BIOTA

Born and educated in France, Hervé Bocherens obtained his PhD in Paleontology at the University of Paris 6 in 1992 on isotopic tracking of fossil terrestrial vertebrates. After a post-doctoral fellowship in the USA (Carnegie Institution and Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC) in 1992-1994, he obtained a researcher position at the CNRS at the University of Paris 6, then moved to the University of Montpellier 2 in 2001. He was hired as full professor in biogeology at the University of Tübingen (Germany) in 2008. In 2017, he became also affiliated to the Senckenberg Society for Natural Science Research in 2017 and was vice-director of the Senckenberg Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment Centre in Tübingen from 2017 to 2022. He is chair of the Department of Geosciences at the University of Tübingen since 2022. His main research interest is the isotopic tracking of interactions between terrestrial environment, vertebrates, and humans in the past with implications for the future, with an outcome of 250 peer-reviewed publications and supervision of more than 30 PhD students.  

Dr. Bogdan P. Onac is a Professor in the School of Geosciences at the University of South Florida (USA), specializing in reconstructing past climate and environmental changes using a variety of cave deposits. He earned his Bachelor’s and PhD in Geology from Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.  Furthering his expertise, Dr. Onac held a Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholarship at Pennsylvania State University (USA) and served as a postdoctoral fellow at Lund University (Sweden).  His innovative research explores clues within cave and lava tube deposits—including ice, guano, and speleothems—using stable and radiogenic isotope geochemistry and mineralogy to uncover insights into Earth’s climate history.  Dr. Onac also holds the position of Adjunct Research Professor at the Babeș-Bolyai University.  Dr. Onac’s leadership extends beyond academia. As the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Speleology and a member of several editorial boards, he has shaped the direction of karst research worldwide. 

After obtaining a medical degree in Romania, I joined the team of Peter van Endert at Université Paris 5, INSERM, Necker, Paris, France, where I obtained a permanent position as “Principal Investigator” in 2005. My research career started in the field of MHC-I (Major Histocompatibility Complex class I) antigen presentation, in which I contributed to the identification of a new class of antigen trimming enzymes and description of novel cell biology mechanisms that allow the presentation of exogenous proteins antigens by dendritic cells (DCs) via MHC-I (Nature Immunology 2005, Science 2009). I started my independent group in 2015, as team leader, at Bichat Medical School, in Paris, in the INSERM Unit 1149. My team investigates the molecular mechanisms by which the endocytic system regulates the trafficking and signaling of immune receptors, such as endosomal TLRs (Nature Immunology 2017), Fc immunoglobulin receptors (iScience 2023, Advanced Science 2024) and antigen T Cell Receptor (Nature Communications 2020).