One day · One room · Many generations

Kamoun Lab
Alumni & Friends

Monday 7 September 2026
09:30 – 17:00
The Assembly House, Theatre Street, Norwich
See the programme Sunday meet-up
Welcome

Old friends, new friends, and everyone in between

Every year or so we post a lab lineup with a row of flags under it. The people behind those flags have since scattered to labs, companies and countries of their own, and new flags have taken their place. This is the first time we bring a good part of that history back into one room.

The format is deliberately simple: four sessions of short talks, long discussions, and coffee breaks that run over. The science is the excuse. The conversations are the point. If you were in the lab in 2012, find someone who joined in 2025. If you have only ever met each other as names on an author list, fix that today.

Thank you for coming back to Norwich.

Sophien, Adeline, AmirAli & Mauricio on behalf of the Kamoun Group, The Sainsbury Laboratory
The night before

Sunday meet-up at the Lamb Inn

Sunday 6 September · from about 5 PM

Informal drinks for anyone already in town

No programme, no name badges. Come when you land, leave when you like. Groups can spread out for dinner around the city afterwards.

The Lamb Inn, Norwich Haymarket, NR1 3RU — a few minutes' walk from the Assembly House and the market.

Monday 7 September · 09:30

Arrivals at the Assembly House

Coffee from 09:30, welcome at 09:50, first talk at 10:00. Directions are in the venue section.

Programme

Monday 7 September 2026

Four sessions, twelve-to-fifteen-minute talks, and a general discussion at the end of each block. Talk titles marked “tbd” will be confirmed on the day. Speakers: please use PMID on your slides — here's why ↗.

09:30
Arrivals coffee & registration
09:50
Welcome Sophien Kamoun & the organising team

Session 1 · Structural Biology

Chair: Mauricio Contreras
10:00 – 10:15
Roger Castells-Graells Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO)
Design and structure of novel protein assemblies in the age of AI
10:15 – 10:30
Juan Carlos De la Concepcion ZMBP, University of Tübingen
In situ structural biology at the plant–pathogen interface
10:30 – 10:45
Ben Seager The Sainsbury Laboratory
Cryo-EM structure of an atypically large resistosome
10:45 – 11:15
General discussion
11:15
Coffee break

Session 2 · NLR Biology

Chair: Jiorgos Kourelis
11:45 – 12:00
Tarhan Ibrahim Imperial College London
A helper NLR channels organellar calcium to trigger plant immunity
12:00 – 12:15
Clemence Marchal Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry
It takes two to tango: the Pik NLR pair accumulates as a hetero-oligomeric complex in the resting state
12:15 – 12:30
Juan Azcue The Sainsbury Laboratory
A singleton integrated-domain NLR scaffold enables modular plant immune receptor design
12:30 – 13:00
General discussion
13:00
Lunch

Session 3 · Receptors and Effectors

Chair: AmirAli Toghani
14:00 – 14:15
Thorsten Langner Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg
Does structural genomic variation drive effector evolution?
14:15 – 14:30
Nick Eilmann Imperial College London
AI-guided immune receptor discovery
14:30 – 14:45
Liu Qijun Imperial College London
Quantifying early immune signalling at scale using BY-2 cell packs
14:45 – 15:15
General discussion
15:15
Coffee break

Session 4 · Design, Engineering and Impact

Chair: Sophien Kamoun
15:45 – 15:55
Vladimir Nekrasov Biographica
Title tbd
15:55 – 16:05
Khaoula Belhaj International Seed Federation
From idea to impact: what it takes to bring genome-edited products to market
16:05 – 16:15
Nick Desnoyer The Sainsbury Laboratory
OpenFlower: flower design for art & education
16:15 – 16:25
James Canham The Sainsbury Laboratory
Title tbd
16:25 – 16:45
General discussion
16:45
Wrapping up
17:00
End of programme
Speakers

