Speakers

Chris Chang is the Class of 1942 Chair Professor of Chemistry and Molecular and Cell Biology and HHMI Investigator at UC Berkeley, as well as a Faculty Scientist in the Chemical Sciences Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He was born in Ames, IA and received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Caltech in 1997, working with Prof. Harry Gray on spectroscopy of metal-nitrido and metal-oxo complexes. After spending a year as a Fulbright scholar in Strasbourg, France with Nobel Laureate Dr. Jean-Pierre Sauvage on chemical topology, Chris received his Ph.D. from MIT in 2002 under the supervision of Prof. Dan Nocera, where his graduate work focused on proton-electron transfer and oxygen catalysis. He stayed at MIT as a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Steve Lippard, working on zinc biology and then began his independent career at UC Berkeley in 2004.

Research in the Chang group focuses on the study of metals in biology and energy, with particular interest in neuroscience, metabolism, and solar-to-chemical conversion. His lab has made fundamental discoveries in inorganic and biological chemistry through developing activity-based sensing probes to open a field of transition metal signaling, exemplified by identifying copper and hydrogen peroxide signals that regulate processes spanning neural activity to fat metabolism. The discovery of copper as a bona fide cell signal establishes a new paradigm for metals in biology, expanding the roles of redox transition metals beyond metal cofactors. Chang’s lab has also advanced artificial photosynthesis through bioinorganic catalyst design. His group’s work in catalysis has shown that simple molecular mimics of complex enzymes and materials can be used to create new classes of catalysts for solar hydrogen production that feature cheap, earth-abundant elements and operate under environmentally friendly conditions. More recent efforts have established a broad-based program in hybrid catalysis molecules to mimic and interface with biological and materials systems. Chris has published over 170 papers with an average of 110 citations per paper (h-index 78), with 10 awarded patents, and has given over 300 invited lectures worldwide. His group’s research has been honored by awards from the Dreyfus, Beckman, Sloan, and Packard Foundations, Amgen, Astra Zeneca, and Novartis, AFAR, MIT Technology Review (TR35 Award), ACS (Cope Scholar, Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry), RSC (Transition Metal Chemistry), and the Society for Biological Inorganic Chemistry. Most recently, Chris was awarded the 2013 Noyce Prize at UC Berkeley for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the 2013 ACS Nobel Laureate Signature Award in Graduate Education, the 2013 Baekeland Award, the 2015 Blavatnik National Award in Chemistry, and the 2018 RSC Jeremy Knowles Award, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017. More information on the Chang lab can be found at http://www.cchem.berkeley.edu/cjcgrp/ .

Peng Chen is the Cheung Kong Professor and Chairman at Department of Chemical Biology at Peking University. He obtained Ph.D degree with Prof. Chuan He at The University of Chicago in 2007 and performed postdoctoral research with Prof. Peter Schultz at The Scripps Research Institute before starting his own lab at Peking University in 2009.

His lab is interested in developing and applying bioorthogonal chemistry-enabled tools to decipher dynamic protein interactions and modifications in living systems. He created the bond-cleavage type of bioorthogonal reactions for protein gain-of-function studies.  He has received many awards including Society of Biological Inorganic Chemistry Early Career Award (2017), Tan Kah Kee Young Scientist Award (2016), The Chemical Society of Japan Distinguished Lectureship (2015) and The Chem. Soc. Rev. Emerging Investigator Lectureship (2014).

Dr. Linda Hsieh-Wilson is the Arthur and Marian Hanisch Memorial Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology. She received her B.S. degree magna cum laude in chemistry from Yale University in 1990. In 1996, she completed her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley, where she was a National Science Foundation predoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Professor Peter Schultz. In 1996, she moved to Rockefeller University to study neurobiology with Professor and Nobel Laureate Paul Greengard as a Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell postdoctoral fellow. Dr. Hsieh-Wilson joined the faculty at the California Institute of Technology in 2000, where she became an associate professor of chemistry in 2006 and full professor in 2010. She was an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute from 2005-2014, and in 2015, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her honors include the Beckman Young Investigator Award (2000), the Research Corporation Research Innovation Award (2000), an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (2003), the Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry (2006), the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award (2008), the Gill Young Investigator Award in Neuroscience (2009), and the Horace S. Isbell Award in Carbohydrate Chemistry (2014).

