Speakers

Yimon Aye read chemistry at Oxford UK and received her PhD degree in organic chemistry with David Evans from Harvard. She then switched her research discipline to life science and trained with JoAnne Stubbe at MIT. Science in the Aye lab (https://leago.epfl.ch) seeks to understand non-canonical cell signaling processes. Her laboratory is most well-known for investigations into electrophile signaling, a nuanced communication mode whereby on-target engagement between reactive metabolites and target proteins, orchestrates precision responses at cellular/organismal levels. Her contributions have been recognized by several international honors, with the most recent being 2021 ACS Cope Scholars, International Chemical Biology Society Global Lectureship, 2022 Tetrahedron Young Investigator, and European Research Council grant awards.

https://leago.epfl.ch
yimon.aye@epfl.ch

Keynote Lecture: Spotlighting the Functional Responsivity & Druggability of the Local Interactome in Living Systems
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After completing his D.Phil. in 2008 at the University of Oxford, U.K., Gonçalo Bernardes undertook postdoctoral work at the Max-Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Germany, and the ETH Zürich, Switzerland, and worked as a Group Leader at Alfama Lda in Portugal. He started his independent research career in 2013 at the University of Cambridge as a Royal Society University Research Fellow. In 2018 he was appointed University Lecturer and was promoted to Reader in 2019 and to Full Professor in 2022. Gonçalo is the recipient of two European Research Council grants; a starting grant and a proof-of-concept grant, and was awarded the Harrison–Meldola Memorial Prize in 2016 from the Royal Society of Chemistry, the 2020 Young Chemical Biologist Award from the International Chemical Biology Society (ICBS) and recently the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientist in the UK – Finalist in Chemistry. His research group interests focus on the use of chemistry principles to tackle challenging biological problems for understanding and fight cancer, and he has co-founded two companies that use technologies he developed in his lab.

www.gbernardeslab.com
Twitter: @gbernardes_chem
gb453@cam.ac.uk

Keynote Lecture: Translational Chemical Biology
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Maria Laura Bolognesi is Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna. Her research is concerned with the design, synthesis, and biological investigation of small molecules in the neurodegenerative and neglected tropical disease areas. She has a track record of more than 180 publications in high-ranked scientific journals, patents and patent applications, and numerous invited talks worldwide. She was awarded a Distinguished Visiting Professor Fellowship at the Complutense University of Madrid in 2009, a PVE Fellowship at the University of Brasilia in 2014 and Professeur Invité at Université Caen Normandie in 2018. She is also the President of the Medicinal Chemistry Division of the Italian Chemical Society, an Associate Editor of the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry (ACS) and serves in the Advisory Board of the European Federation of Medicinal Chemistry (EFMC).

https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/marialaura.bolognesi/en
https://site.unibo.it/medchembolab-bolognesi/en
Twitter: @mlbolognesi
marialaura.bolognesi@unibo.it

Keynote Lecture: Bifunctional Small Molecules in Medicinal Chemistry: When Two Are Better Than One
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Annalaura Brai is a medicinal chemist, experienced in the synthesis of organic compounds. She obtained a degree cum laude in Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Technology at the University of Cagliari in 2010. In 2011 she joined the research group of Professor Maurizio Botta at the University of Siena, where she attended the Master in Drug Design and Synthesis and three years later she got her Ph.D. in Chemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences. From 2015 to 2020 she worked at Lead Discovery Siena as a principal scientist. She is actually employed at the University of Siena as a post-doc researcher. Her main interest is the identification of broad-spectrum antivirals active against resistant strains and emerging viruses.

https://en.unisi.it/
annalaura.brai@unisi.it

Keynote Lecture: Targets for Broad-Spectrum Antiviral Therapy: Lessons Learned and Future Perspectives
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Félix Calderón started his career in industry in 2007 as a medicinal chemist at GSK. Since then, he has held different leadership roles in anti-infectious and anti-inflammatory areas within the organization being responsible for the identification of multiple lead series, clinical candidates and the validation of a new anti-protozoal target class. He has a broad experience working with external partners and a track record of implementing and delivering new collaborations across diseases. In 2018 he was appointed Head of the Tres Cantos Open Lab.

Prior to GSK, his background includes a B.Sc. from the Autonoma University of Madrid and training in bioorganic chemistry at the University of Turin (Italy), the Spanish National Council for Scientific Research (CSIC, Ph.D. awarded in 2006), and computational chemistry at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). He is editor of the ACS Infectious Diseases journal and board member of the Fine Chemical Group of the London based Society for Chemistry and Industry (SCI).

