Bill DeGrado, University of California, United States
William (Bill) DeGrado’s work focuses on the design of small molecule drugs, peptides, proteins to address biological and mechanistic questions. Since 2011, Bill has been a professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California San Francisco, where he is also a member of the Cardiovascular Research Institute and an adjunct member of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases. Prior to UCSF, he was he was a member of DuPont Central Research and DuPont Merck Pharmaceutical Company from 1981 to 1996 and the Raiziss Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania (1996 – 2011). He has served as a visiting professor or adjunct faculty at Harvard (Department of Chemistry); Johns Hopkins (Biophysics), University of Pennsylvania (Biochemistry & Biophysics) and UCSF (Pharmaceutical Chemistry). Bill was also co-founder of Pliant, a company devoted to finding cures for fibrotic diseases (http://pliantrx.com). Some of Bill’s research interests include: de novo design of proteins and peptides; peptide mimetics; structure/function of membrane proteins, including integrins and viral ion channels; small molecule drug design; bioinorganic chemistry.
Bill graduated from Kalamazoo College in 1978, received his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Chicago (1981), and joined DuPont Central Research without an intervening postdoctoral position. Bill is a member of the National Academy of Science, the National Academy of Inventors, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Bernard Henrissat (kindly sponsored by Carbohydrate Research), Aix-Marseille University, France
Bernard Henrissat, PhD (1979) and DSc (1985), is a Director of Research at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, CNRS, in Marseille, France. He the Founder and Head of the carbohydrate-active enzyme (CAZy) database (www.cazy.org) and of the Glycogenomics team at the Architecture & Fonction des Macromolécules Biologiques laboratory. The quantity and quality of data curated in the CAZy database has made it an essential resource for both academic and company researchers world-wide. This resource also allows him to explore the many paths towards the discovery of novel carbohydrate-active enzymes. Dr. Henrissat pioneering research on carbohydrate-active enzymes has been recognized through several distinguished awards, including the Pierre Desnuelle Award from French Academy of Sciences (2007), the inaugural Novozymes Prize (2015), and the IChemE Global Award for Energy (2016).
Yamuna Krishnan, University of Chicago, United States
Yamuna Krishnan is Professor of Chemistry and Brain Research Foundation Fellow at the University of Chicago. She received a PhD from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and was an 1851 Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, UK, with Shankar Balasubramanian. Her lab has developed a breakthrough chemical imaging technology in living systems. It uses DNA-based molecular devices to interrogate cellular processes. She is the youngest woman to receive India’s highest award for Science - Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award in Chemical Sciences. She is on the Editorial board of several journals from the ACS, the RSC and Wiley-Interscience. She has received numerous awards including the Innovator of the Year, from the AWIS, Chicago, the AVRA Young Scientist Award, Associateship of the Indian Academy of Sciences, the Innovative Young Biotechnologist Award, the INSA Young Scientist Medal, the YIM Boston Young Scientist Award and most recently on Cell’s 40 under 40.
Maja Köhn, University of Freiburg, Germany
Maja Köhn studied chemistry at the University of Kiel. In 2005 she obtained her PhD from the Max-Planck-Institute and University Dortmund under the direction of H. Waldmann. She conducted her postdoctoral work with G. L. Verdine at Harvard University. 2007-2016 she was an independent group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg. Since 2016 she is Full Professor for Integrative Signaling Research at the Faculty of Biology, University of Freiburg.
Maja’s research involves the application of methods of synthetic chemistry and molecular cell biology to study and target phosphatases in health and disease. She is a European Research Council (ERC) Investigator. Her recent awards include the Friedmund Neumann prize of the Schering Foundation, the Tetrahedron Young Investigator Award in Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry, and the Miklos Bodanszky Award of the European Peptide Society.
Homepage: http://www.bioss.uni-freiburg.de/de/prof-dr-maja-koehn/
Pam Silver, Harvard Medical School, United States
Pamela Silver received her BS in Chemistry and PhD in Biochemistry from the University of California where she was an NIH Pre-doctoral Fellow. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University where she was a Fellow of the American Cancer Society and The Medical Foundation. Subsequently, she was an Assistant Professor in Molecular Biology at Princeton University where she was an Established Investigator of the American Heart Association, a Scholar of the March of Dimes and an NSF Presidential Young Investigator. She moved to Harvard Medical School where she was a Professor in the Dept of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology. She was named a Claudia Adams Barr Investigator and awarded the Mentoring Award for the PhD Program in Biological and Biomedical Sciences at Harvard Medical School. In 2004, she became one of the first members of the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School and the first Director of the Harvard University PhD Program in
Systems Biology. In 2009, she became one of the founding members of the Harvard University Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Her work was recognized by an Innovation Award at BIO2007 and has been funded by grants from the NIH, DOD, DOE, NSF, Novartis, Merck and The Keck Foundation. She currently holds an NIH MERIT award. She has served on numerous government and private advisory panels including the NIH Pioneer and Innovator Award Committees, the NAS/NRC Study
On Network Science, the OSD/NA Biodefense Workshop, the Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund, the Novartis Oncology Program and the Institute of Synthetic Biology at Imperial College. She was recently appointed as a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute. Her laboratory works in diverse areas of Systems and Synthetic Biology. The main focus areas include predictable design and re-programming of biological systems and designing sustainability.
Yasuteru Urano, University of Tokyo, Japan
Yasuteru Urano is a Professor at Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Graduate School of Medicine, the University of Tokyo (UT), JAPAN. Dr. Urano obtained BE, ME, and PhD degree (Pharmaceutical Sciences) in 1990, 1992, and 1995 from the UT, respectively. After a JSPS post-doctoral fellow from 1995 to 1997, he became an assistant professor in 1997, an associate professor from 2005 at Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, UT, and then a full professor at Graduate School of Medicine, UT from 2010. From 2013, he also became a professor at Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, UT. He is now assigned as a project leader of AMED CREST.
