Jozef Samaj received his Ph.D. degree in Plant Physiology from the Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia. He completed three post-doctoral programmes supported by Eurosilva, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the EU Marie Curie Programme in the highly regarded laboratories of Alain Boudet in Toulouse, Dieter Volkmann in Bonn, and Heribert Hirt in Vienna. He worked on the cell biology of somatic embryogenesis, lignification in tree species, arabinogalactan proteins, the cytoskeleton, and signalling proteins. Jozef Samaj has co-edited three books and co-authored more than 75 research papers, reviews, and book chapters. He is a senior lecturer and group leader at the Institute of Cellular and Molecular Botany in Bonn, Germany, and senior researcher at the Institute of Plant Genetics and Biotechnology, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Nitra, Slovakia. His current research is focussed on the role of signalling components and the cytoskeleton in relation to the vesicular trafficking during plant development and stress responses using integrated cell-biological and functional proteomics approaches. Jay Thelen received his B.Sc. degree in Biology and Biochemistry from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1993. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri-Columbia (UMC) studying the structure and regulation of plant mitochondrial pyruvate dehydrogenase complexes under the guidance of Douglas Randall. In 1999 he started a 3-year postdoctoral position in John Ohlrogge's lab at Michigan State University investigating the plastid acetyl-CoA carboxylase protein complex. He returned to UMC in 2002 as the Associate Director of a campus Proteomics Center. In 2004, he was promoted to Assistant Professor in the Biochemistry Department, a position he currently holds. He has authored or co-authored 35 research and review articles since 1994. His research interests are centered around the regulation of plant metabolism, particularly carbon assimilation in oilseeds, and multienzyme metabolic complexes. He is currently studying seed filling in numerous crop oilseeds, using various quantitative proteomics approaches. He is also investigating global phosphoprotein networks involved in seed development and is developing improved strategies for quantitative proteomics.