Thirteen talks, four sessions

Session 1 · Structural Biology
Roger Castells-Graells
Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO)
Design and structure of novel protein assemblies in the age of AI
LinkedIn ↗
Session 1 · Structural Biology
Juan Carlos De la Concepcion
ZMBP, University of Tübingen
In situ structural biology at the plant–pathogen interface
LinkedIn ↗
Session 1 · Structural Biology
Ben Seager
The Sainsbury Laboratory
Cryo-EM structure of an atypically large resistosome
TSL profile ↗
Session 2 · NLR Biology
Tarhan Ibrahim
Imperial College London
A helper NLR channels organellar calcium to trigger plant immunity
LinkedIn ↗
Session 2 · NLR Biology
Clemence Marchal
Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry
It takes two to tango: the Pik NLR pair accumulates as a hetero-oligomeric complex in the resting state
LinkedIn ↗
Session 2 · NLR Biology
Juan Azcue
The Sainsbury Laboratory
A singleton integrated-domain NLR scaffold enables modular plant immune receptor design
TSL profile ↗
Session 3 · Receptors and Effectors
Thorsten Langner
Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg
Does structural genomic variation drive effector evolution?
LinkedIn ↗
Session 3 · Receptors and Effectors
Nick Eilmann
Imperial College London
AI-guided immune receptor discovery
ORCID ↗
Session 3 · Receptors and Effectors
Liu Qijun
Imperial College London
Quantifying early immune signalling at scale using BY-2 cell packs
Session 4 · Design, Engineering and Impact
Vladimir Nekrasov
Biographica
Title tbd
LinkedIn ↗
Session 4 · Design, Engineering and Impact
Khaoula Belhaj
International Seed Federation
From idea to impact: what it takes to bring genome-edited products to market
LinkedIn ↗
Session 4 · Design, Engineering and Impact
Nick Desnoyer
The Sainsbury Laboratory · OpenFlower
OpenFlower: flower design for art & education
LinkedIn ↗
Session 4 · Design, Engineering and Impact
James Canham
The Sainsbury Laboratory · GetGenome
Title tbd
GetGenome team ↗

Session chairs: Mauricio Contreras (ZMBP, University of Tübingen), Jiorgos Kourelis (Imperial College London), AmirAli Toghani and Sophien Kamoun (The Sainsbury Laboratory).

Venue

The Assembly House, Norwich

Theatre Street
Norwich NR2 1RQ

Open in Google Maps ↗  ·  assemblyhousenorwich.co.uk ↗

A Georgian assembly house in the very heart of the city, next to the Theatre Royal and opposite The Forum. Everything in the centre — the market, the Lanes, the cathedral — is within a ten-minute walk.

From Norwich railway station
About 0.7 miles on foot, roughly 15 minutes: cross the river on Prince of Wales Road, continue up to the castle, then along Red Lion Street and Rampant Horse Street to Theatre Street. Taxis from the station rank take about 5 minutes.
By car
Set your satnav to NR2 1RQ. The house has a small pay-and-display car park at the rear on Chantry Road (two designated disabled spaces). The nearest public car parks, all a two-minute walk, are The Chantry (90 spaces), Chapel Field East, The Forum (206 spaces) and Chantry Place at Chapelfield (1,000 spaces).
By bus
Stops on Theatre Street, Red Lion Street, St Stephens Street and Castle Meadow are all within a few minutes' walk. The bus station on Surrey Street is about 5 minutes away.
Who's coming

Participants

Grouped by where you sit in the lab's story. Names link to LinkedIn where we found one, otherwise to a lab or institutional page.

Current lab The Sainsbury Laboratory, Norwich · 23

Alumni former members of the lab · 18

Friends collaborators, neighbours and the next generation · 15

  • Hernán BurbanoUniversity College London
  • Sergio M. LatorreUniversity College London
  • Ryohei TerauchiKyoto University · Iwate Biotechnology Research Center
  • Vivianne VleeshouwersWageningen University & Research
  • Francesca AlzalamiraWageningen University & Research
  • Guillermo Merino MartinWageningen University & Research · Plant Breeding
  • Jasmin WiedmerWageningen University & Research · Plant Breeding
  • Nick EilmannImperial College London · Bozkurt & Kourelis Labs
  • Liu QijunImperial College London
  • Everton FerreiraImperial College London · Kourelis Lab
  • Cecilia LongoniImperial College London · PhD student, Kourelis Lab
  • Daniel CincuraImperial College London · Kourelis Lab
  • Valentina LeónINGEBI-CONICET · FCEN, UBA, Argentina
  • Tarhan IbrahimImperial College London · Bozkurt Lab
  • Daniel Moñino LópezKWS

Spotted a wrong affiliation or a missing link? Tell Sophien and we'll fix it before the day.

Then & Now

Who was in the lab when

A walk through the lab's X/Twitter archive, 2012 to 2026. Captions are lifted from the original posts; the year is the year it was posted. Use it to work out who overlapped with whom — and who you have never actually met.

Networking

Find your era. Then leave it.

Over lunch and coffee, tables will carry an era card. Sit with your own cohort first if you like — then go and sit with one you never overlapped with. The current lab has questions for the Golden Generation, and vice versa.

Ohio & early Norwich

Up to about 2013. The Phytophthora years, the move to TSL, the first Norwich lineups.

2014 – 2019

Team BLASTOFF and Team NRC. Wheat blast, NRC networks, the first resistosome cakes.

2020 – 2023

The Zoom cohort. Lab meetings on a grid, AlphaFold arrives, Pikobodies.

2024 – now

The current lab. AI-guided structural biology, resistosomes, OpenFlower, GetGenome.

Era boundaries are approximate and for conversation only. If you straddle two, you get to pick.