Prof. Ruedi Aebersold, co-founder of Biognosys, is one of the pioneers in the field of proteomics. He is known for developing a series of methods that have found wide application in analytical protein chemistry and proteomics like a new class of reagents termed Isotope Coded Affinity Tag (ICAT) reagents used in quantitative mass spectrometry. Prof. Dr. Aebersold and his team of researchers use the protein profiles determined by this method to differentiate cells in different states, such as noncancerous versus cancerous cells, and to systematically study how cells respond to external stimuli. These "snapshot" profiles indicate which cells contain abnormal levels of certain proteins. This is expected to lead to new diagnostic markers for disease and to a more complete understanding of the biochemical processes that control and constitute cell physiology.

Prof. Aebersold serves on the Scientific Advisory Committees of numerous academic and private sector research organizations and is a member of several editorial boards in the fields of protein science, genomics, and proteomics.

Prof. Aebersold is a native of Switzerland and obtained his Ph.D. in Cellular Biology at the Biocenter of the University of Basel in 1983. Since that time, he is a faculty member of the Universities of Washington and British Columbia, until 2000, when he co-founded the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. In 2004, he accepted a position as full professor at the Institute of Biotechnology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, where in January 2005, his research group became the first integral part of the newly founded Institute of Molecular Systems Biology.

Paola Picotti obtained her PhD from the University of Padova, in Italy. Her PhD studies focused on the analysis of protein folding and misfolding via biochemical, spectroscopic and mass spectrometry-based techniques. In 2006 she joined Ruedi Aebersold’s group at ETH Zuerich, where her research focused on the development of targeted proteomic techniques based on selected reaction monitoring (SRM) and their application to the analysis of biological systems, such as metabolic and signaling networks in cells. For these studies she received the ETH Latsis Prize 2011. At the beginning of 2011 she started her own research group and was appointed assistant professor at the Institute of Biochemistry of the ETH Zuerich. Her group is currently applying proteomic and phosphoproteomic techniques to studying the pathological consequences of protein aggregation in cells. She is also involved in the development of publicly accessible tools to promote the archiviation of SRM assays and their dissemination to the scientific community.