He is coauthor of more than 40 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters.

www.openlabfoundation.org
felix.r.calderon-romo@gsk.com

Keynote Lecture: From Open Innovation (OI) to Innovation in Partnership (IIP)
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Kelly Chibale is a full Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Cape Town (UCT) where he holds the Neville Isdell Chair in African-centric Drug Discovery & Development. He is also a Full Member of the UCT Institute of Infectious Disease & Molecular Medicine, a Tier 1 South Africa Research Chair in Drug Discovery, founding Director of the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC) Drug Discovery & Development Research Unit at UCT, the Founder and Director of the UCT Holistic Drug Discovery and Development Centre (H3D), a Johnson and Johnson (J&J) Satellite Centre for Global Health Discovery.

Kelly obtained his PhD in Synthetic Organic Chemistry from the University of Cambridge in the UK with Stuart Warren.  This was followed by postdoctoral stints at the University of Liverpool in the UK with Nick Greeves and at the Scripps Research Institute in the USA with K.C. Nicolaou. He was a Sandler Sabbatical Fellow at the University of California San Francisco, a US Fulbright Senior Research Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and a Visiting Professor at Pfizer in the UK.

He has received many awards and honors. These include a Visiting Cheney Fellowship with the Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences-School of Chemistry and Faculty of Biological Sciences-Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology, University of Leeds (UK) and a Gold Medal of the South African Chemical Institute. Kelly was named by Fortune magazine as one of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders in 2018 and by Harvard University’s Public Health magazine as one of the 25 standout voices in African public health in 2022. He serves as an Associate Editor of the American Chemical Society (ACS)’s Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. Professor Chibale will assume the role of editor-in-chief of the ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters journal in January 2023.

http://www.h3d.uct.ac.za/
Twitter: @Kelly_Chibale; @H3D_UCT; @UCT_news; @UCT_Research
Kelly.Chibale@uct.ac.za

Keynote Lecture: Medicinal Chemistry and Chemical Biology at the H3D Centre
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Stuart Conway is a Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Oxford, and the E. P. Abraham Cephalosporin Fellow in Organic Chemistry at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. He studied Chemistry with Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Warwick before undertaking PhD studies at the University of Bristol. Stuart completed post-doctoral studies with Professor Andrew Holmes FRS at the University of Cambridge and in 2003, he was appointed as a Lecturer in Bioorganic Chemistry at the University of St Andrews. In 2008 was appointed as an Associate Professor at Oxford, and in October 2014 he was promoted to Full Professor. Between March and August 2013 Stuart was a Visiting Associate at the California Institute of Technology. Stuart is an Associate Editor for the J. Med. Chem. and ACS Bio & Med Chem Au. His research focuses on the development of molecular tools to enable the study of biological systems, with a focus on epigenetics and hypoxia.

http://conway.chem.ox.ac.uk
Twitter: @conway_group
stuart.conway@chem.ox.ac.uk

Keynote Lecture: Probing the Function of Bromodomains in Human Disease
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Tobias J. Erb is a Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society and Director at the Max Planck Institute for terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, Germany. Tobi Erb’s research interests are the microbial carbon cycle, in particular the biochemistry and synthetic biology of carbon dioxide conversion. Tobi Erb’s studies center on the discovery, the function and the design of novel CO2 converting enzymes from bacteria, algae and plants and their use in artificial photosynthesis, as well as the bottom-up design of complex metabolic networks and artificial cells. Tobi Erb studied Chemistry and Biology and did his PhD (2009) at the University of Freiburg, Germany and the Ohio State University, US. After a postdoctoral stint at the University of Illinois, US, he headed a junior group at ETH Zürich, Switzerland from 2011-2014. In 2014 he became a Max Planck Research Group Leader at the MPI in Marburg, and was promoted to Director in 2017. Currently he is Managing Director. Tobi Erb received numerous awards, among them the Encouragement Award of the Swiss Society of Microbiology (2013), the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz-Prize (2016), the Research Award of the German Association for General and Applied Microbiology (2017), as well as the Otto-Bayer-award (2018). He was named as one of 12 up- and coming scientists of 2015 by the Chemical and Engineering News of the American Chemical Society and was elected to the Junge Akademie (Young Academy) at the German National Academy of Sciences in 2013. In 2022 he has been awarded the Future InsightTM Prize 2022 from Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany.

