5^th Global Congress on Environmental Microbiology November 28-30, 2016 Atlanta, Georgia, USA

Kostas Konstantinidis has joined the Faculty at Georgia Tech in November 2007 and he is holding the Carlton S. Wilder Junior Professorship in Environmental Engineering since September 2012. He has earned his BS (1999) in Agriculture Sciences from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece and his PhD (2004) from the Center for Microbial Ecology at Michigan State University, where he was a Bouyoukos Fellow. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Environmental microbiology and genomics Computational approaches for studying the ecology and evolution of microorganisms Development of genomic and proteomic techniques to investigate and quantify in-situ important microbial-mediated processes Population and single-cell genomics Assessing the extent and value of biodiversity within natural assemblages of Bacteria and Archaea Biotechnological applications of microbial functional diversity Environmental relevance of microbial diseases

Karin Moelling was trained as Physicist, she analyzed Retroviruses, including HIV/AIDS, oncogenes, cander and more recently microbiology and virome . She worked at the max Planck Inst Berlin and was Director and Prof at the Univ Zürich, from where she retired. She published more than 250 peer-reviewed papers, and published a book on HIV and recently on viruses, phages, giant viruses, microorganisms wth emphasis on the their role in other cases than disease: “More Freinds than Foes, fantastic stories about viruses” (World Scient.Press, 2016)

Mölling's research interests focused primarily on retroviruses, particular human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), on which she began work as a graduate student. She is well known for her discovery of the ribonuclease H activity of reverse transcriptase, which is required for viral proliferation.Her work in this area led to the development of a DNA-based candidate HIV vaccine for which she led clinical trials.She has also worked on oncogenes, leading to the isolation of the Myc transcription factor protein;on virus diagnostics; and more recently on the evolutionary history of retroviruses and retrotransposons.