David S. Rueda

Imperial College London, London, Uk

David S. Rueda is the chair of Molecular and Cellular Medicine at Imperial College London, in London (UK). He graduated in 1997 with a diploma in Chemical Engineering at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. He obtained his PhD in 2001 from the EPFL, with a thesis on Overtone Spectroscopy of Methanol. During a postdoctoral stay at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (MI), he developed fluorescence microscopy assays to study the conformational dynamics of ribozymes with single molecule resolution. In 2005, he joined the department of Chemistry at Wayne State University (Detroit, MI), where he continued working on single molecule studies of nucleic acids and proteins. He was tenured and promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in 2011. In 2012, he accepted the Chair of Molecular and Cellular Medicine at Imperial College. Since 2013, he also heads the Single Molecule Imaging Group at the MRC London Institute of Medical Science, London, UK. David Rueda’s scientific interests range from single molecule biophysics to imaging single RNA molecules in live cells. In recent years, his group has been engaged in several collaborations aiming at understanding the fundamental mechanism of DNA repair by homologous recombination, chromatin structure and remodelling. His work has been awarded with several prizes, amongst them the Wayne State University Outstanding Junior Faculty Award (2011) and the A. Paul Schaap Faculty Scholar (2011). He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (since 2014), and Chair of the PCCP Editorial Board (since 2019).

Matt Newton

MRC-London Institute of Medical Sciences, Single Molecule Imaging Group, London W12 0NN, UK

Matt Newton studied Molecular Genetics at The University of Edinburgh earning his BSc (Hons) degree in 2015. He obtained his PhD from Imperial College London in 2021 under the supervision of Professor David Rueda in the Single Molecule Imaging Group where he used optical-tweezers and single-molecule FRET to investigate the off-target activity of CRISPR/Cas9. He is currently a postdoctoral training fellow in the lab of Dr. Simon Boulton at the Francis Crick Institute where he is using single-molecule and biochemical methods to study mechanisms of DNA damage repair and telomere stability. 

Ondrej Belan

The Francis Crick Institute, DSB Repair Metabolism Laboratory, London NW1 1AT, UK

Ondrej Belan is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the group of Prof. Stephen J. Elledge at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He received his BSc (Hons) at Medical Faculty of Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic in 2017. He then enrolled at Imperial College London and began his PhD studies at The Francis Crick Institute under the supervision of Dr. Simon J. Boulton in DSB Repair Metabolism Laboratory. In a joint project between the groups of Dr. Simon J. Boulton and Professor David S. Rueda, Ondrej has used ensemble biochemical methods, optical-tweezers, fluorescence microscopy and nematode genetics to investigate mechanisms of DNA double strand break repair and genome stability maintenance.