Piergiuseppe Nestola, PhD, is a Manager of Process Technology Consultants at Sartorius where he is responsible for providing scientific, technological and process leadership in the field of viral-based therapeutics. He holds a PhD degree in Chemical and Biochemical Engineering from Universidade Nova de Lisboa (PT), where he developed virus purification processes for vaccines and gene therapies. Before joining Sartorius Piergiuseppe worked for several years at Janssen Vaccines AG in Bern (CH) as a scientist and team leader in the process development group. He was involved in developing and scaling up both viral vectors and protein-based vaccines in this role. Piergiuseppe has also been a judge at the Mass challenge and Bioexpert network incubators since 2018, supporting start-up life science companies.

Cristina Peixoto graduated in Applied Chemistry (Branch Biotechnology) New University of Lisbon and she holds a PhD in Engineering Sciences from Instituto de Tecnologia Quimica Biológica (ITQB) from New University of Lisbon. Working in Animal Cell Technology since 1996, her PhD contributed to the establishment of several scalable purification processes for complex biopharmaceuticals, mainly virus and virus like particles for vaccine and gene therapy. Since, 2009 she is the Head of the Downstream Process Development lab at Animal Cell Technology Unit of iBET and currently coordinate the Bioproduction Unit of iBET.

Dr Michael Schulte is responsible at Merck Millipore for Research and Development of new chromatographic materials including polymeric and silica-based beads as well as adsorptive membranes. He has more than twenty years of experience in the field of preparative HPLC. In his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Münster, Germany he developed new chiral stationary phases for chromatographic enantioseparations. In 1995 he joined Merck and has since then been responsible for research and development in the area of preparative chromatography, including the development of new stationary phases, new separation processes and the implementation of Simulated Moving Bed-technology at Merck. He is co-editor of the book “Preparative Chromatography” published in its 3rd edition by Wiley-VCH in 2020 and is the co-author of more than 50 scientific publications.