Co-Chair of the Ageing Society Grand Challenge Research Committee
Lucia Marucci is a Professor of Systems and Engineering Biology at the University of Bristol. After completing her studies in Mathematics, Lucia started a PhD in Automatic Engineering, focused on the design of synthetic gene network (University of Naples, Italy, PhD award 2010). She then moved to the Centre for Genomic Regulation (Barcelona, Spain) where she was awarded an EMBO Long term fellowship to study gene expression dynamics in pluripotent stem cells.
Lucia moved to Bristol in 2013 and co-directs the Bristol BioDesign Institute, a specialised research institute in Synthetic Biology. Lucia’s research is focused on developing quantitative tools to understand cell dynamics and engineering-inspired methodologies for controlling living system functions, with the final aim to both disentangle and reprogram the complexity governing life.
Her approach combines tools from different disciplines: control engineering, systems and synthetic biology, and computer science.
Mike Chappell
Chair of the Ageing Society Grand Challenge Research Committee
Mike Chappell is a Professor within the School of Engineering at the University of Warwick where he heads the Systems and Information Engineering Discipline Stream that includes much of the Biomedical Engineering activity within the School. He is also a former Co-Lead for the University’s Global Research Priority programme for Health, heads the University’s Gait (motion capture) Laboratory and co-leads the School’s Biomedical Engineering Institute (the BMEI). He has research expertise in the systems modelling and data analysis of biomedical, pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic, biological and Quantitative and Systems Pharmacology (QSP) processes.
Much of his work relates to the application to these fields of techniques in system dynamics, non-linear systems, data analytics, control and system identification with particular application to effective drug design and development, metabolic systems, cancer, diabetes, motion capture, orthotics and prosthetics. He also has specific expertise in structural identifiability and indistinguishability analyses that are important prerequisites to experiment design, model parameter estimation and model validation.
He has had close research collaborations with industry and hospital-based research groups for over 30 years, in particular, with The Binding Site/Thermo Fisher, where the modelling performed has driven and led to international clinical trials (e.g., EULite), AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline. He led the Marie Curie funded European Industrial Doctorate training network on Innovative Modelling for Pharmaceutical Advances through Collaborative Training (IMPACT) in collaboration with AstraZeneca and has run three EPSRC funded Summer Schools on Mathematics for Biomedical Engineering at Warwick.
He is a member of the Management Committee for the initially EPSRC/MRC funded QSP-UK network that includes all of the major UK-based pharmaceutical companies and is the Principal Investigator on the current EPSRC funded PROLIMB project in collaboration with colleagues at UHCW and UCL. He is also currently a lead partner in the EU Horizon funded project ERAMET (Ecosystem for rapid adoption of modelling and simulation METhods) and a member of the International Federation for Automatic Control (IFAC) Technical Committee 8.2 on Biological and Medical Systems.
