Jochen Hampe is a Professor of Gastroenterology and heads Gastroenterology and Hepatology at the Medical Department 1, University Hospital Dresden at the TU Dresden, Germany. He was trained as a physician for Internal Medicine and Gastroenterology at the Charité University Hospital Berlin and the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel. Prof. Hampe studied medicine at the Humboldt University Berlin and the Imperial College London supported by a scholarship of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

Jochen Hampe received postdoctoral training at the Department of Gastroenterology of the University of California at San Diego and at Axys Pharmaceuticals in San Diego, California. His research interests include the genetics functional epigenomcs of complex liver diseases such as alcoholic and non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, liver cirrhosis and hepatobiliary transport. Prof. Hampe received the Theodor Frerichs Award of the German Society for Internal Medicine and the Siegfried Thannhauser Award of the German Gastroenterological Association.

In LiSyM, Jochen Hampe coordinates the pillar I activities. Here, the early events governing the transition from simple steatosis to the onset of inflammation are the focus of a coordinated effort of modellers, 3D imaging and functional genomic activities.

Prof. Dr. med. Christian Trautwein started to study medicine between 1991 and 1997 at the universities of Mainz and Tübingen. He performed his MD Thesis in the laboratory of Prof. Dr. Michael Manns on “The analysis of PBC specific antibodies”. After his medical school he started to work at the I. Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Mainz under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Dr. KH Meyer zum Büschenfelde. During this time he visited the laboratory in Birmingham to specifically study liver transplantation related diseases. From 1991 to 1993 he worked in the laboratory of Prof. Dr. Michael Karin at the University of San Diego. Starting 1993 until 2005 he joined the Department of Prof. Dr. Michael Manns in Hannover. During this time he became Senior Physician, Prof. of Medicine III and Vice Director of the Department of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Endocrinology in Hannover. Since 2005 he is Director of the Department of Internal Medicine at the University Hospital at the RWTH Aachen. In this position he developed a “Sonderforschungsbereich” and established a new liver transplant program in Aachen.

Frank Lammert is Professor of Internal Medicine and Head of the Department of Medicine at Saarland University Hospital Homburg, Germany. Between 2002 and 2007 he was Associate Professor of Gastroenterology and Assistant Professor for Molecular and Clinical Hepatology at the University of Bonn and Aachen University (RWTH), respectively.

Prof. Lammert studied medicine and economics at the Universities of Düsseldorf, Hagen and Aachen supported by a scholarship of the German National Academic Foundation and obtained his PhD summa cum laude at Aachen University in 1995.

Frank Lammert held a number of academic faculty appointments, including Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School, Department of Medicine, Boston, where he worked in the laboratory of Prof. Martin C. Carey, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Frank Lammert has served as member of the Governing Board of the German Association for the Study of the Liver (GASL) and Associate Editor of the Journal of Hepatology.

His research interests include the genetics of complex liver diseases, hepatic fibrogenesis and hepatobiliary transport. Prof. Lammert received the Theodor Frerichs Award of the German Society for Internal Medicine in 2002 and the Siegfried Thannhauser Award of the German Gastroenterological Association in 2005.

Prof. Ursula Klingmüller studied Biology at the Universities Bayreuth and Heidelberg. During her Diploma and Graduate thesis at the ZMBH in Heidelberg in the group of Prof. H. Schaller she addressed virus-host-cell interactions of Hepatitis B viruses. As postdoctoral fellow she was funded by a stipend by the DFG and studied in the groups of Prof. L. Cantley, Harvard Medical School, and of Prof. H. Lodish, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, in Boston, USA, signal transduction through the erythropoietin receptor.

In 1996 she returned to Germany to head an independent Hans-Spemann-Junior Group at the Max-Planck-Institute for Immunbiology in Freiburg. In 2003 she was awarded a Theodor-Boveri-Group at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg and since 2007 heads the division „Systems Biology of Signal Transduction“ at the DKFZ. In 2011 she was appointed as W3-professor at the University of Heidelberg. In 2016 she was elected to the German Ethics Council.

Ursula Klingmüller has published more than 93 high rank publications. Her research combines quantitative analysis of information processing and cell fate decisions with mathematical modeling to unravel key regulatory mechanisms and predict strategies for effective intervention. Specifically, she addresses signaling pathways involved in liver regeneration. In the LiSyM Network she is co-coordinator of Pillar III Acute-on-Chronic Liver Failure and project leader in Pillar II and Pillar III focusing on dynamic pathway modeling of cytokine and growth factor induced signal transduction to gain insights into mechanisms that are changed in the chronically diseased liver.