https://www.mpi-marburg.mpg.de/erb
Twitter: @erblabs
toerb@mpi-marburg.mpg.de

Keynote Lecture: Photosynthesis 2.0: Re-inventing CO₂-fixation with Synthetic Biology and Machine Learning
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Birte Höcker is a full professor at the department of biochemistry at Bayreuth University. After studying biology at the University of Göttingen and at Carleton University in Ottawa, she received her PhD in biochemistry at the University of Cologne. She then worked as a postdoctoral fellow on computational protein design at Duke University in Durham, NC. In 2006 she started her independent research group at the MPI for Developmental Biology in Tübingen. In 2016 the group relocated to Bayreuth where they continue their work on the evolution and design of protein folds and functions.

www.proteindesign.uni-bayreuth.de/
birte.hoecker@uni-bayreuth.de

Keynote Lecture: On the Design of Protein Folds and Functions
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Florian Hollfelder is Professor for Chemical and Synthetic Biology at the Biochemistry Department of the University of Cambridge/UK. Born in Berlin he was trained at TU Berlin, was a visiting fellow at Stanford (with D. Herschlag), obtained his MPhil and PhD Degrees at Cambridge (with AJ Kirby) and worked at as a postdoc at Harvard Medical School (with C. T. Walsh). His group was started in 2001 at Cambridge and employs a broad multi-disciplinary approach that combines methods and ideas ranging from physical-organic chemistry to biophysics, molecular biology and directed evolution. High- and low-throughput approaches are combined with classical kinetic and thermodynamic analysis. For directed evolution, the group has developed microfluidic devices to carry our screening of up to 10⁸ clones via assays in emulsion droplets at a picolitre scale. Such high throughput experiments are used to gain insight into the process of protein evolution for binders and catalysts, into strategies to identify new enzymes from metagenomic sources and, on a fundamental level, to investigate the origins of enzymatic rate accelerations. The mechanistic principles that emerge from this work will form a basis for development of transferable, general rules to guide future enzyme evolution and protein engineering.

https://hollfelder.bioc.cam.ac.uk/
Twitter: @hollfelderlab
fh111@cam.ac.uk

Keynote Lecture: Professor in Chemical and Synthetic Biology
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Dr. Hans Lennernäs is a professor of Biopharmacy at Uppsala University, Sweden, and has been an adjunct professor at Copenhagen University, Denmark 2000-2012. His current research is focused on improving drug treatment for various diseases. He has been the Principal Investigator in a collaboration with Food Drug & Administration, USA, Univ. of Michigan, and Medical Product Agency, Sweden 1992-2000 to develop a FDA regulatory guideline (Biopharmaceutics Classification System). His work had led to more 245 publications and 350 invited lectures at scientific meetings. He has more than 17 000 citations and a H-index of 65 (web of science). He has obtained Glaxo Wellcome Achievement Award 1997 and Annual Award from the Industrial Pharmacy Section 1998, Fédération Internationale Pharmaceutique (FIP), AAPS Fellow 2004 and AAPS Meritorious Manuscript Award 2004, New Safe Medicine Faster Award 2008 and Hjärnäpplet (Innovation Award at UU) 2017. He received Lilly och Sven Thuréus Awards at Swedish Royal Society of Sciences in 2019 and Academy of Pharmaceutical Sciences (UK) Award in 2020.  He has been the managing entity for an IMI-grant of 24.5 MEuro during 2012-2018. He received the highest research rank at an international evaluation 2011. Since 1992 he has developed treatment strategy for localized prostate cancer and primary liver cancer and invented 22 patents. He is one of the innovators for the treatment of acute pain conditions (Rapinyl^®). He has with co-inventors initiated five other start-up companies. One has developed an oral replacement therapy (Plenadren^®) for Addison disease (approved by EMA 2011) and a second public company developed a product for localised prostate cancer (phase III). He has been on the board on several companies such as PULS AB, LIDDS AB, Recipharm Pharmaceutical AB, Nanologica AB, Empros Pharma AB, Endoriz AB. His translational research is focused on hepatocellular cancer, endocrinology and local gastrointestinal diseases. His research is currently supported by the Swedish Research Council and Swedish Cancer Society.

