of his Nature papers was ranked #6 in MolecularBiologyand #9Bioinformatics and
Computational Biology in the all-time rankings of the Faculty of 1000 website our of >100,000 papers published by January 2015.

Laura Ansone (Project coordinator from LBMC)
Alexander Perfilyev (Project Coordinator from ULUND)
William Slater (Project Coordinator from UNIVDUN)