Madlen Matz-Soja studied ecotrophology at the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences in Bernburg. As a PhD student she worked in the field of regulation of hepatic gene expression via morphogenic pathways, at the Institute of Biochemistry, Faculty of Medicine, University Leipzig in Prof. Dr. Rolf Gebhardt's research group.

Having finished her postdoctoral training Madlen continued her research and developed several methods to investigate morphogenic signals, like the Wnt/β-Catenin and the Hedgehog signalling pathway in the adult liver. In particular she identified a new mechanism by which the lipid content of the liver is regulated.
Within the Virtual Liver Network she contributed to multiple projects which were associated with liver steatosis.

Now, she became leader of the junior research group “Hedgehog signalling pathway” within LiSyM at the Rudolf-Schönheimer-Institute of Biochemistry at Leipzig University. As a member of the leadership team she represents the interests of the four LiSyM junior groups.

Marino Zerial graduated in biology at the University of Trieste in 1982 with a thesis on lysosomal storage disorders. He conducted post-doctoral experiences at the Institut J. Monod (Paris) on the organization of the human genome and at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, EMBL (Heidelberg) on the biosynthesis and endocytosis of the tranferrin receptor. He became EMBL research Group Leader in 1991, when he started his work on the molecular regulation of endocytosis. In 1998, he became Max Planck Director and co-founder of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, MPI-CBG, Dresden.

Marino Zerial has made key contributions towards the understanding of the molecular mechanisms of endocytosis. Particularly, his work on Rab5 as a master regulator of endosome biogenesis established key principles that are now textbook knowledge.

In the past few years, Zerial’s group has performed a systems analysis of endocytosis using quantitative multi-parametric image analysis, revealing design principles of the endocytic network that are important for signalling. Zerial and colleagues have been developing methods for a multi-scale analysis of tissue organization and function, using the mouse liver as model system.

For his scientific contributions, he was awarded the 1994 FEBS Anniversary Prize, the Chiara D’Onofrio Prize (1999), and the prestigious Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize (2006). Marino Zerial was elected EMBO Member in 1996 and is Honorary Professor at the Medical Faculty, University of Technology, Dresden.

For information about his research, see http://zerial.mpi-cbg.de/

Dirk Drasdo is head of group for “Multi-cellular Systems Biology” co-localized at INRIA Paris-Rocquencourt in France, the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioinformatics, Universoty of Leipzig, Germany and IfADo, Dortmund, Germany.

His main research topic is modeling of multi-cellular tissue organisation. He established center-based models of growing tissues in various applications. In these models cells are mimicked as individual agents, parameterized by measurable biophysical and biokinetic parameters. More recently he and his group established a process chain parameterizing single-cell-based tissue models out of image data in collaboration with the group of J.G. Hengstler (IfaDo). With a modeling guided experimental strategy they were able to predict a previously unrecognized order mechanism during liver regeneration and very recently to deduce the necessity for an ammonia sink mechanism after drug induced liver damage which subsequently could be identified.

Before his position as “Directeur de Recherche” (1st class, research institution - equivalent of a full professor position) at INRIA he has hold a faculty position at the Mathematics Dept. and the Center for Systems Biology at University of Warwick, UK, and research associate positions at the Max-Planck-Institutes for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig, and Colloid and Interface Science in Golm, as well as at the Institute for Medical Informatics, Statistics and Epidemiology at the Medical Faculty of Leipzig University; he has a habilitation in Computer Science (University of Leipzig), a PhD in Physics (MPI for Biophys. Chemistry and Univ. of Göttingen), and master degree in Physics from the RWTH Aachen. He has been or is PI in several EU as well as national German or French projects on tissue organisation.

In LiSym Dirk Drasdo is co-coordinator of pillar III (ACLF) and participator in pillar II.

Steven Dooley is University Professor and Head of Section of Molecular Hepatology & Alcohol Associated Diseases in the Department of Medicine II at the Medical Faculty Mannheim, at Heidelberg University. Prof. Dooley graduated in Biology at the University at Kaiserslautern and did his PhD studies at the Institute of Human Genetics, University of Saarland in Homburg. His Postdoc research on Molecular Cancer Research took place at the Institute of Human Genetics at the same University. Later in 1998, he became Group Leader and Assistant Professor in the Department of Clinical Chemistry and Pathobiochemistry at the University Hospital RWTH Aachen. In 2004, he was appointed as a full Professor to Heidelberg University.

