EFMC-ISCB 2023

Claudia Höbartner is professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Würzburg. Her research interests include the synthetic, biomolecular and structural chemistry of natural and artificial nucleic acids, with a focus on natural RNA modifications and in vitro selection of ribozymes and other catalytic and functional nucleic acids.

Claudia studied Chemistry in Vienna and in Zürich, and she earned a PhD degree from the Leopold-Franzens-University Innsbruck. After postdoctoral research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, USA), she joined the Max Planck Institute for biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen as a Max Planck research group leader. In 2014, she was appointed professor for biomolecular label chemistry at the Georg-August-University Göttingen. Since 2017 she holds the Chair of Organic Chemistry I at the Julius-Maximilians-University Würzburg.

Thomas Carell studied Chemistry at the Universities of Münster and Heidelberg. He obtained his doctorate with research at the Max-Planck Institute of Medical Research. After postdoctoral training with Prof. J. Rebek at MIT (Cambridge, USA) he started his independent career at the ETH Zürich. In 2000, he accepted a full professor position for Organic Chemistry at the Philipps-Universität in Marburg (Germany) and in 2004 he moved to his current position, the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich (Germany). Thomas Carell is heading an international research group in the field of chemical biology. The group investigates unusual DNA and RNA with epigenetic and epitranscriptomic functions and we are studying new concepts about the origin of life. Thomas Carell is a member of the German National Academy Leopoldina, a recipient of the Cross of Merit from the Federal Republic of Germany, and he a supervisory board member at BASF SE.

Global Head, Chemical Biology and Therapeutics Department, Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research since 2021. John has been with Novatis in progressive roles since 2004 when he joined the Global Discovery Chemistry department to help found the Chemical Genetics group there.

Previously, Dr. Tallarico served as Head of Chemical Technology, an Institute Fellow at the Harvard Institute of Chemistry and Cell Biology (ICCB) and an instructor in the Department of Cell Biology. The Harvard ICCB is a joint initiative of Harvard Medical School and Harvard University where research was focused on developing the nascent field of chemical genetics.

Dr. Tallarico’s post-doctoral studies were performed at Harvard Medical School and Harvard University as a Fellow of the Cancer Research Fund of the Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell Foundation. It was at this time, that Dr. Tallarico began his work in the field of chemical genetics where he worked with a team of researchers to build the chemical technology platform central to the ICCB discovery efforts. His laboratory was specifically interested in bringing the power of chemistry to help understand biological systems.

Dr. Tallarico received his B.A in Chemistry at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio in 1993, and his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry at Boston College in 1999.

Dr. Alessandra Magistrato is research director at of Italian National Research Council (CNR-IOM) c/o International School for Advanced studies, Trieste Italy, where she leads the group computational biology. She obtained her PhD in computational Chemistry at ETH Zentrum, Zuerich, Switerland, and she was postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.

The Magistrato Lab research activity is devoted to the development and application of state-of-the-art computational methods for multi-scale molecular simulations. We aim to investigate the structure, function, and dynamics of complex biological systems and to the development of small-molecule inhibitor to modulate their function. Our research activity ranges from the study of pharmacologically relevant enzymes, to that of protein/RNA machineries, metal ions transporters and cytolytic toxins. Our research lies at the interface of chemistry, biology and medicinal chemistry and involves collaborations with various experimental labs

Tom W. Muir received his B.Sc in chemistry from the University of Edinburgh in 1989 and his Ph.D. in chemistry from the same institute in 1993 under the direction of Professor Robert Ramage. After postdoc studies with Stephen B.H. Kent at The Scripps Research Institute, he joined the faculty of The Rockefeller University in 1996, where he was, until 2011, the Richard E. Salomon Family Professor and Director of the Pels Center of Chemistry, Biochemistry and Structural Biology. In 2011, Dr. Muir joined the faculty of Princeton University as the Van Zandt Williams Jr. Class of ’65 Professor of Chemistry.

He served as Chair of the Chemistry Department until 2020. He has published over 250 scientific articles in the area of chemical biology and is best known for developing methods for the preparation of proteins containing unnatural amino acids, posttranslational modifications and spectroscopic probes. These approaches are now widely employed in academia and industry. His current interests lie in the area of epigenetics, where he tries to illuminate how chemical changes to chromatin drive different cellular phenotypes.

Alice Ting is a Professor of Genetics, Biology, and by courtesy, Chemistry at Stanford University. Alice’s work straddles the interface of chemistry and biology and the molecular technologies she has developed, including enzyme-catalyzed proximity labeling, have been widely adopted in cell biology and neuroscience to probe organelle proteomes and protein interaction networks. She has received the NIH Pioneer Award, the Arthur Cope Scholar Award, and the McKnight Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Award. Alice has been a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub investigator since 2017. Prior to Stanford, Alice was Professor of Chemistry at MIT and she received her training at Harvard with EJ Corey, UC Berkeley with Peter Schultz, and UCSD with Roger Tsien.