Keynote Lecture: Image-guided locoregional precision dosing of chemotherapeutics in liver cancer and supportive treatment of their off-target effects in the small intestine
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Marnix Medema is a Professor of Bioinformatics at Wageningen University. His research group develops and applies algorithms for the (meta)genomic identification and functional prediction of microbial biosynthetic pathways, with the aim to unravel the chemical language of microbiomes. He built and co-coordinates the development of the antiSMASH software for identification of biosynthetic gene clusters and developed various additional algorithms to chart their diversity and identify their functional roles in microbiomes. Medema is recipient of NWO Rubicon, Veni and Vidi fellowships and an ERC Starting Grant, and has coordinated several international consortia studying bacterial specialized metabolites. He received several prizes for his work, including the NBIC Young Investigator Award. He is editorial board member of Natural Product Reports, mSystems and FEMS Microbes, and senior editor of ISME Communications, member of the scientific advisory board of Hexagon Bio and co-founder of Design Pharmaceuticals.

http://www.marnixmedema.nl/
Twitter: @MarnixMedema
marnix.medema@wur.nl

Keynote Lecture: Deciphering the Chemical Language of the Microbiome
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Olivia Merkel has been a Professor of Drug Delivery at LMU Munich since 2015. She is a Registered Pharmacist, received a MS (2006) and a PhD (2009) in Pharmaceutical Technology as well as numerous awards, including an ERC Starting Grant, ERC Proof-of-Concept Grant, the APV Research Award and the Carl-Wilhelm-Scheele-Award. Merkel is the author of over 100 articles and book chapters. She served as NIH reviewer from 2014-2015, SNF reviewer from 2018-2022, is an Editorial Board member for JCR, EJPB, Molecular Pharmaceutics and other journals, was the President of the German Controlled Release Society in 2020 and the Chair of the CRS Focus Group on Transdermal and Mucosal Delivery from 2020-2022. Her research focuses mainly on RNA formulation and pulmonary delivery for the treatment of a variety of lung diseases.

https://www.cup.lmu.de/pb/aks/merkel/
LinkedIn: olivia-merkel
Twitter: @LabMerkel
olivia.merkel@lmu.de

Keynote Lecture: Hydrophobic Modification of Spermine-based Poly(β-amino ester)s and its Role in siRNA Delivery
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Christa Müller studied pharmacy at the University of Tübingen, Germany, and received her Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical/Medicinal Chemistry from the same university. After postdoctoral stays with John W. Daly (1989-1990 and 1992) in the Laboratory of Bioorganic Chemistry, at the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Maryland, USA, she became Associate Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at Würzburg University in Germany. Since 1998 she is full professor of Pharmaceutical & Medicinal Chemistry at Bonn University and a founder of the Pharma-Center Bonn and the Bonn International Graduate School of Drug Sciences (BIGS DrugS). Her scientific interests are focused on the medicinal chemistry and molecular pharmacology of purine-binding membrane proteins (purine receptors, ectonucleotidases), orphan G protein-coupled receptors and G proteins, and recently also on coronavirus therapeutics. Disease indications include neurodegenerative and inflammatory diseases, cancer, and infections. She has published ca. 500 scientific papers and patents in the field of medicinal chemistry and pharmacology. Among a number of awards, she received the Nauta Pharmacochemistry Award for Medicinal Chemistry and Chemical Biology by the European Federation of Medicinal Chemistry (EFMC) in 2018. Since 2021, she acts as Editor-in-Chief of ACS Pharmacology & Translational Science.

http://mueller-group.pharma.uni-bonn.de
http://www.pharmazentrum.uni-bonn.de
Twitter: @Mueller_AG
christa.mueller@uni-bonn.de

Keynote Lecture: Developing Modulators of Purinergic Signaling to Target Inflammation and Cancer
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Dean Naisbitt is a Professor of Drug Safety Science at The University of Liverpool (UK). He has developed practical and conceptual means to combine aspects of genetics, cell biology and chemistry in order to study the fundamental principles of immunological drug reactions. He has established sophisticated immunological platforms to study emerging drug safety issues with an immune pathogenesis using HLA-typed lymphocytes isolated from patients and drug-naïve volunteers.

Dr. Naisbitt has been recognized with several honours and awards including the ISSX New Investigator Award, the British Pharmacological Society Novartis prize and the ACS Chemical Research in Toxicology Young Investigator award. He has published over 170 research articles and serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of Chemical Research in Toxicology.