Prof. Dooley received the Gábor-Szász-Award of the Deutsche Vereinte Gesellschaft für Klinische Chemie und Laboratoriums-Medizin for outstanding scientific merits. He has over 200 publications and his work is supported by different grants from, among others DFG, BMBF and EU. His research is dedicated to cellular processes that occur in the liver in response to damage, e.g. from alcohol abuse or malnutrition, specifically in the role of TGF-β family members, their signaling pathway regulators and target genes. His group is using molecular biology, cell biology, imaging and systems biology in cells, animal models and samples from human patients with liver disease to understand disease mechanisms and find new targets to be used for diagnosis or therapy.

Lars Küpfer is a senior scientist in the Systems Pharmacology group of Bayer AG in Leverkusen and at the Institute of Applied Microbiology of the RWTH Aachen. He studied chemical engineering at the TH Karlsruhe, RWTH Aachen and Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, and received his Ph.D. degree from ETH Zurich. In his thesis, Lars Küpfer analyzed metabolic and regulatory principles in yeast based on computational models. In his current position, he works on pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic modeling of novel drug candidates thereby supporting decision making along the pharma development process. Lars Küpfer's main research interests are in the areas of physiologically-based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) modelling, toxicology and multiscale modelling. Within LiSyM he coordinates modelling and analysis of patient and animal PK data.

Wolfgang Müller studied physics and computer science to diploma level, followed by a doctoral thesis about searching images by their visual similarity and a habilitation on search in distributed systems. After a brief stay in industry, rewriting a large public-facing web application, he joined the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS gGmbH, a private, not-for-profit research institute) as group leader of the Scientific Databases and Visualisation Group (SDBV).

The SDBV is an interdisciplinary group whose research and development is concerned with diverse flavors of management of scientific data. SDBV is responsible for the data management within LiSyM. It is the German part of FAIRDOM, a transnational data and model management project, and part of the de.NBI-SysBio, the systems biology part of the German Network for Bioninformatics Infrastructure. For these large-scale projects SDBV develops together with its collaboration partners the SEEK platform, a system for exchanging and storing data, models and other information in Systems Biology.

LiSyM data management is coordinated by Müller, and is based on the FAIRDOM Hub, building on the progress made within the Virtual Liver Network. SDBV members are active in the data management (GI/GMDS), biocuration (ISB) and bio data standards (STRENDA, COMBINE) communities.

Hermann-Georg (Hergo) Holzhütter is group leader at the Institute of Biochemistry of the Medical School Berlin (Charité). He studied physics at the Humboldt-University Berlin and graduated at this University in theoretical physics with a thesis on electron transport in semiconductors. 1979 he joint the Institute of Biochemistry of the Charité as leader of the Mathematical Systems Biochemistry Group. His group works on mathematical models of enzymes, metabolic networks of various human cells, intra-cellular vesicle transport and development of in vitro toxicity test systems. His contribution to these fields was awarded with several national and international prizes. In the Virtual Liver Network (VLN), Hergo was Project Leader and partner in several projects. His work is mainly dedicated to the development of a comprehensive kinetic model of liver metabolism and the integration of this model with models of signal transduction and gene expression developed in other projects. In LiSyM he acts as coordinator of Pillar IV (Improvement of functional liver tests).

Michael P. Manns is Director of the Department of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Endocrinology at Hannover Medical School (MHH), Hannover, Germany since 1991. Since 2015 he is Clinical Director of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI), Braunschweig, and Founding Director of the Centre for Individualised Infection Medicine (CIIM), Hannover.

He graduated in medicine from the University of Vienna in Austria and the University of Mainz in Germany before completing postgraduate training at the Free University of Berlin, Germany, and the University of Mainz, where he became Professor of Medicine in 1986. Subsequently, Professor Manns was a Research Associate at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, USA from 1987 to 1988.

Professor Manns has a long-term research interest in liver diseases with a main focus on viral hepatitis, autoimmune liver diseases, hepatocellular carcinoma, liver transplantation and regenerative medicine.

Professor Manns is founder and Chairman of Hep-Net, a national network of competence on viral hepatitis, and the German Liver Foundation. He has been President of the German Society of Gastroenterology (DGVS), the German Association for the Study of the Liver (GASL) and the German Society of Internal Medicine (DGIM) and is President of United European Gastro¬enterology (UEG) 2016 – 2017. Since 2015 Prof. Manns is member of the Scientific Panel for Health (SPH) of the European Commission.

