Chemical biology symposium 2019

Dr. Jacqueline K. Barton is the John G. Kirkwood and Arthur A. Noyes Professor of Chemistry and Norman Davidson Leadership Chair of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. Barton was awarded the A.B. at Barnard College and a Ph.D. in Inorganic Chemistry at Columbia University. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Bell Laboratories and Yale University, she became an assistant professor at Hunter College, City University of New York. Soon after, she returned to Columbia University, becoming a professor of chemistry after three years (1986). In the fall of 1989, she joined the faculty at Caltech, and in 2009, she began her term as Chair of the Division. Professor Barton has pioneered the application of transition metal complexes to probe recognition and reactions of double helical DNA. In particular, she has carried out studies to elucidate electron transfer chemistry mediated by the DNA double helix, a basis for understanding DNA damage, repair, and replication. Through this research, Barton has trained more than 100 graduate students and postdoctoral students. Barton has also served the chemistry community through her service on government and industrial boards. She currently serves as a Director of the Dow Chemical Company and Gilead Sciences. Barton has received many awards. These include the NSF Alan T. Waterman Award, the American Chemical Society (ACS) Award in Pure Chemistry, and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. She has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Academy of Sciences, along with an honorary fellowship in the Royal Society of Chemistry. In 2011, Dr. Barton received the 2010 National Medal of Science from President Obama, and in 2015, she received the ACS Priestley Medal, the highest award of the ACS.

Judy Hirst is a physical chemist who combines structural, biochemical and chemical techniques to pioneer studies of energy conversion in complex redox enzymes. She is known particularly for her work on mammalian respiratory complex I (NADH:ubiquinone oxidoreductase), an energy-transducing, mitochondrial redox enzyme of fundamental and medical importance, and for solving its structure by electron cryomicroscopy.  Judy is Professor of Biological Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, Deputy Director of the MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit, and Fellow in Chemistry at Corpus Christi College.  She was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2018.

Howard Riezman was trained in the United States and Switzerland as a biochemist working with bacteria, plants and yeast driven by a keen interest in membrane biogenesis. In 1983, he started an independent laboratory at the ISREC in Lausanne undertaking pioneering studies on the endocytic pathway in yeast. He received a call as full professor at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel in 1987 where he continued his work on endocytosis and began studying GPI-anchored protein biosynthesis and traffic. He is well known for the discovery of roles of actin, receptor ubiquitination, and sphingolipids in membrane trafficking. In 2002 he moved to the Biochemistry department of the University of Geneva. He continues working on membranes, but the emphasis of his research is to understand the metabolism and function of membrane lipids using a wide variety of techniques including biochemistry, genetics, metabolic engineering, synthetic biology, mass spectrometry, modeling, and chemical biology.
 
Howard Riezman was elected member of EMBO in 1997 and has served as department chairman in both Basel and Geneva. He has served on the Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) for 7 years and 6 years as a member of the Foundation Council of the SNSF. His work has received generous funding from the SNSF since 1983, as well as from the HFSPO, EU and ESF. He has been awarded the directorship of a Swiss National Center for Competence in Research (NCCR) in Chemical Biology by the Federal Department of the Interior in 2010 that will run through 2022

Dirk Trauner was born and raised in Linz, Austria, studied biology and chemistry in Vienna, Frankfurt, and Berlin, and pursued a Ph.D. in chemistry under the direction of Johann Mulzer. After a postdoctoral stint with Samuel J. Danishefsky, be became an Associate Professor at UC Berkeley and then a Professor at the Ludwig Maximillian University of Munich. In 2017, he moved to New York University. He has been awarded the 2016 Emil Fischer Medal and the 2016 Otto Bayer Award and is am Member of the German National Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina, a Corresponding Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Petra Schwille obtained her PhD in 1996 in the group of Manfred Eigen at the MPI for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen. After a postdoctoral stay at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY) she established a research group at the MPI Göttingen in 1999 and accepted a professorship and chair of biophysics at the BIOTEC of the TU Dresden in 2002. In 2011, she was appointed scientific member of the Max Planck Society and Director at the MPI of Biochemistry, Martinsried. Her research interests range from single‐molecule biophysics to bottom‐up synthetic biology of artificial cells.

Thomas Ward obtained is PhD in organometallic chemistry at the ETH Zurich, followed by a postdoc in theoretical chemistry at Cornell University. At the University of Basel, his group focuses on artificial metalloenzymes with the aim of complementing both homogeneous catalysis and biocatalysis for in vivo catalysis.