Giorgio Bernardi

Giorgio Bernardi received an MD degree from the University of Padua (Italy) and a degree in Physics from the University of Strasbourg (France). He spent most of his scientific career with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), first at the Center for Research on Macromolecules in Strasbourg, then at the Jacques Monod Institute in Paris. Dr. Bernardi is the was President of the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn in Naples between 1998 and 2007 and now its honorary president, and Head of the Laboratory of Molecular Evolution there. Giorgio Bernardi has published over 350 papers in the fields of molecular genetics and molecular evolution as well as a book entitled “Structural and evolutionary genomics: natural selection in genome evolution” (Elsevier, 2004). Dr. Bernardi was the Chairman of the FEBS Course Committee (1977-86), of COGENE, the Committee on Genetic Experimentation of ICSU (1982-96), and of the Scientific Council of ROSTE (2002-2004). He obtained a honorary degree from the Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology, Moscow (Russia), and from the University of Ancona (Italy). He was a Fogarty Scholar at NIH, Bethesda, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Osaka and at the National Institute of Genetics, Mishima (Japan). Dr. Bernardi is a Member of several Academies (including Academia Europaea and the Istituto Veneto) and scientific Societies. He is the Editor-in-Chief of GENE and the Chairman of International Society of Molecular Evolution.

Cecilia Saccone

Cecilia Saccone has been full professor of Molecular Biology, Faculty of Science, University of Bari, Italy since 1973. She was President of the CNR Research Area of Bari (1987-2000). She is associate professor at I.T.B. - CNR, Italy.
She has been and/or is a member of many scientific committees and delegate on many international scientific panels, among which EMBO (European Molecular Biology Organization).

She was invited visiting professor at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris VI, the European Bio-informatics Institute (EBI) (Hinxton, UK) and at the Universidad de Sevilla.

Scientific coordinator of several EU Projects among which the EU Bridge project "Promotion of EMBnet", Metazoa Mitochondrial DNAs (MitBase) and EMBRACE.

Partner in Mammalian Phylogeny.

She has been awarded many honours, including the Miller Reasearch Professorship Award (Berkeley U.S.A.) in 1990 and several Italian prizes for research, among which the Minerva Prize for Scientific Research (26 November 2004).

She has published a large amount of papers and several reviews and she is serving on the editorial boards of several international and European journals of molecular biology, molecular evolution, comparative genomics. She is Author with Prof. G. Pesole of the book: “Handbook of Comparative Genomics”– John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2003.

She has always believed in the importance of the multidisciplinary approach to biological issues and her teams include both experts in sequence production (biologists) and in sequence analysis (bioinformatics).

The main research areas, each specialised in a different aspect of molecular biology, but whose research topics are closely interrelated, are:

* Organization and expression of the mitochondrial genome.
* Functional and Comparative Genomics
* Molecular Evolution
* Bioinformatics and Biocomputing

More recently, she has been involved in some Molecular Biodiversity issues with the particular aim to integrate Genomics and (Bio)Informatics with Biodiversity. She is participating in the European effort for the DNA Barcoding, a promising initiative in the field of Molecular Biodiversity including Environmental Monitoring.