Paulo J. Oliveira is currently Principal Investigator with “Agregação” at the CNC – Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology, University of Coimbra, Portugal. He is the current leader of the “Mitochondria, Metabolism and Disease” group and of the MitoXT: Mitochondrial Toxicology and Experimental Therapeutics laboratory. Paulo Oliveira's current research focuses on mitochondrial metabolism, namely alterations resulting from aging and lifestyle-related diseases, and on investigating strategies to preserve mitochondrial function across the lifespan for a healthy aging. Paulo has over 300 peer-reviewed publications (h-index=53). Paulo Oliveira was also President of the European Society for Clinical Investigation, after being its Vice-President for 2 years. Since 2020, Paulo is Vice-President of the CNC – Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology, University of Coimbra, Portugal. He is also the former Coordinator of the Doctoral Program in Experimental Biology and Biomedicine at the same University.

Afshan Malik is a molecular biologist with a strong interest in mitochondrial biology and metabolic disease. Her lab is focused on understanding the molecular pathways of systemic mitochondrial dysfunction which contribute to common metabolic disease. She leads the Diabetes and Mitochondrial research group in her department and co-leads the immunometabolism research interest group at KCL. Projects currently underway in her lab are focused on metabolic diseases including chronic kidney disease, Alzheimer’s disease and obesity related co-morbidities. She proposed the use of mitochondrial DNA copy number (MtDNA-CN) as a biomarker of mitochondrial dysfunction more than 20 years ago and has since developed methods to measure cellular and cell free mtDNA-CN in clinical samples in parallel with other molecular methods to measure and monitor mitochondrial function in humans and experimental models. More recently her lab showed that protein translation in both the mitochondrial and the cytosolic compartments is co-regulated and that this process is dysregulated in chronic kidney disease. (www.kcl.ac.uk/research/malik-lab).