RSC Chemical Biology Desktop Seminar featuring Roderich Süssmuth and Maja Köhn

Maja Köhn is a Professor for Integrative Signaling Research at the Faculty of Biology, University of Freiburg, Germany. She studied chemistry at the University of Kiel and moved afterwards to the Max-Planck-Institute and the University in Dortmund, where she obtained her PhD under the direction of H. Waldmann in 2005. After Maja’s postdoctoral work with G. L. Verdine at Harvard University, she started her independent career in 2007 as a group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany. In 2016 Maja moved to Freiburg for her current position. Research in her group focuses on the development and application of tools using synthetic chemistry and molecular cell biology to study and target phosphatases in health and disease.

Anna received a PhD in Bioorganic Chemistry from the Polish Academy of Sciences in 2010 and after a short postdoctoral stay at the same institution, she decided to pursue a career in Scientific Publishing. She started as the Managing Editor, chemistry at De Gruyter, where she was responsible for launching new journals and led the transformation of a subscription-based journal to Open Access. In 2016 she moved to Lausanne, Switzerland to join Frontiers. As a Journal Development Specialist, she worked on the development of a broad range of journals from Chemistry to Engineering and Applied Mathematics. She joined the Royal Society of Chemistry in March this year as an Executive Editor to support the development of an Open Access journal portfolio.

Roderich Süssmuth is Professor of the Department of Chemistry at the Technical University of Berlin. He received his Diploma in Chemistry (1995) and his PhD in Chemistry (1998) from the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. This was followed by a post-doctoral stay at The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla (2000-2001) and an Assistant Professor position with an Emmy-Noether Fellowship at the University of Tübingen (2002-2004). Roderich was appointed to the position of Associate Professor at TU Berlin in 2004, and Full Professor in 2009. Roderich’s research interests are in the fields of peptide chemistry, peptide drugs, medicinal chemistry and the biosynthesis and mode of action of natural products. Roderich serves on various grant committees and has received various awards and recognitions.