Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry Symposium

Margaret Brimble is Director of Medicinal Chemistry at The University of Auckland. She is Past-President of IUPAC Organic and Biomolecular Division III and an Associate Editor for Organic and Biomolecular Chemistry. Margaret was awarded the NZ Association of Scientists Marsden Medal in 2016 for a lifetime of achievement in science and in 2012 she was awarded the RSNZ Rutherford medal (NZ’s top science prize), the Hector Medal, and the MacDiarmid medal. Other awards include the IUPAC Distinguished Women in Chemistry award, the University of Auckland Vice-Chancellor’s Commercialization Medal, the 2007 L’Oréal-UNESCO Women in Science Laureate for Asia-Pacific in Materials Science, the RSC Natural Product Chemistry Award, the RACI Adrien Albert Award and the Novartis Chemistry Award. She has also been conferred with two Queen’s honours (MNZM 2004 and CNZM 2012) for her services to science. She has published over 550 papers and is named as an inventor on 32 families of patents. Margaret discovered the drug candidate NNZ2566 for Neuren Pharmaceuticals that is in phase 3 clinical trials for Rett Syndrome and Fragile X Syndrome. NNZ2566 was named trofinetide by the WHO and has received orphan drug status and fast-track designation as the first drug to treat these two indications. Professor Brimble’s laboratory has also been licensed by Medsafe NZ to manufacture clinical grade peptides as APIs under cGMP and successfully delivered 5 clinical grade peptide vaccines for a melanoma vaccine clinical trial (MELVAC). Margaret is Co-Founder of the start-up company SapVax (US$5 million investment from BioMotiv, USA) developing a suite of “first-in-class cancer vaccines” based on a novel self-adjuvanting peptide chemistry platform for immuno-oncology applications. 

Christian Hackenberger studied chemistry in Freiburg, Madison/WI and Aachen University. He obtained his MSc 1999 with Samuel H Gellman and in 2003 his PhD with Carsten Bolm at the RWTH Aachen University. After his postdoctoral studies with Barbara Imperiali at MIT he moved to the Freie Universität Berlin in 2005 as an independent Emmy Noether group leader.  He was then appointed as Associate Professor of Bioorganic Chemistry in 2011. In 2012 he accepted the call for the Leibniz-Humboldt Professor of Chemical Biology at the FMP Berlin and the Humboldt University Berlin. Recent awards include the Heinz-Maier Leibnitz Award (2011) and the ORCHEM price for young investigators (2012).

Ivan Huc is a full Professor at the Department of Pharmacy of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich (Germany). Prior to his appointment at LMU he was a group leader, as CNRS researcher then as research director, at the European Institute of Chemistry and Biology in Bordeaux, France, from 1998 until 2017. He studied chemistry at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris, France and obtained his doctorate from the Univ. of Paris VI in 1994 for work performed at the ENS and at MIT in Cambridge, USA. He then did a post-doc and worked as a research associate at the University of Strasbourg from 1995 until 1998. His group focuses the design, synthesis and characterization of aromatic foldamers and their applications including pharmacological aspects.

Motomu Kanai was born in 1967 in Tokyo, Japan, and received his bachelor degree from The University of Tokyo (UTokyo) in 1989 under the direction of the late Professor Kenji Koga. In the middle of his PhD course in UTokyo (in 1992), he obtained an assistant professor position in Osaka University under the direction of Professor Kiyoshi Tomioka. He obtained his PhD from Osaka University in 1995. Then, he moved to University of Wisconsin, USA, for postdoctoral studies with Professor Laura L. Kiessling. In 1997, he returned to Japan and joined Professor  Masakatsu Shibasaki’s group in UTokyo as an assistant professor. After doing lecturer (2000~2003) and associate professor (2003~2010), he is currently a professor in UTokyo (since 2010). He acted as the PI of ERATO Kanai Life Science Project (2011~2017) and is acting as the PI of “Hybrid Catalysis” Grant- in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas by JSPS (2017~2022). He has received The Pharmaceutical Society of Japan Award for Young Scientists (2001), Thieme Journals Award (2003), Merck-Banyu Lectureship Award (MBLA: 2005), Asian Core Program Lectureship Award (2008 and 2010, from Thailand, Malaysia, and China), Novartis Lecturer in Organic Chemistry (2011), and Thomson-Reuters The 4th Research Front Award. His research interest is the development of catalysts.

