Christiaan Henkel is a molecular biologist turned bioinformatician. For the past eight years, he has studied the genomes of a wide variety of organisms, ranging from bacteria to snakes (and including quite a few fish species). Currently, he is working on eel and tulip genomics at Leiden University and University of Applied Sciences Leiden, in collaboration with genomics companies BaseClear and ZF-screens.

Chief Technology Officer at Oxford Nanopore. On the Executive team, he is responsible for all of the Company’s product-development activities. Clive leads the specification and design of the Company’s nanopore-based sensing platform, including strand DNA/RNA sequencing and protein-sensing applications with a strong focus on scientific excellence and successful adoption by the scientific community. Clive joined Oxford Nanopore from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (Cambridge, UK) where he played a key role in the adoption and exploitation of 'next generation' DNA sequencing platforms. This involved helping to set up the world’s largest single installation of Illumina (formerly Solexa) Genome Analyzers in a production sequencing environment, initially used to pioneer the 1000 genomes project. From early 2003 he was Director of Computational Biology and IT at Solexa Ltd, where he was central to the development and commercialisation of the Genome Analyzer (GA). Solexa was sold to Illumina for $650m in early 2007 after the successful placement and adoption of 12 instruments. The Solexa technology, now commercialised by Illumina, is the market-leading DNA sequencing technology driving the renaissance in DNA-based discovery. He has a strong background in computer science and genetics/molecular biology and manages interdisciplinary teams including mechanical engineering, electronics, physics, surface chemistry, electrophysiology, software engineering and applications (of the technology). Clive applies modern agile management techniques to the entire product-development lifecycle. Clive has also held various management and consulting positions at GlaxoWellcome, Oxford Glycosciences and other EU- and US-based organisations. He has worked at the interface between computing and science, ranging from genetics to proteomics. He holds degrees in Genetics and Computational Biology from the University of York.

Arwyn Edwards is a microbial ecologist at Aberystwyth University. He is currently a Senior Lecturer in Biology at the Institute of Biological, Environmental & Rural Sciences and Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Environmental Microbiology. His research group is focused upon the evolution, structure, function and stability of microbial communities in extreme environments in response to environmental changes at both societally-relevant and “deep” geo/evolutionary timescales. Arwyn particularly enjoys taking Nanopore sequencing to strange new places.

Raymond Hulzink is a scientific researcher at KeyGene, a plant biotechnology company in the Netherlands. In the last eight years, he gained much experience in the field of Nextn Generation Sequencing with expertise on a wide range of platforms (Illumina, Pacific Biosciences, Oxford Nanopore Technologies etc.). In the department of Technology Development, he is involved in the development of novel sequencing applications and molecular marker methods. In 2014, he joined the Oxford Nanopore MinION™’s early access programme. Recently, he joined the PromethION early access and VolTRAX introduction programs to evaluate the applicability of these systems for molecular plant breeding.

Next to his job at KeyGene, Raymond is member of the Scientific Advisory Board at ProteoNic BV, a biotechnology company offering products and services for improving recombinant protein production. Raymond earned his PhD in Molecular Plant Physiology at the Radboud University of Nijmegen on the regulation of gene expression. After his PhD, Raymond was postdoctoral researcher in the plant department of the NIOO-KNAW and studied the evolution of disease resistance in plants following a functional and comparative genomics approach. Furthermore, he worked as a post-doc at KeyGene where he was involved in map-based cloning of plant disease resistance genes.