Chemical biology symposium 2022

Thomas Carell (Ph. D) was raised in Bad-Salzuflen (Germany). He studied chemistry at the Universities of Münster and Heidelberg. In 1993 he obtained his doctorate with Prof. H. A. Staab at the Max Planck Institute of Medical Research in Heidelberg. After postdoctoral training with Prof. J. Rebek at MIT (Cambridge, USA) in 1993-1995, Thomas Carell moved to the ETH Zürich (Switzerland) as an assistant professor to start independent research. He obtained his habilitation (tenure) in 2000. He subsequently accepted a full professor position for Organic Chemistry at the Philipps-Universität in Marburg (Germany). In 2004 Thomas Carell moved to the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich (Germany), where he is heading a research group centered around chemical biology. The current focus is to analyze the chemistry of epigenetic programming in DNA and RNA. Thomas Carell founded the company Baseclick GmBH in 2008. He is a member of the National German Academy, Leopoldina and of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a recipient of the Cross of Merit from the Federal Republic of Germany (knighted). Thomas Carell obtained the Leibniz award from the DFG in 2003 (comparable to an HHMI investigator in the USA) and an ERC advanced grant in 2017. Thomas Carell is the speaker of the collaborative research center (CRC1309) on chemical epigenetics. He is the founder of the company Baseclick GmbH and since 2019 he is a member of the supervisory board at BASF SE.

Peng Chen is currently Professor and Chairman at the Department of Chemical Biology, College of Chemistry and Molecular engineering, Peking University.  He obtained BS degree in Chemistry at Peking University in 2002, and Ph.D in Chemistry with Prof. Chuan He at The University of Chicago in 2007. After a postdoctoral training at The Scripps Research Institute with Prof, Peter Schultz, he started his independent career at Peking University since 2009. He is currently the Director of the Chemical Biology Division of Chinese Chemical Society and the Associate Editor at ACS Chemical Biology.
 
His interests include bioorthogonal reactions and probes for studying protein functions and interactions in living systems. He developed chemical-enabled toolkits to uncover how the spatial-temporal organized human proteome is rewired during cancer and immune signaling, and his lab also exploited the therapeutic potential of these new reactions for protein-based immunotherapy. He is a leading expert in the development of bioorthogonal cleavage reactions for chemical controlled gain-of-function study of proteins within their native cellular context.  
 

M. Carmen Galan is a Professor of Organic and Biological Chemistry in the School of Chemistry at the University of Bristol. In 2017, she was awarded the RSC Dextra Carbohydrate Chemistry award in recognition of her research into new synthetic methodologies for oligosaccharide synthesis and the development of novel glycoconjugate probes and in 2021 she received the RSC Jeremy Knowles award for the development of bioinspired synthetic probes for the targeting and regulation of cellular processes in mammalian and plant cells.  
 
Prior to that, she held an ERC consolidator award (2015-2020), EPSRC Career Acceleration fellowship (2012-2017) and a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship (2008-2012), which followed a lectureship in the same department (from 2006). Carmen received her Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the Complex Carbohydrate Research Center at The University of Georgia, USA, under the supervision of Prof. Geert-Jan Boons. She then moved to California to pursue post-doctoral research with Prof. Chi-Huey Wong at The Scripps Research Institute. After that, she continued her post-doctoral training at M.I.T with Prof. Sarah O'Connor before moving to the UK

Manuel Müller’s interdisciplinary research group develops and applies chemical biology tools to investigate the function of post-translational modifications (PTMs). We are particularly interested in PTMs that involve the polypeptide backbone and how these (and more traditional modifications) control cellular life and death decisions.
Manuel studied biochemistry at ETH Zürich and stayed on to pursue a PhD with Prof. Don Hilvert on primordial enzymes. His work was supported by a fellowship from the Scholarship Fund of the Swiss Chemical Industry and awarded with the ETH Medal. He then joined Prof. Tom Muir’s lab at Rockefeller as a postdoctoral fellow (Swiss National Science Foundation) and moved with the group to Princeton University in 2011. There he deployed “designer chromatin” to elucidate how chromatin-modifying enzymes contribute to epigenetic phenomena and diseases. In 2016, he joined the recently re-established chemistry department at King’s College London as a Wellcome Trust/Royal Society Sir Henry Dale Fellow. In 2021, he was recognised with the RSC Norman Heatley Award.

After her PhD at the University of Padua (Italy), Paola Picotti did postdoctoral research in the group of Ruedi Aebersold at ETH Zurich, where she developed targeted proteomic technologies based on mass spectrometry. In 2011, she was appointed Assistant Professor at the Institute of Biochemistry, ETHZ, and in 2017 tenured Associate Professor at the Institute of Molecular Systems Biology, ETHZ. Major contributions of the Picotti group include the development of structural proteomics technologies to probe in situ protein structural changes, characterization of the determinants of proteome thermostability, large-scale identification of protein-small molecule interactions, and the discovery of regulators of toxic proteins in Parkinson’s disease. Dr. Picotti was awarded the Latsis Prize, the Cotter Award of US HUPO, the SGMS award, the EMBO Young Investigator Award, the Friedrich Miescher Award, the Juan- Pablo Albar award of the European Proteome Association, ERC Starting and Consolidator grants, and the EMBO Gold Medal.