Prof Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg

Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede obtained a PhD in Physical Chemistry 1996, at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden. During 1997-1998 she did a postdoc at the Beckman Institute at California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA with Harry Gray. In 1999 she started her independent career as an assistant professor in Chemistry at Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. She received tenure and was promoted to associate professor in 2002. In 2004 she moved to Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA, as associate professor with tenure in the Biochemistry and Cell Biology department. After 5 years, in 2008, she returned to Sweden and became full professor in Chemistry at Umeå University in the north of Sweden. She spent 7 years there before moving to Gothenburg in 2015 to the then newly-founded Biology and Biological Engineering department, there acting as head of one of its divisions, Chemical Biology.

Her research centres around protein biophysics, with current focus on mechanisms of copper transport proteins and cross-reactivity in amyloid formation. She was elected into the Royal Swedish Academy of the Sciences in 2016. She has published over 230 peer-reviewed papers. Throughout her academic career, she has always taken leadership roles on local, national and international levels. She always tries to promote women in science via outreach to pupils/public, teaching undergraduates/graduates, and mentoring of young faculty. This year she began to lead Genie (Gender Initiative for Excellence), a ten-year project that is the world’s largest gender equality initiative in an academic setting.

Dr Kajsa M. Paulsson, Lund University

Kajsa M. Paulsson is group Leader of the Antigen presentation at Experimental Medical Science, Faculty of Medicine at Lund University. Her research focus is on antigen presentation using various methods ranging from tissue analysis and cell biology to protein biochemistry and synchrotron radiation. Kajsa defended her PhD thesis in tumor immunology at Lund University 2001. After a post doc at University College of London she set up her lab at the Panum institute, University of Copenhagen. A few years after she moved back to Lund University and settled her research group at BMC, Faculty of Medicine.

With an interest in both research and innovation as well as in infrastructures and cooperation she has developed extensive experience in leading and coordinating multi-organizational and cross-discipline projects. Kajsa has a number of management and board positions, including board member of Lund Institute of Advanced X-ray and Neutron Sciences (LINXS) and Lund Protein Production Platform (LP3). Kajsa strongly believes that networks and mentoring makes a big difference in career development of women and she has participated both as an adept and as a mentor in several programs both in Sweden and elsewhere.

Ilaria Ferlenghi, GSK Vaccines
Ilaria Ferlenghi received her Ph.D in Biophysics at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, working on viral structures with the pioneer of the cryo-electron microscopy, Dr. Stephen Fuller. She performed several post-doctoral studies at different institutions: at the EMBL, Germany, applying x-ray crystallography on viral protein structures and later on bacterial helicases structures; as a visiting researcher at Harvard Medical School, USA; and the CNRS in Paris. She became head of the Structural Microscopy Group at the Novartis Vaccines in the 2006, and was appointed PhD Director of the Novartis (now GSK) Academy in 2012. She is member of the WILS (Women in Life Science). She has published several book chapters and more than 25 peer-reviewed research papers in reputed international journals. Her research interests focus on the use of structural biology applied to vaccine discovery.