10 Treurenberg, 1000 Brussels
To mark International Women's Day, the Liszt Institute Brussels presents a round table discussion with women scientists on the (poor) representation of women in this field, with the aim of encouraging young girls to pursue a career in science.
As part of the trio presidency of the EU, we invite a Spanish, a Belgian and a Hungarian scientist.
- Julia Ramos González (Spain) - Postdoctoral fellow of the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique – FNRS based at the Research Institute of Mathematics and Physics
- Shoshana Wodak (Belgium) - Visiting Group Leader at the VIB-VUB Center for Structural Biology, at the Flemish Free University of Brussels
- Andrea Fekete (Hungary) - Consultant pediatrician at Semmelweis University, 1st Dept. of Pediatrics
The opening speech will be given by Deputy Permanent Representative (COREPER I), Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary H.E. dr. Katalin Molnár
Moderator: Dr. Edit Szepessy, Policy Coordinator, EC Directorate-General for Health and Food Safety
The event is organized in the framework of the Belgian Club of Hungarian Scinentist, with the collaboration of the Embassy of Spain in Belgium, supported by the Cultural and Scientific Diplomacy Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Prof. Andrea Fekete
Dr. Andrea Fekete is a consultant paediatrician specialized in nephrology. She graduated at the Semmelweis University where she defended her PhD thesis in 2004 about the gender differences in chronic kidney disease. In 2008 she joined to the research laboratory at the Semmelweis University and Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Her research is concerned with the progression of chronic kidney disease; with a special emphasis on renal fibrosis. She spent two years in Freiburg, Germany where she studied the genetic background of various chronic renal diseases. She also worked in Gainesville, Florida at the Department of Physiology and Functional Genomics investigating the pathophysiology of nitric oxide deficiency. In 2011 she became a laureate of the Momentum Progam of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences that supports outstanding investigators in the early stages of their career. With this grant Dr Fekete established her own research group, where she studies the causes and possible novel treatments of diabetes, a severe public health-care issue of global scale. She is very productive, with more than 50 publications in the leading journals in the field of nephrology and renal physiology. She also won several national and international awards. She is also an enthusiastic teacher; she gives seminars both for graduate and postgraduate students. Currently she is the leader of the Diabetes Research Group of the Semmelweis University and Hungarian Academy of Sciences and she also works as a clinician taking care of renal paediatric patients. As a mother of three children she hope that also her example can motivate women to take part in medical leadership and scientific career parallel to a happy family life.
Dr. Shoshana Wodak
Shoshana J. Wodak, earned her PhD at Columbia University, New York. She developed, in collaboration with Joel Janin, the first docking algorithms for the prediction of protein-protein interactions and one of the first procedures for defining structural domains from the atomic coordinates of proteins. With her team at the Free University of Brussels she then used molecular simulations and bioinformatics approaches to investigate the role of local interactions in stabilizing the native state of proteins, protein structure prediction, protein folding, and fold recognition. Together with her teams at the Free University of Brussels, the European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, UK, and at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, she developed efficient procedures for computational protein design, for simulating protein interactions and conformational changes, and for analyzing protein interactions networks and cellular pathways.
Between 1986-1993, Dr. Wodak was the Scientific Director of the protein engineering team at Plant Genetic Systems, Belgium.
Dr. Wodak founded and co-directed the Centre for Structural Biology and Bioinformatics and headed a Master’s program in Bioinformatics. She has been a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) since 1990. She held a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics from 2005-2012, and was elected an ISCB fellow in 2016. She is a member of F1000 (Now Faculty Opinion) since 2017. Dr. Wodak has been a member of numerous expert panels and Advisory Committees in Europe (ERC, Horizon 2020), US (DOE) and Canada (CIHR), and is on the Editorial Boards of several journals in her her field. Since 2001, Dr. Wodak serves on the Management Committee of CAPRI (Critical Assessment of Predicted Interactions), a community-wide international initiative for fostering the development of methods and algorithms for the prediction of protein interactions and complexes, and has been coordinating this effort, since 2013.
Dr. Wodak is currently a Visiting Group Leader at the VIB-VUB Center for Structural Biology, at the Flemish Free University of Brussels, Belgium. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the Elixir 3DBioInfo Community, and serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of Cyclica Inc. in Toronto Canada.
Dr. Julia Ramos González
Julia Ramos González is Postdoctoral Fellow of the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique – FNRS (Belgium), based at the Institute of Research in Mathematics and Physics of the Catholic University of Louvain (UCLouvain). Previously, she was appointed as a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek – FWO (Belgium), based at the Mathematics Department of the University of Antwerp, university from which she also had obtained a PhD in Mathematics in 2017. She holds a Master’s Degree in Advanced Mathematical Methods in Physics and Bachelor Degrees in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Salamanca (Spain). She conducts research in Pure Mathematics, most concretely in the branch of Category Theory, and she is an enthusiastic teacher.