Matthew Vander Heiden is the Director of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and is the Lester Wolfe Professor in Molecular Biology in the Department of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also an Institute Member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, and an Instructor of Medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Vander Heiden received his MD and PhD degree from the University of Chicago. He also completed clinical training in Internal Medicine and Medical Oncology at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital / Dana-Farber Cancer Institute prior to completing a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School. His laboratory studies how metabolism is regulated to meet the needs of cells in different physiological situations with a focus on understanding the role of metabolism in cancer.

Marc Vendrell graduated in Chemistry at the University of Barcelona in 2007 before joining the Singapore Bioimaging Consortium to work in synthetic fluorophores for optical imaging. In 2012 he started his independent career as an Academic Fellow at the University of Edinburgh to develop and translate optical probes for imaging immune cells in humans. His research has led to several license agreements with industry to commercialise chemical technologies worldwide (Trp-BODIPY, ApoTracker, SCOTfluors) and been recognised with international awards and distinctions: ERC Consolidator Grant (2017), Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2017), Marcial Moreno Lectureship (2018) and SRUK Emerging Talent Award (2019). Since 2020, he is appointed as Personal Chair of Translational Chemistry and Biomedical Imaging and is the Lead for IRR Chemistry Hub and the API Synthesis Unit at the College of Medicine in Edinburgh.

Samuele Cazzamalli studied Medicinal Chemistry at Universitá degli Studi di Milano, where he graduated with a thesis on the development of novel techniques for the application of biocatalysts in flow chemistry under the supervision of Prof. Carlo De Micheli. Samuele performed his PhD at ETH Zurich in the group of Professor Dario Neri with a focus on non-internalizing antibody- and small molecule-drug conjugates for the treatment of cancer. Samuele currently heads research in the field of Small Molecule Therapeutics at Philochem.

Alberto Fernández-Tejada is Ikerbasque Research Professor and Group Leader of the Chemical Immunology Laboratory at CIC bioGUNE (Biscay, Spain).

He obtained his PhD in Chemistry with Prof. Corzana from the University of La Rioja (Spain) in 2009, and then carried out postdoctoral research with Prof. Gin and Prof. Danishefsky at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (USA) until 2014, funded through a Fulbright and a Marie Curie International Fellowship.

After further postdoctoral studies with Prof. Jiménez-Barbero (CIB-CSIC, CIC bioGUNE, Spain) and Prof. Davis at the University of Oxford (UK), in 2017 he started his independent career in CIC bioGUNE funded through an ERC Starting Grant.

His research program at the chemistry–immunology frontier is focused on the development of novel chemical tools to advance molecular adjuvants and vaccines and to gain insights into their mechanisms of action.

Recently, Prof. Alberto Fernández-Tejada has been awarded two ERC Proof of Concept grants to progress his synthetic adjuvant and vaccine candidates through preclinical stage, with the aim of moving them closer to commercialization.

Prof. Dorothea Fiedler, Ph.D, is currently director at the Leibniz-Research Institute of Molecular Pharmacology (FMP) in Berlin, and holds a professorship in chemistry at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Her research group works in the area of chemical biology, and is focused on understanding a central group of cellular messengers, the inositol poly- and pyrophosphates. To uncover the signaling functions of these high-energy metabolites at the molecular level, the group uses methods in synthetic chemistry, peptide chemistry, biochemistry, molecular biology, proteomics and metabolomics.

After receiving a Diplom in Chemistry from the University of Wurzburg, Dorothea Fiedler conducted her graduate work in inorganic chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, under the guidance of Kennth Raymond and Robert Bergman. Following postdoctoral work in Kevan Shokat’s lab at UCSF, she became an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Princeton University in 2010. In 2015, she moved to the FMP and the Humboldt University, Berlin, where she continues to investigate cellular signaling pathways, using a combination of chemical and biological approaches.

Uwe Grether received his Diploma degree in Chemistry at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, where he subsequently earned his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry with Professor Herbert Waldmann in 2000. After that, he joined Professor James D. White’s group at Oregon State University for his postdoctoral research. In 2001, Dr. Grether started at the Pharma Research and Early Development unit of F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd. in Basel, Switzerland. He has a long standing professional experience as project team leader in drug discovery and development reaching advanced stages up to phase 3 clinical trials with multiple new molecular entities. Dr. Grether has profound knowledge on different target classes, a broad variety of indications, chemical biology, and expertise in due diligences. He has led academic as well as industrial external collaborations and is an intrapreneur of novel technologies for project and platform applications. Dr. Grether is co-author of more than 140 patents, research publications and book chapters. His research interests include medicinal chemistry, late stage functionalization and chemical probes focusing on holistic approaches toward a clinical end-goal.

