Etienne Challet received his Ph.D. degree from University of Strasbourg (France) in 1996. He then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University (USA), and a second postdoctoral fellowship at Free University of Brussels (Belgium). In 1999, he has been recruited as a Tenured Researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Strasbourg. Since 2005 he is the head of the research team “Regulation of circadian clocks” and has been promoted a director of research in 2007. His research areas include chronobiology, neuroscience, nutrition and neuroendocrinology. He has published 106 peer-reviewed publications in scientific journals, including Journal of Neuroscience, Current Biology and FASEB journal which have been cited more than 2700 times. Currently he is review editor for Frontiers in Sleep and Chronobiology and Frontiers in Neuroendocrine Science as well as academic editor for Plos One. He teaches “Neurobiology of Rhythms” at the University of Strasbourg and Ecole Nationale Supérieure (ENS) and supervised 7 PhD students.

Dr. Miguel López received his PhD in Molecular Biology (2002) from the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC, Spain) and made his postdoctoral training (2002-2006) in the Department of Clinical Biochemistry in the University of Cambridge (UK). Currently, Dr. Miguel López is Associate Professor in Department of Physiology at the School of Medicine and the Research Centre of Molecular Medicine and Chronic Diseases (CIMUS) of USC. Since the beginning of his PhD, he has focussed his research on the regulation of energy balance and obesity, with his current interest on hypothalamic energy sensors in the modulation of energy balance and metabolism. He has published 131 peer-reviewed papers. He currently serves on the editorial board of Endocronology, Journal of Molecular Endocrinology, Molecular Metabolism, Journal of Endocrinology, several Frontiers journals and PLoS ONE, and as a reviewer for several international biomedical journals, as well as for the Spanish Ministry of Science and the Spanish Medical Research Council, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, and L'Agence Nationale de la Recherche. For his work in this area, Dr. López received the awards for Basic Research in Obesity from Spanish Endocrinology and Nutrition Society (SEEN, 2006 and 2009) and the Spanish Society for the Study of Obesity (SEEDO, 2009), Spanish Award on Neuroendocrinology (2012), as well as the European Association for the Study of Obesity (EASO) Young Investigator Award for Basic Science (2008; first Spanish citizen to be awarded with that price). He has been PI of 10 national and international grants, among them an ERC Starting Grant. He teaches Endocrinology in the Schools of Medicine and Pharmacy of USC. He has supervised 9 PhD Thesis.  

Dr. Henriette Kirchner is a nutrition scientist by training (University of Jena ,Germany, 2005) and has focused on metabolic diseases ever since. She received her PhD in neuro-endocrinology from Matthias Tschöp at the University of Cincinnati where she discovered that the hunger hormone ghrelin is a signal to prepare the organism for the incoming nutrient load rather than a hunger hormone. Moreover she studied the mechanisms of metabolic surgery, a treatment for obesity and type 2 diabetes that is widely used but still incompletely understood. In 2011 Henriette moved to Stockholm as postdoctoral fellow in Juleen Zierath’s lab at the Karolinska Institute funded by a prestigious EMBO longterm fellowship. Still focusing on metabolic diseases she investigated the epigenetic mechanisms in liver that contribute to the development obesity and type 2 diabetes. Funded by the Emmy-Noether Program from the German Research Foundation DFG Henriette joined the CBBM in Lübeck in 2014 where she currently leads the Epigenetics & Metabolism group.

Henriette has won numerous awards including the Ethan Sims Young Investigator Award from The Obesity Society (2009) and the Young Investigator Award from the Leibniz Foundation (2011). Her work has been cited almost 2000 times and she is a frequent peer reviewer for the journals Molecular Metabolism, Diabetologia and Diabetes.

Jens Mittag received his Diploma in Biochemistry from the University of Hannover (Germany) in 2003 and finished his PhD at the Max Planck Institute of Experimental Endocrinology in Hannover with Karl Bauer in 2006. Subsequently, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Björn Vennström at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm (Sweden) funded by a longterm fellowship from the EMBO and the German Research Council DFG.

In 2010 he became Assistant Professor and independent junior group leader at the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology at the Karolinska Institute funded by the Swedish Research Council Vetenskapsrådet, where he also completed his Associate Professorship in Endocrinology in 2011.

In 2014 he became full professor of Molecular Endocrinology at the Center of Brain, Behavior and Metabolism CBBM of the University of Lübeck (Germany), funded by the Heisenberg Program of the DFG. He is currently Senior Editor at the “Journal of Endocrinology” and “Journal of Molecular Endocrinology” as well as for Nature “Scientific Reports”. He has obtained more than 3 Mio € of independent peer-reviewed funding, and to date published more than 35 original articles, reviews or book chapters.

His primary research interests are the central and peripheral effects of thyroid hormone on cardiovascular functions and thermoregulation. 

Dr. Riccardo Dore received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Cagliari (Italy) in 2010. In Prof. Mariangela Serra´s lab, he mainly worked on the behavioral and biochemical characterization of the phenotype induced by chronic social isolation during adolescence, in both parents and offspring of socially isolated parents, with an emphasis on the role of endogenous neuroactive steroids in regulating GABA(A)-mediated neurotransmission and stress responsiveness. Thanks to the “Master&Back” fellowship awarded by Autonomous Region of Sardinia (Italy), Riccardo joined Prof. Elena Choleris´ lab at the University of Guelph (Canada), where he studied the effects of neuroactive steroids on social learning. He then joined the research group of Prof. Cottone/Sabino at the Boston University (US) where he clarified the mechanism by which PACAP (Pituitary adenylate cyclase-activating polypeptide) exerts its anxiogenic and anti-rewarding effects, as well as he characterized a new paradigm of “intermittent access to palatable food” for the study of compulsive-like eating.

Since 2014, Riccardo is postdoctoral researcher at the Center of Brain, Behavior and Metabolism, University of Lübeck (Germany), where he is studying the role of nesfatin-1 in the regulation of the brain reward system and energy homeostasis. He published 8 original articles, 1 review and 1 book chapter.