Dr. Amelia Linnemann received her Bachelor of Science in Biology from the University of Detroit Mercy and her PhD in Molecular Biology and Genetics from Wayne State University. She then completed postdoctoral training at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Linnemann is now an Associate Professor (with tenure) in the Department of Pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine (IUSM) in Indianapolis, IN. She is a member of both the Herman B Wells Center for Pediatric Research and the National Institutes of Health-funded Indiana Center for Diabetes and Metabolic Diseases (CDMD). She is also the director of the CDMD Microscopy Core and the Associate Director of Pipeline Program Development at IUSM. Dr. Linnemann is the prior recipient of a prestigious K01 Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health, has maintained continuous extramural funding since establishing her lab in 2016, and is a member of the NIDDK-Human Islet Research Network (HIRN). Research in Dr. Linnemann’s laboratory is focused on the study of the insulin-producing pancreatic beta-cells under conditions of inflammatory stress. Dr. Linnemann is particularly interested in how higher-level metabolic signals contribute to molecular crosstalk within the islet and influence beta-cell adaptation to stress, specifically through studies focused on autophagy and the antioxidant response. Her team uses cutting-edge imaging approaches to study these pathways and has developed a series of novel tools for use with intravital microscopy. Her lab was the first group to demonstrate defective autophagy in human type 1 diabetes, and their observations suggested lysosomal dysfunction prior to diabetes onset in autoantibody positive individuals. Thus, many of the current studies in the lab are focused on biological processes in early diabetes development, as well as developing and optimizing tools for in vivo imaging of pancreatic islet function associated with diabetes pathogenesis.

Melkam Kebede is a cell biologist with a strong interest in understanding the cause of reduced glucose stimulated insulin secretion in type 2 diabetes. She heads the Islet Biology and Metabolism laboratory at the Charles Perkins Centre, University of Sydney. Melkam studies the pancreatic beta-cell with specific interests in understanding the mechanisms behind insulin secretory granule biogenesis, maturation, stability and targeting for secretion. Her laboratory uses a combination of mass spectrometry, flow cytometry, microscopy, cell and molecular biology approaches to help understand these processes in cell and animal models of type 2 diabetes. Her research has been funded by Diabetes Australia Research Program and the NHMRC project and Ideas grants.