For her graduate work Dr. Karbstein joined the Biochemistry Department at Stanford University, where she studied RNA enzymes under Professor Daniel Herschlag, focusing in particular on the role of conformational transitions. After obtaining her Ph.D., she moved to the University of California at Berkeley, where she worked under the mentorship of Professor Jennifer Doudna. After completing her postdoctoral studies, in 2006, Dr. Karbstein obtained a faculty position at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In 2010 she was recruited to The Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, FL, where Dr. Karbstein first joined the Cancer Biology Department. Dr. Karbstein is currently a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology, where her lab studies how ribosomes are assembled within cells, and how this assembly is both regulated and quality controlled. Her scientific work has been recognized with an HHMI Faculty Scholar award.

Besides her laboratory research, Dr. Karbstein is an Associate Editor for ACS Chemical Biology, an Editorial Board Member for the Journal of Biological Chemistry, and the PI of the NSF-funded summer undergraduate research program “SURFing the Interface between Chemistry and Biology” at Scripps Florida. In addition to her work Dr. Karbstein enjoys spending time with her two daughters, age 12 and 14.

Professor Kiessling earned a S.B. in Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from Yale University. After two years at the California Institute of Technology as an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow, she joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1991. In 2017, she returned to MIT as the Novartis Professor of Chemistry. Her interdisciplinary research interests focus on elucidating and exploiting the mechanisms of cell surface recognition processes, especially those involving protein-glycan interactions. Another major research interest is multivalency and its role in recognition, signal transduction, and direction of cell fate.

Laura is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Member of the American Academy of Microbiology, the Wisconsin Academy of the Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and National Academy of Sciences. She has served as Editor–In-Chief of ACS Chemical Biology since 2005. She is a member of the Research Advisory Board of GlaxoSmithKline, the Yale University Council, and the Council of the National Academy of Sciences. Her honors and awards include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the ACS Gibbs Medal, and the Tetrahedron Prize.

View more information on Dr. Kiessling and her research.

Craig W. Lindsley, Ph.D. is the Co-Director and Director of Medicinal Chemistry for the Vanderbilt Center for Neuroscience Drug Discovery (VCNDD) and University Professor (also Professor of Pharmacology, Chemistry & Biochemistry). Craig graduated in 1992 from California State University, Chico with a B.S. in Chemistry, received his Ph.D. degree in Chemistry from the University of California, Santa Barbara (Lipshutz), in 1996, and pursued postdoctoral studies at Harvard University (Shair). In 2001, Craig accepted a position at Merck & Co where he pioneered, in positions of increasing responsibility, the development of allosteric ligands for Akt, mGlu₅ and M₁, providing critical proof-of-concept compounds that validated the mechanism of allosteric modulation and clinical candidates. In 2006, Craig accepted an Associate Professor position in Pharmacology and Chemistry at Vanderbilt University, and promoted to Full Professor in 2009.  In that same year, Craig became the founding Editor-in-Chief of ACS Chemical Neuroscience and was also awarded the ASPET-Astellas Award for Translational Pharmacology. In 2012, he was awarded an endowed chair, the William K. Warren, Jr. Chair in Medicine.  The following year, Craig was awarded the Portoghese Lectureship from the ACS MEDI division and the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry for impact in the field of medicinal chemistry, and in 2014, received the John J. Abel Award in Pharmacology from ASPET. More recently, Craig was inducted as an AAAS Fellow, awarded the Pharmacia-ASPET Award in Experimental Therapeutics and named a Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher (2015, 2016 and 2017 (Now Clarivate)) as well as a Thomson Reuters World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds (2016).  In 2018, Craig was honored as the the 22^nd Smissman Memorial Lecturer (KU Department of Medicinal Chemistry) and the 2018 Sato Memorial International Award. Together with Jeff Conn, Craig has pioneered the concept of GPCR allosteric modulation, developing key proof of concept compounds and clinical candidates. In addition, Craig’s lab has completed the total synthesis of 30 natural products and developed synthetic methods widely utilized by the community. Craig holds over 86 issued US patents and has published over 400 manuscripts and another 180 published patent applications. In 2016, and without an industry partner, Craig oversaw IND-enabling studies of a novel M₁ PAM that was awarded an open IND form the FDA. In mid-2017, the Phase I trial (SAD and MAD) initiated at Vanderbilt.