Twitter: @ImmunoPharm
dnes@liverpool.ac.uk

Keynote Lecture: Deciphering Mechanisms of Adverse Drug Reactions
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Sarah O’Connor received her degrees in chemistry from the University of Chicago (BSc) and MIT (PhD), and performed her post-doctoral work at Harvard Medical School. She was a Professor and Project Leader in Biological Chemistry at the John Innes Centre from 2011 to 2019. She has been the Director of the Department of Natural Product Biosynthesis at the Max Planck Institute of Chemical Ecology since summer 2019. Her research interests focus on plants’ natural products, with a particular interest in the iridoids and alkaloids. Her research group takes a broad approach to understand plant biosynthetic pathways, ranging from gene discovery, mechanistic enzymology, and metabolic engineering. She has received the ACS Ernest Guenther Award in Natural Products (2022), Royal Society of Chemistry Perkin Prize for Organic Chemistry (2019); European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant (2018); Election to European Molecular Biology Organization (2017), Wain Medal (2013).

https://www.sarahoconnor.org/
Twitter: @OConnor_Lab
oconnor@ice.mpg.de

Keynote Lecture: Harnessing the chemistry of plant natural product biosynthesis
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Geoffrey Otim is the Founder and CEO, SynBio Africa.

Over the years, Geoffrey has built a robust community of stakeholders in synthetic biology and biosecurity across the African continent including founding the first iGEM team from East Africa, organizing the very first international synthetic biology and biosecurity conference in Africa, and leading the first community-led international biosecurity initiative in Africa (SynBio Africa Global Catastrophic Biological Risks Initiative).

He has received several international awards, fellowships, and invitations to speak on topics related to synthetic biology and biosecurity at many international conferences in Africa, Europe, North America, and Asia. Among them are the SB.7 Synthetic Biology Conference in Singapore in 2017, SynBiobeta conference in 2018, and the inaugural World Plastics Summit in Monaco in 2022, as well as the UN Convention on Biodiversity 2018, Global Community Biosummit in Boston in 2019, Global South Biosecurity conference in Geneva, 2019, Global Health security summit in Singapore, 2022, among others.

https://synbioafrica.com
http://gcbri.synbioafrica.com/index.php
Twitter: @OtimGeoffrey25; @SynBioAfrica
otimgeoffrey25@yahoo.co.uk

Keynote Lecture: The Status of Synthetic Biology and Biosecurity in Africa – The Past, Present and Future
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Magnus Palmblad is Associate Professor and Head of Bioinformatics at the Center for Proteomics and Metabolomics of the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC). He did his MSc in Molecular Biotechnology at Uppsala University with minors in mathematics and computer science from the University of Maryland, and received his PhD in Ion Physics at Uppsala University in 2002. After a 3-year postdoc at the Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, he was appointed as Senior Research Fellow at the University of Reading’s BioCentre and joined the LUMC Biomolecular Mass Spectrometry Unit in 2007, where he was instrumental in evolving this to the present Center for Proteomics and Metabolomics. His main research interests are in computational proteomics, including machine leaning/AI, novel algorithms, and data analysis workflows. He has also published extensively on systematic analysis of the biomedical literature combining text mining and computational chemistry. Dr. Palmblad has served on Editorial Boards of several journals, including currently as Associate Editor of the Journal of Proteome Research.

Twitter: @MagnusPalmblad
Mastodon – @magnuspalmblad@fediscience.org

Keynote Lecture: Semantic Annotation and Text Mining of Analytical Chemistry Methods
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Professor of Toxicology, ETH Zurich, Switzerland. I was born in Brooklyn, New York. I studied Chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley (Go Bears!) and MIT. I did a postdoc in Toxicology at the University of Minnesota Cancer Center. Goals of my research are to elucidate the chemical basis of mutagenesis and toxicity, and promote innovative bioanalysis strategies for predicting chemical hazards and precision responses to cancer therapeutics. I teach courses in Toxicology and Chemical Biology. I am President of the Swiss Society of Toxicology and Editor-In-Chief of Chemical Research in Toxicology. I love biking, running, cross country skiing, rowing and learning surprising new functionalities in ChemDraw from my 9-year old son.

www.toxicology.ethz.ch
Twitter: @ProfessorShana; @Toxicology_ETH
sturlas@ethz.ch

Keynote Lecture: Tracking the Chemical Basis of Mutagenesis
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