Gerard Hornstra, PhD studied Medicine at Erasmus University Rotterdam and Leiden University. He received his professional training in the field of Experimental Nutrition at the Unilever Research Laboratories in Vlaardingen. In 1981 he obtained a PhD degree in Medicine at Maastricht University on a thesis, entitled 'Dietary fats and arterial thrombosis'.In 1980, Prof. Hornstra joined Maastricht University where he investigated health aspect of essential fatty acids, with special emphasis on cardiovascular disease, pregnancy and early human development. After his retirement, early 2003, Prof. Hornstra continued to supervise and advise PhD students.

In addition, he works as a private research consultant in the area of dietary lipids in health and disease. His special scientific interest concerns the importance of essential and other fatty acids in cardiovascular disease, maternal nutrition, and infant development.

Philippe Bougnoux, MD is a medical oncologist, specialized in breast and gynaecologic cancers. He performed his trainings in medicine in Tours and in immunology at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. After a 3 years post-doctoral staying as a Fogarty fellow at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, MD, he became professor of cancer biology at the university of Tours, and chief of the cancer outpatient unit at the university cancer centre Henry S. Kaplan. He is also heading the Inserm research Unit 921 « Nutrition, growth and Cancer » and coordinates a consortium of research units in chemistry and biology on marine-derived anticancer agents within the canceropôle of the western part of France.

His research interests are to understand how diet and lipid nutrients influence the molecular alterations which result in malignant tumors and how they integrate to delay breast cancer occurrence or individual response to anticancer agents. He does translational research in the field of dietary lipids in relation to breast cancer prevention and treatment. He is currently carrying out clinical trials of dietary intervention with omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids to enhance the sensitivity of tumors to radiation or chemotherapy.

The theme of his current research uses PET imaging and other isotope methods aims to learn more about energy metabolism in the aging brain, and whether polyunsaturates help maintain cognitive function during aging via effects on fuel availability to the brain. Dr. Cunnane has sat on grant selection committees of Canada’s main science funding agencies and is on the editorial boards of three journals. He was the chief organizer of ISSFAL 2002 and was on the ISSFAL Executive Board from 2000-2008. He is the author Survival of the Fattest: The Key to Human Brain Evolution (2005), and co-editor of the recently published book - Human Brain Evolution – Influence of Freshwater and Marine Food Resources (2010). Both books describe the pivotal role of nutritional and metabolic changes in hominids as prerequisites for evolution of the cognitively advanced human brain. He has also written a book on zinc nutrition, co-edited two books on flaxseed in human nutrition, and published 250 peer-reviewed research papers.

Dr. Newgard’s research focuses on application of an interdisciplinary approach for understanding of diabetes and obesity mechanisms involving gene discovery, metabolic engineering, and comprehensive tools of metabolic analysis (“metabolomics”) such as mass spectrometry-based metabolic profiling and NMR-based metabolic flux analysis. Dr. Newgard has authored over 200 peer-reviewed and review articles, and has been the recipient of several awards, including the Kayla Grodsky Award for Outstanding Basic Science Research from the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation (1999), the Outstanding Scientific Achievement (Lilly) Award from the American Diabetes Association (2001), a Merit Award from the NIH (2001), the Solomon Berson Prize of the American Physiological Society (2003), and a Freedom to Discover Award in Metabolic Research from Bristol-Meyers Squibb (2006).