Prof. Lanqun Mao obtained his Ph.D. in East China Normal University in 1998 and then worked in Bioanalytical Systems (BAS) Inc. Japan as a research scientist followed by postdoctoral studies at Department of Electronic Chemistry at Tokyo Institute of Technology. He is currently a professor of Key Laboratory of Analytical Chemistry for Living Biosystems at Institute of Chemistry, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). He has been working at the interface between analytical chemistry (mainly electrochemistry) and neuroscience including in vivo electrochemistry, bioelectrochemistry, and in vivo microdialysis. He has published more than 200 papers in peer-reviewed journals such as JACS, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., Acc. Chem. Res., Chem. Soc. Rev. and edited 4 book chapters. He is a recipient of the “Hundred Distinguished Young Scholars” from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2002) and the “National Distinguished Young Scholars” from National Natural Science Foundation of China (2006). He was awarded First Class Prize of Science and Technology, Beijing (2012) and Second Class National Award on Natural Science (2015). Currently, he is Associate Editor of Analyst, and Editorial Board member of ACS Chemical Neuroscience, ACS Omega, Electrochemistry Communications, and Electroanalysis.

Prof. Dr. Rolf Müller studied Pharmacy at the University of Bonn from 1986-1990, received his approbation as a pharmacist in 1991 and finished his PhD on a pharmaceutical-microbiological topic in 1994. From 1996-1997 he spent two years as a DFG research scholar at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA and returned to Germany in 1998 as a junior group leader at the former German Research Centre for Biotechnology (GBF). In 2000, he completed his habilitation thesis at the Technical University Braunschweig about the biosynthesis of antibiotics in actinomycetes and myxobacteria. Since October 2003, Rolf Müller holds a chair as professor of pharmaceutical biotechnology at Saarland University and in 2009 he became managing director of the newly founded Helmholtz-Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS). Furthermore, he heads the department of “Microbial Natural Products” (MINS) and co-founded the PharmBioTec GmbH in Saarbrücken.

Rolf Müller’s research is dedicated to the chemistry and biology of microbial natural products with an emphasis on myxobacteria. Using an interdisciplinary research setting his group focusses on the identification, modification and pharmaceutical development of new anti-infectives exhibiting innovative mode of action.

Rolf Müller received the Phoenix-Pharmacy Research Award (2001, 2007, and 2016), the DECHEMA Award for Natural Products Research (2002), the BioFuture Award of the Federal Ministry for Education and Research (2003) and the DECHEMA Award of the Max-Buchner Research Foundation (2010). He was elected member of the National Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech) in 2012 and member of the National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina) in 2016. In May 2018, Rolf Müller received the Inhoffen Medal which is awarded by the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) and the Technical University (TU) Braunschweig.

