Executive Committee

President 
Prof Aleksandra Filipovska
NHMRC Investigator
Louis Landau Chair in Child Health Research

University of Western Australia & the Telethon Kids Institute

aleksandra.filipovska@uwa.edu.au
Twitter @FilipovskaLab

Professor Aleksandra Filipovska is a NHMRC Investigator, Louis Landau Chair in Child Health Research at the University of Western Australia and the Telethon Kids Institute in Perth, Australia and a Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Synthetic Biology. She received her PhD from the University of Otago, New Zealand and she was a NZ Foundation for Research, Science and Technology Fellow at the MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit in Cambridge, the United Kingdom. Her group focuses on the regulation of gene expression by RNA-binding proteins in models of disease and multi-omic technologies to elucidate their molecular functions. She develops treatments for metabolic and cardiovascular diseases. In 2022 Aleksandra was elected as a fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences

Dr. Alexis Diaz-Vegas is cell biologist whose research is focused on dissecting the role of mitochondrial dysfunction in metabolic disease. Alexis obtained a PhD from The University of Chile, Chile in 2018. Here Diaz-Vegas utilised a range of cell and molecular biology tools in both cell and animal models to study the role of mitochondrial calcium uptake, mitochondrial dynamics and mitophagy on muscle degeneration and insulin signalling in skeletal muscle.

In 2018, Diaz-Vegas joined the Advanced Centre for Chronic Diseases (ACCDIS, Chile) as a postdoctoral researcher to study the role of mitochondrial-endoplasmic reticulum interaction in cardiac hypertrophy, providing the opportunity to further refine skills in mitochondrial biology and cardiometabolic disease.

In 2019, Diaz-Vegas joined the University of Sydney as a postdoctoral research fellow. In this role Diaz-Vegas has been exploring how mitochondrial reactive oxygen species contribute to insulin resistance in skeletal muscle and adipocytes.

Secretary
Alexis Diaz-Vegas, Ph. D.
Research Fellow, Charles Perkin Centre,
The University of Sydney
Twitter @adiazvegas

Treasurer
Jan Manent, Ph.D.
Senior research fellow

Australian Regenerative Medicine, Monash University 
jan.manent@monash.edu
Twitter @JanManentN 

Dr. Jan Manent is a research fellow at the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute at Monash University. Jan obtained his PhD in Human Genetics from the Pierre and Marie Curie university in Paris. During his graduate research, Jan worked on the cancer-predisposition syndrome Neurofibromatosis type 2, developing and characterising in vitro models of NF2-related Schwann cell tumours. 

As a postdoctoral fellow, first at the Harvard Medical School and then at the Peter MacCallum cancer centre, he went on to investigate signal integration in organ growth during development and cancer, using the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as a model system.

After a venture in industry in the Monash-embedded startup Cell Mogrify, he joined the laboratory of Associate Professor Edwina McGlinn at ARMI, where he is currently investigating the gene regulatory networks controlling growth and patterning of the early mammalian embryo using mouse models and pluripotent stem cells.

Jan has been an active member of the Australia and New Zealand Society for Cell and Developmental Biology since 2013, and the Victoria state representative from 2021 to 2023.