ESTIC-2026

Plenary speakers

Sir Richard J. Roberts Ph.D. F.R.S.

1993 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine
Chief Scientific Officer
New England Biolabs.

Dr. Richard J. Roberts is the Chief Scientific Officer at New England Biolabs, Ipswich, Massachusetts. He received a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry in 1968 from Sheffield University and then moved as a postdoctoral fellow to Harvard. From 1972 to 1992, he worked at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, eventually becoming Assistant Director for Research under Dr. J.D. Watson. He began work on the newly discovered Type II restriction enzymes in 1972 and these enzymes have been a major research theme. Studies of transcription in Adenovirus-2 led to the discovery of split genes and mRNA splicing in 1977, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1993. During the sequencing of the Adenovirus-2 genome, computational tools became essential and his laboratory pioneered the application of computers in this area. DNA methyltransferases, as components of restriction- modification systems are also of active interest and the first crystal structures for the HhaI methyltransferase led to the discovery of base flipping. Bioinformatic studies of microbial genomes to find new restriction systems are a major research focus as is the elucidation of DNA methyltransferase recognition sequences using SMRT sequencing. He frequently runs campaigns among Nobel Laureates to support humanitarian causes including strong support for GMOs to solve world hunger.

Dr. Joachim Frank

Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2017
Professor, Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics & Biological Sciences
Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

Born in 1940 in Germany, Joachim Frank is a biophysicist considered the founder of single-particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), a technique now widely used to determine the structure of biological molecules. He studied physics at the University of Freiburg in 1963 and received the doctorate from the Technical University of Munich in 1970, for a dissertation in the laboratory of Walter Hoppe at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry focusing on image processing of electron micrographs. After postdoctoral studies in the USA and the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, he joined the Wadsworth Center in Albany, New York in 1975 as a senior research scientist. In 1985 he became part of the founding faculty for the department of biomedical sciences of the University at Albany. He has been recognized with numerous awards and accolades for his development of the mathematical and computational foundations of cryo-EM and the application of this technique to the study of ribosome structure and function. In 1998 he was named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator. In 2003 he received an appointment by Columbia University as lecturer and since 2008 he is professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics and of biological sciences. In 2017, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Richard Henderson and Jacques Dubochet for "developing cryo-electron microscopy for high-resolution structural determination of biomolecules in solutions”.

Dr. Kostya Novoselov

Nobel Prize in Physics 2010
Academic Researcher
Director, National University of Singapore,
Institute For Functional Intelligent Materials.

Prof. Peter Corke

Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Robotics
Queensland University of Technology (QUT),
QUT robotics education pioneer honoured with global award

Peter Corke is an internationally recognised researcher and pioneer in robotics, computer vision, and autonomous systems. He is a Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Robotics at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). Over a four-decade career spanning field robotics for mining, agriculture, and environmental monitoring, he has led foundational research in embodied intelligence and developed widely adopted open-source robotics software and educational resources worldwide. He is a highly cited author; a Fellow of the IEEE, the Australian Academy of Science, and the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering (ATSE); a former Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine; and a recipient of the Australian Award for University Teaching (AAUT) and the Joseph F. Engelberger Robotics Award.

Prof. Timothy Palmer

Royal Society Research Professor in Climate Physics,
University of Oxford
IMO prize 2024

Professor Tim Palmer CBE FRS is a Royal Society Research Professor Emeritus in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford. His PhD was from the University in Oxford in general relativity theory. Since then he has specialised on the dynamics and predictability of weather and climate. His research contributions range from the discovery of breaking Rossby waves in the stratosphere to the study of causes of long-term drought in the African Sahel. Operationally he pioneered the development of the first ensemble prediction system for probabilistic weather and climate prediction, at the UK Met Office and at ECMWF. Palmer is a Fellow of the Royal Society and an International Member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He has won the top prizes of the American and European Meteorological Societies and of the UN World Meteorological Organisation.

Prof. Arunava Majumdar

Dean of the Doerr School of Sustainability &
Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University, USA.

Dr. Arun Majumdar is the inaugural Dean of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. He is the Jay Precourt Provostial Chair Professor at Stanford University, a faculty member of the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Energy Science and Engineering, a Senior Fellow and former Director of the Precourt Institute for Energy and Senior Fellow of the Woods Institute for the Environment and Senior Fellow by (courtesy) of the Hoover Institution. He is also a faculty in Department of Photon Science at SLAC. In October 2009, Dr. Majumdar was nominated by President Obama and confirmed by the Senate to become the Founding Director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E), where he served until June 2012 and helped ARPA-E become a model of excellence and innovation for the government with bipartisan support from Congress and other stakeholders.