Alanna Schepartz, Ph.D. is a Sterling Professor of Chemistry and Molecular, Cellular, and
Developmental Biology at Yale University. She joined the Yale faculty in 1988 following
graduate work at Columbia University (with Ronald Breslow) and postdoctoral work at
Ca;tech (with Peter Dervan). She was promoted to Associate Professor in 1992, to Full
Professor with tenure in 1995, and was named the Milton Harris, ’29 Ph.D. Professor of
Chemistry in 2000. From 2002-2007, she held a Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Professorship. From 2011-2014, she served as the inaugural Director of the Yale Chemical
Biology Institute. In 2017 she was named a Sterling Professor, one of Yale’s highest faculty
honors.
Research in the Schepartz laboratory falls at the combined interface of chemistry, biology,
medicine, and biotechnology. The lab seek to understand the fundamental chemistry that
controls cellular interactions between and among proteins, nucleic acids, and small molecules,
and then apply this knowledge to discover new biology or develop novel molecules with
unique and useful properties. Current topics include the development of chemical tools called
HIDE probes the enable exceptionally long time-lapse imaging of organelle dynamics at
super-resolution, and others that allow the detection and discrimination of discrete protein
folds in live cells. With these tools and others, the group is exploring how transmembrane
proteins encode and decode chemical information during biased signaling, how to effectively
direct the intracellular trafficking of therapeutic proteins, and how to repurpose the
translational apparatus to synthesize sequence-defined chemical polymers and materials.
Alanna Schepartz has received numerous awards for her work, including a David and Lucile
Packard Foundation Fellowship (1990), a N.S.F. Presidential Young Investigator Award
(1991), a Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (1993), an Alfred P. Sloan
Research Fellowship (1994), an A.C.S. Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award (1995), the A.C.S. Eli
Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry (1997), the Dylan Hixon ’88 Award for Teaching
Excellence in the Natural Sciences (1999), the Agnes Fay Morgan Research Award (2002),
the Frank H. Westheimer Prize Medal (2008), the ACS Chemical Biology Prize & Prize
Lecture (2010), for which she was the inaugural recipient, the Alexander M. Cruickshank
Prize (2010), the Ronald Breslow Award for Achievement in Biomimetic Chemistry (2012),
and the Wheland Medal (2015). In 2010, Schepartz was elected as a Fellow of both the
American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Chemical Society. From 2005 to
2016, she served the chemical biology community as an Associate Editor of the Journal of the
American Chemical Society, and in 2016 was appointed as Editor-in-Chief of the classic ACS
journal Biochemistry. In 2014, Alanna was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Hiroaki Suga is a Professor of the Department of Chemistry, Graduate School of Science in the University of Tokyo. He received Ph. D. in Chemistry (1994) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After three years of post-doctoral work in Massachusetts General Hospital, he was appointed as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry in the State University of New York at Buffalo (1997) and promoted to the tenured Associate Professor (2002). He moved to the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology in the University of Tokyo as an Associate Professor (2003) and Full Professor (2005). Since 2010, he is in the current affiliation. His research interests are in the field of bioorganic chemistry, chemical biology and biotechnology related to RNA, translation, and peptides. He is the recipient of Akabori Memorial Award 2014, Japanese Peptide Society and Max-Bergmann Gold Medal 2016, Nagoya Medal 2017 Silver, etc. He is also a founder of PeptiDream Inc. Tokyo, a publicly traded company in the first stock Tokyo exchange market, which has many partnerships with pharmaceutical companies in worldwide.

Prof. Wang is currently Dean of School of Life Sciences at Tsinghua University. He obtained his B.S. degree in 1996 from Tsinghua University and Ph.D. degree in 2001 from Tsinghua University. Subsequently, he worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow under the supervision of Prof. Eva Nogales, advancing to Research Scientist in 2006 at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He joined Yale University as a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry in 2009 and returned to his alma mater as a Professor of Life Sciences in 2011.

Since becoming an independent principle investigator, Prof. Wang has published more than 80 papers in leading journals, including Cell, Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, Molecular Cell and Cell Research, contributing greatly to the development and application of cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), which has gradually become a mainstream technological method to solve the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules. Prof. Wang played critical leading roles in establishing the National Center of Protein Sciences at Tsinghua University, now one of the largest and most productive cryo-EM facilities in the world.

Prof. Wang’s current research interests include methodology development for more efficient and high resolution cryo-EM, the coordination mechanisms of cytoskeleton and membrane systems, and the mechanism and regulations of nucleic acid quality control. He has solved the structures of eukaryotic exosome complex in various RNA processing scenarios and discovered multiple pathways of substrate-specific processing by this complex. He has recently solved the structure of human Dicer and its complex with RNA substrates after a decade-long effort, providing important mechanistic insights for small RNA biogenesis. His most recent breakthrough in cryo-EM methodology development opened a new way to obtain atomic-resolution structure of macromolecules in over-focus mode with volta phase plate by Cs-corrected cryo-EM, potentiating the use of this method as a new approach for cryo-EM data acquisition.

Prof. Wang was recipient of the Youth One-Thousand Talent by State Council of China, won the National Award of Science (2nd rank) by State Council of China, was elected as the Chair of National Cryo-EM Society of China and the Chair of 2019 Gordon Research Conference on Three-Dimensional Electron Microscopy.