Professor Manns has received numerous awards including the International Hans Popper Award in 1995 and the European Association for the Study of the Liver (EASL) Recognition Award in 2007.

He has published more than 1000 articles in international peer-reviewed journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, Nature, Nature Medicine, Cell, Gastroenterology, and Hepatology among others. He has an H-Index of 137 (Google Scholar, 10 May 2016). According to Thomson Reuters he ranks among the top 1 % of most cited researchers in clinical medicine.

Prof. Dr. Ron M.A. Heeren obtained a PhD degree in technical physics in 1992 at the University of Amsterdam on plasma-surface interactions. He was the research group leader at FOM-AMOLF for macromolecular ion physics and biomolecular imaging mass spectrometry. In 2001 he was appointed professor at the chemistry faculty of Utrecht University lecturing on the physical aspects of biomolecular mass spectrometry.

In the period 1995-2015 he has been developing new approaches towards high spatial resolution and high throughput molecular imaging mass spectrometry using Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry and Matrix Assisted Laser Desorption and Ionization. He was the research director for emerging technologies within the Netherlands Proteomics Centre from 2008-2013. In 2012 he co-founded Omics2Image B.V., a company focused on bringing innovative ion detector technology to the analytical market.

In 2014 he was appointed as distinguished professor and Limburg Chair at the University of Maastricht where he now is the co-director jointly with Prof. Peter Peters of M4I, the Maastricht MultiModal Molecular Imaging institute and heads the division of imaging MS. He is the elected treasurer and executive board member of the international mass spectrometry foundation and serves on various editorial boards of peer-reviewed journals. He is and has been active in many professional societies to advance mass spectrometric research, education and professionalization. He is an executive board member of the Indian society of mass spectrometry ISMAS. His publication record encompasses an excess of 200 peer-reviewed publications and his H-index is 37.

His academic research interests are the fundamental studies of the energetics of macromolecular systems, conformational studies of non-covalently bound protein complexes, translational imaging research, high-throughput bioinformatics and the development and validation of new mass spectrometry based proteomic imaging techniques for the life sciences.

Sophie Lotersztajn is Director of Research at the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM) at the Center for research on inflammation (CRI) and has a lrecognized expertise in signaling, inflammation and liver pathophysiology.

She is the chairman of the Hepato-Gastroenterology Department of the CRI and heads a group devoted to the study of liver inflammation and fibrosis in the context of fatty liver disease. Her group is a founding team of the Laboratory of Excellence Inflammex, a network dedicated to the study of inflammatory diseases. She has published more than a 100 peer reviewed scientific papers in high ranked journals (Nature Medicine, PNAS, Gastroenterology, Hepatology etc…).

She has been invited more than a 100 times to international meetings and institutes (Cold Spring Harbor, Faseb, EASL, AASLD, Experimental Biology) and has organized several national and international meetings and symposiums. She has a longstanding expertise in the evaluation of national (Inserm, Fondation pour la Recherche Medicale) and international (EC, Israelian Science Foundation, Walbio) programs, and is a member of several scientific boards (Biorion (Netherlands), Ciberehed (Spain), Galaxy (Germany) etc…). She currently serves as an Associate Editor for Journal of Hepatology and American Journal of Phsyiology-Cell Physiology.

Prof Walter Kolch is Director of Systems Biology Ireland (SBI) at University College Dublin (Ireland). SBI was rated amongst the top 5 Systems Biology Institutes worldwide by an international review panel in 2014. Established in 2009 SBI has successfully grown to comprise ca. 70 staff from >20 different nations producing >260 publications in the last 5 years (ca. 1 per week) in high ranking journals including Nature, Cell, Molecular Cell, Nature, Nature Cell Biology, Nature Biotechnology. SBI research focuses on elucidating the basic principles of the design and function of biological signal transduction networks in order to design new therapeutic approaches to cancer, degenerative and inflammatory diseases based on a systems level, mechanistic understanding of biomolecular networks. The study of signal transduction networks constitutes the underpinning basic research programme that drives applications in currently three areas: (i) Personalised cancer diagnostics and therapeutics (ca. 60% of the programme): combating drug resistance, developing optimal drug combination therapies, diagnosis and treatment of metastatic disease; (ii) Understanding and treating inflammatory disease (ca. 20% of the programme): regulation of global gene expression in response to hypoxia in inflammation, such as rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease; modification of transcriptional regulators and developing transcription factor-targeted therapies for inflammatory bowel disease; and (iii) Dermatology focusing on the role of signalling networks in eczema, itch and skin cancers. From February 2010-April 2016 Walter also was Director of the Conway Institute of Biomolecular and Biomedical Research, the largest life sciences research institute in Ireland with ca. 100 groups focussing on elucidating the molecular causes of human diseases. Managing the Conway through severe (>35%) budget cuts during the financial crisis the Conway was able to recover its publication output and grant income in 2013 to the peak levels of 2008.