Ang Li obtained his B.Sc. at Peking University and his Ph.D. at The Scripps Research Institute, and conducted postdoctoral studies at Institute of Chemical and Engineering Sciences in Singapore. He joined the faculty of Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry (SIOC), Chinese Academy of Sciences, in 2010. His research focuses on the total synthesis of structurally and biologically interesting natural products.

Professor Liu graduated from University of Science and Technology of China (1999). He obtained his PhD from Columbia University (2004), and conducted post-doctoral research work at Scripps Research Institute (2004-2007). Liu started at Tsinghua University in 2007 and works as a Professor in the Chemistry department. His research group is interested in chemical protein synthesis.

Dr Géraldine Masson received her PhD in 2003 from the Joseph Fourier University, (France). She then moved to the University of Amsterdam (Holland) as a Marie Curie postdoctoral research fellow with Prof. Jan van Maarseveen and Prof. Henk Hiemstra. At the end of 2005, she was appointed “Chargé de Recherche” by the CNRS in the research group of Prof. Jieping Zhu at the Institut de Chimie des Substances Naturelles (ICSN), before initiating her independent career in 2011. She was promoted to Research Director of CNRS in 2014 in the same institute. Her contributions to the field of Organic Chemistry have been recognized with numerous awards including the Diverchim Prize in Synthetic Organic Chemistry from French Organic Chemistry Division (2011), CNRS Bronze Medal (2013), Liebig Lectureship of the German Chemical Society (2016), and Novacap Prize of the French Académie des Sciences Award (2017). Her group’s research activities are directed toward the development of the design and development of new catalytic methods for the synthesis of optically active molecules displaying biologically activities. The three specific research areas focus on: (1) asymmetric organocatalysis; (2) photoredox-catalysis and (3) asymmetric hypervalent iodine catalysis. 

Mugesh received his B.Sc. (1990) and M.Sc. (1993) degrees from the University of Madras and Bharathidasan University, respectively. He obtained his Ph.D. (1998) at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. In 2000, he moved to Germany as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Technical University, Braunschweig. In 2001-2002, he worked with Prof. K. C. Nicolaou at the Scripps Research Institute, as a Skaggs postdoctoral fellow.
His research involves organic/organometallic synthesis, enzyme mimetic studies and chemical biology. He is an author of more than 130 publications in international peer reviewed journals and is a recipient of several awards/fellowships, which include: National Prize for Research on Interfaces of Chemistry and Biology (2017); Rajib Goyal Prize in Chemical Science by Kurukshetra University (2017); Bhagyatara Award by Panjab University (2017); JSPS Invitation Fellowship for Research in Japan (2016); ISCB Award for Excellence (2016); J. C. Bose National Fellowship, DST, Government of India (2015); Prof. S.K. Pradhan Endowment Lecture Award, ICT Mumbai (2014); Asian Rising Star Commemorative Plaque, Asian Chemical Congress (2013); Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize (2012); AstraZeneca Excellence in Chemistry Award (2012); CRSI Bronze Medal (2011); CDRI Award for Excellence in Drug Research (2010); Swarnajayanti Fellowship, Government of India (2006-07); Ramanna Fellowship, DST (2006). 

Shuli You was born in Henan, China, and received his BSc in chemistry from Nankai Univ. (1996). He obtained his PhD from Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry (SIOC) in 2001 under the supervision of Prof. Lixin Dai before doing postdoctoral studies with Prof. Jeffery Kelly at The Scripps Research Institute. From 2004, he worked at the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation as a PI before returning to SIOC as a Professor in 2006. His research interests mainly focus on asymmetric C-H functionalization and catalytic asymmetric dearomatization (CADA) reactions. He is the recipient of AstraZeneca Excellence in Chemistry Award (2011) and RSC Merck Award (2015).

Professor Andrei K Yudin is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Toronto and currently serves as the chairman of the Board of Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry. He has made many distinguished contributions to the field of organic chemistry through his research, which hinges on fundamental studies of chemical reactivity.
The breadth of Yudin’s contributions covers: synthetic electrochemistry, fluorine chemistry, catalysis, multicomponent reactions, biologically active peptides, and organoboron chemistry. He is particularly passionate about chemoselectivity and tries to solve the long-standing challenges in this area by creating and exploring amphoteric molecules. The reagents developed in his lab often defy logic by featuring both nucleophilic and electrophilic nodes of reactivity. The peptide macrocycle and boron platforms, which emerged as a result of Yudin’s research, have led to the discovery of new bioactive molecules and resulted in the creation of spin-off companies.