Melanie Stefan

Melanie is a Lecturer at Edinburgh Medical School: Biomedical Sciences. Her research lab is affiliated with the Centre for Discovery Brain Sciences and with the Patrick Wild Centre for Research into Autism, Fragile X Syndrome and Intellectual Disabilities at the University of Edinburgh. She did her pre- and postdoctoral work with Nicolas Le Novère at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Cambridge (UK). During that time, she also spent six months as a visiting fellow in Shinya Kuroda’s lab at the University of Tokyo. She obtained her PhD from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and Clare College, Cambridge in 2009. After that, she worked as a postdoc in neuroscience with Mary B. Kennedy at the California Institute of Technology (2010-2013), and then as a lecturer and curriculum fellow for quantitative biology at Harvard Medical School (2013-2014). Her research interests revolve around using computers to understand learning and memory, from simulating how proteins in the brain work together to strengthen the connection between neurons to using educational data to understand how students learn.

    Simon Bartlett

Simon is the scientific editor at the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares in Madrid. His early interests were in acting and modern languages, but a growing fascination with science prompted a switch to a biochemistry degree and a career in research in Manchester and London. A move to Spain reunited those strands, and for the past fifteen years he has worked as an authors’ editor and Spanish-to-English biomedical translator, helping non-native-English-speaking scientists and clinicians target their written and audiovisual communication to bring their message to international audiences. He has also run several workshops exploring the rhetorical imperatives of modern English expository prose style and how these differ from conventions in Spanish.