Walter is best known for his work in oncogene signal transduction, proteomics and systems biology. Having obtained a MD from the University of Vienna, Austria, he worked in academia, research institutions and pharmaceutical industry in the USA, Germany, Great Britain and Ireland. His current research interest focuses on understanding how biochemical networks specify biological decisions, and how these properties can be exploited for improving the diagnosis and therapy of cancer. Walter has a broad scientific scope and vast experience in leading large interdisciplinary projects. He serves on several editorial boards and international scientific advisory boards, including the Center for Genome Regulation (Barcelona, Spain) and the Yale Systems Biology Center (New Haven, NH, USA). He was a Director of the Caledonian Research Foundation (2007-2010), President of the British Society for Proteome Research, (2007-10), and was elected as Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2006 and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2016.

Bart Staels, PhD., is professor (‘classe exceptionnelle’) in the faculty of pharmacy at the University of Lille, Lille, France. He is director of the Inserm Unit UMR 1011 with laboratories (approx.100 persons) on the campus of the Institut Pasteur de Lille and the Research Pole of the University of Lille, Lille, France.

Pr. Staels earned his doctorate at the Institute for Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Leuven, Belgium. He completed postdoctoral work at the Metabolic Research Unit, University of California, San Francisco and was postdoctoral research fellow of the Reverse Cholesterol Transport/Atherosclerosis Project, BioAvenir, Vitry sur Seine, France.

Pr. Staels is a member of learned societies such as the European Atherosclerosis Society, the International Atherosclerosis Society (Distinguished Fellow), the Nouvelle Société Française d’Athérosclérose, the Société Française de Diabète, the American Heart Association (Premium Professional Silver Heart Member), the American Diabetes Association and European Association for the Study of Diabetes. He is past-president of the Nouvelle Société Française d’Athérosclérose (NSFA; 2009-2011).
Pr. Staels is also co-founder of the biopharmaceutical company Genfit SA, and president of its Scientific Advisory Board. He is co-founder and board member of the European Genomic Institute for Diabetes (EGID).
He was appointed European corresponding member of the National Academy of Pharmacy in June 2011; Senior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France in October 2011 and received the International Francqui Professor Chair in 2013.

Pr. Staels has been awarded the Young Investigator Award of the European Atherosclerosis Society, the Bronze Medal of the CNRS and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the British Atherosclerosis Society, the pharmaceutical “Barré” 2007 prize from the Faculté de Pharmacie of Montreal, and the French “JP Binet” prize from the Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale, Paris, in 2011. He is also recipient of the 2012 “Distinguished Leader in Insulin Resistance” award from the International Committee for Insulin Resistance (ICIR).

Pr. Staels’ research focuses on molecular pharmacology of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, including dyslipidemia and type 2 diabetes. He particularly studies the role of nuclear receptors (such as the PPARs, FXR, Rev-erb and ROR in the control of inflammation and lipid and glucose homeostasis as well as the transcriptional mechanisms involved. Pr. Staels was among the first to identify a crucial role for the nuclear receptor PPAR in the control of lipid and glucose metabolism as well as cardiovascular function in humans. He elucidated the action mechanism of the fibrate class of drugs that are currently used in the treatment of lipid disorders and worked also on the action mechanism of the glitazones, a class of anti-diabetic drugs. His work has identified the PPAR transcription factors as potential drug targets for the treatment of diabetes, dyslipidemia, cardiovascular disease and NAFLD, which contributed to the development of several novel therapeutic compounds, one of them is currently in phase IIb of clinical development.

To date, Pr. Staels has published more than 790 papers, including 200 review articles, and several book chapters.
He received the ISI citations award (citation number of 44024; h-index factor of 110 and average citation of 55/article). Based on the French 2007 Necker Institute dossier, Pr.Staels was between 2000-2005 among the 35 french researchers with the highest publication volume.
Pr. Staels is also reviewer for numerous international journals and has been invited speaker at many prestigious international meetings, including the IAS, AHA, ADA and IDF. He contributed to the organization of congresses such as the “International Symposia on PPARs”, the NSFA annual congress and was chairman the 2007 and 2012 Keystone Symposia on “Metabolic Syndrome” and “Genetic and Molecular Basis of Obesity and Body Weight Regulation”.