Prof. Weihong Tan earned his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry at the University of Michigan in 1992 after he obtained his M. Sc. in Physical Chemistry from Chinese Academy of Sciences and a B. Sc. in Chemistry from Hunan Normal University. He is a University Distinguished Professor and a V.T. and Louis Jackson Professor at the University of Florida, and a Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biology at Hunan University, Prof. Tan’s research is in the general area of Bioanalytical Chemistry, Chemical Biology and Molecular Medicine. He specializes in bioanalysis, molecular engineering. theranostics and DNA nanotechnology as well as biosensors. He has made pioneering contributions in spectrochemical analysis: ultrasensitive bioanalysis with DNA probes, ultrasmall optical biosensors, development of biophotonic nanomaterials and aptamer-based chemistry and biotechnologies. He has published over 630 scientific papers with an H-index of 122. He is currently an Associate Editor for JACS (Journal of American Chemical Society). He served as the Associate Editor for Analytical Chemistry. He is serving as either editorial or advisory board member for many journals, including ACS Nano, Science China Chemistry and Chemical Sciences etc. He has received over thirty awards and honors, including NIH Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award in 2018, ACS Award in Spectrochemical Analysis in 2018, Outstanding Contribution in Science Award from Hunan Province in 2017, Second Class National Natural Science Award in China in 2014, ACS Florida Outstanding Achievement Award in 2012, Pittsburgh Conference Achievement Award for Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy (2004) and Beckman Young Investigator Award (1997) etc.

Biao Yu received a Bachelors of Science in Nuclear Chemistry from Peking University in 1989. He went on to obtain a PhD degree in Organic Chemistry from the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry (SIOC). In 1995, Dr. Yu moved to New York University to complete one year of postdoctoral training and was then hired as an Assistant Professor and then Professor at the SIOC. Professor Yu’s research efforts have been focusing on chemical synthesis of complex glycoconjugates and oligosaccharides (ex. mammalian glycosaminoglcans and microbial antibiotics) as well as diverse glycosides from plant and marine species. He has authored over 260 papers and 20 patents. He is currently the Director of the State Key Laboratory of Bioorganic and Natural Products Chemistry and, since 2012, Deputy Director of SIOC.

Zixin Deng, Professor of Microbiology and Chemical Biology at Wuhan University/Shanghai Jiaotong University，the current President of Chinese Society of Microbiology. He is a Member of Chinese Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the Academy of Sciences for Developing World (TWAS), a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology (AAM), and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC). He was born in Hubei Province, China in 1957. He received his Bs degree on microbiology from Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, China, in 1982, and a PhD degree on microbial genetics from the University of East Anglia, UK, in 1987, while working in Streptomyces group at John Innes Centre. Major interest is on Streptomyces genetics, biochemistry and molecular biology of antibiotic biosynthesis, and is a pioneer for the discovery DNA backbone modification by sulfur (phosphorothiolation). He now acts as associate editor for ACS Chemical Biology, and as member of editorial boards for a number of journals including Cell Chemical Biology, Applied & Environmental Microbiology (ASM).

Jiawei Zhou earned his PhD from the Imperial College, UK in 1996. He received his postdoctoral training in the Hahnemann University, USA in 1996-1998, and was appointed as a Laboratory Head of the Shanghai Institute of Physiology in 1998. He is currently a Senior Investigator in the Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Director of the State Key Laboratory of Neuroscience.

His research focus on the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying the maintenance of immune homeostasis in the CNS and the regulation of dopaminergic neurotransmission in mammals. Specific focuses are in understanding cell signaling that regulates neuroinflammation in Parkinson’s disease (Nature, 2013), as well as molecular basis for dopamine storage and reuptake (Nat Neurosci, 2015). He is the recipient of several awards, including the Outstanding Youth Award (NSFC), Sanofi Neuroscience Outstanding Scholarship Award. He currently serves as chair of the Translational Neuroscience Subcommittee and member of the Standing Committee of the Chinese Association for Physiological Sciences as well as chair of the Glial Cell Research Subcommittee, Chinese Neuroscience Society. He is a member of Editorial Board of ACS Chemical Neuroscience (Associate Editor) and Front Aging Neurosci (Associate Editor) and several other scientific journals.