Stephan Hacker obtained his PhD degree working with Prof. Andreas Marx at the University of Konstanz and performed postdoctoral research with Prof. Benjamin Cravatt at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla. Afterwards, he moved to the Technical University of Munich as an independent group leader with a Liebig Fellowship. In 2021, he became Assistant Professor at the Leiden Institute of Chemistry. Stephan Hacker’s group develops covalent protein ligands targeting diverse amino acids as well as chemoproteomic technologies to study their target engagement with resolution of the modified amino acid residue in order to identify new target proteins for antibiotics.

Luca studied chemistry at Imperial College London before obtaining a PhD in chemical biology from the University of Cambridge in 2014. He moved to the Max Planck Institute of molecular physiology as an Alexander von Humboldt post-doctoral researcher before taking up an assistant professorship at the Technical University of Denmark. As an associate professor in chemical biology, he now leads a research group focused on developing chemical tools to study sterol-mediated processes as well as new methods in natural product-inspired compound library synthesis.

Manuel N. Melo is an auxiliary researcher and the head of the Multiscale Modeling lab within the MOSTMICRO unit of ITQB – Universidade NOVA de Lisboa. His work is centered on elucidating the molecular-level details of lipid-lipid, lipid-protein, and protein-protein interactions; recent collaborations also focus on modeling bacterial structures. Manuel's research employs coarse-grained, atomistic, and hybrid molecular dynamic simulations, and tackles both the construction of models (as a developer within the Martini coarse-grain framework) and their application to biological questions. Additionally, Manuel’s lab actively develops simulation and analysis software, with emphasis on large-scale parallelization of analysis.

Manuel pursued his Ph.D. on the molecular level interactions of antimicrobial peptides with cellular membranes, using spectroscopic techniques coupled to mathematical modeling. As a Marie Curie Fellow, and later as a Dutch NWO VENI Fellow, Manuel carried out postdoctoral work at the Marrink lab, at the University of Groningen — where he became involved in the development and application of the Martini coarse grain model.

Dario Neri was born in Rome on 1. May 1963 and grew up in Siena (Italy). He studied Chemistry at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa and earned a PhD in Chemistry from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich), under the supervision of Professor Kurt Wüthrich (Nobel Prize Chemistry 2002). After a post-doctoral research internship (1992-1996) at the Medical Research Council Centre in Cambridge (UK), under the supervision of Sir Gregory Winter (Nobel Prize Chrmistry 2018), he became professor at ETH Zürich in 1996. Dario Neri has been Full Professor of Biomacromolecules at the Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences, ETH Zürich. In October 2020, he moved full-time to Philogen (www.philogen.com), a Swiss-Italian Biotech Company which he had co-founded in 1996 and in which he currently serves as Chief Executive Officer and Chief Scientific Officer, while retaining the ETH Professor title. He is also Honorary Senior Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge, UK.

The research activities of the Neri group and of Philogen focus on the engineering of therapeutic antibodies for the therapy of cancer and other angiogenesis-related disorders and on the development of DNA-encoded chemical libraries. Two of the antibody products of Philogen are currently being investigated in Phase III clinical trials in Europe and in the United States, while the broader clinical-stage pipeline of Philogen is composed both of antibody-based and of small molecule-based pharmaceuticals.

Dario Neri has published more than 400 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals. He is the recipient of the ISOBM Abbott Prize 2000, of the Amgen-Dompe’ Biotec Award 2000, of the Mangia d’Oro 2001, of the Prous Award 2006 of the European Federation of Medicinal Chemistry, of the Robert-Wenner-Prize 2007 of the Swiss Cancer League, of the SWISS BRIDGE Award 2008, of the Prix Mentzer of the French Medicinal Chemistry Society in 2011, of the Phoenix Prize 2014, of an ERC Advanced Grant in 2015, the 6th World ADC Award in 2019 and the Paul Harris Fellow Award in 2022.

Meha joined the Chemical Biology Team at AstraZeneca in August 2020 having worked with MNK-inhibitors for her postdoc at University of Basel, Switzerland. The multidisciplinary study combined in vitro pharmacology, functional genetics and Mass Spectrometry based proteomics to elucidate novel mechanism of action of MNK signaling in ribosomal control of new protein synthesis in neurons. Her Proteomics expertise comes from her work at Prof John Yates laboratory at The Scripps Research Institute, San Diego USA in 2014, where she developed novel phosphopeptide enrichment methods to map signaling changes in brains of nicotine-addicted mice. In the Chemical Biology and Proteomics Team at AstraZeneca she is using chemical and proteomics means to uncover and harness disease-relevant biology for delivering new therapeutic paradigms. Meha completed her PhD from ICGEB, India in 2010.