Jörg Stelling is a Professor of Computational Systems Biology at the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering of ETH Zurich and has a recognized expertise in computational approaches to biological systems.

He heads an interdisciplinary research group that focuses on developing and applying computational methods and mechanistic mathematical models to study complex cellular networks, to elucidate their operating principles, and to enable their rational re-design in contexts such as biomedical applications. A particularly relevant area of research deals with detailed systems dynamics that are, for example, required to understand the integration of cellular regulation across metabolism, signal transduction, and gene regulation. We aim at developing advanced methods and models for detailed network analysis that cope with the prevailing uncertainty due to a lack of experimental data and biological knowledge

Jörg Stelling has published approximately 100 peer reviewed scientific papers in different areas ranging from applied mathematics to biology, including in high ranked journals such as Nature, Science, Cell, PNAS, and others. He has been invited speaker at more than a 100 international meetings and has organized several international meeting (e.g. EMBO). He has served and is serving on a number of evaluation panels (e.g., EU, Volkswagen Foundation), advisory boards (e.g., BBSRC Strategy Panel for Integrative Biology), and editorial boards (e.g., PLOS Computational Biology).

Peter Jansen was Program Director of LiSyM since January 2016. He sadly passed away in September 2021. We are grateful for his contribution to the success of the LiSyM network.

Peter Jansen’s scientific career started in 1970 at the Institute of Pharmacology with work on drug metabolism for which he received a PhD in 1975. For part of his scientific training he went to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York (1973-76). The clinical training started in 1977 at the University of Nijmegen Medical Center.

Of these years of training and education the time in New York stands out since it offered the opportunity to meet and hear the great scientists of that time (Christian De Duve, Alex Novikoff, Sidney Goldstein, Linus Pauling), many of whom worked or visited New York City. Besides science his love of jazz, classical music, literature and art found inspiration in New York and later in Amsterdam where he lived until his death.

Peter did his medical training in Nijmegen but after that he decided to go to the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam to become associate professor of medicine. In 1993 he was appointed professor of hepatology and head of the department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology in the University Medical Center in Groningen, the main liver transplantation center in the Netherlands.

In Groningen he established a laboratory to continue the basic laboratory work that he already had started in Amsterdam. His work, and that of his collaborators, focused on membrane transport and transport of bile acids, organic anions and phospholipids in the liver. During this period most transporter genes were characterized and cloned and knock-out animal models where established. Following these developments, most of the monogenetic diseases were discovered that resulted from mutations of these genes. This all took place in a surprisingly short period of about ten years.

In 2003 he returned to Amsterdam as head of the liver unit. From then on Peter’s research was devoted to the interaction between liver and intestine, FGF19-signalling, nuclear hormone receptors and the role of bile salts in cholestatic and metabolic liver disease.

After Peter’s formal retirement from the University of Amsterdam he had the opportunity to continue as consultant of medical research at the department of Surgery at the Maastricht University Medical Center and as clinical hepatologist at the Department of Gastroenterology at the MUMC.

Research in the LiSyM network is focused on a systems medicine approach to metabolic and cholestatic liver disease. This was a new challenge but Peter, and many other investigators, was convinced that collaboration between mathematicians, biologists and clinicians brings a new dimension to the understanding of these diseases.

A more profound knowledge, particularly on the temporal and spatial dimensions of metabolic and cholestatic liver diseases, is needed to apply the many new drugs that currently are becoming available in a more tailored and individual patient-oriented way. It is of interest to note that there is considerable overlap between drugs developed for metabolic and cholestatic liver disease. Apparently, there are common denominators in the etiology of these diseases (microbiome, bile salt metabolism, nuclear hormone receptors, signalling paths) and this opens a world of new opportunities and discoveries.

Helen Desmond has been project coordinator of the LiSyM research network since April 2018. With a background in forest science, she brings much experience in the management of interdisciplinary research, natural resource management and evaluation programs from a socio-economic perspective in diverse socio-cultural settings, especially in Australia and Pakistan. In these capacities, she has worked for international development agencies, national and state government departments and research institutes, and in university environments. Prior to joining LiSyM, she was project coordinator at the Baden-Württemberg Forest Research Institute, Freiburg, with responsibility for organizing an international forest science congress for over 2 000 participants held in 2017. Capacity building and science communication have continued to be key elements of her work.