Confirmed Speakers

Claudia Höbartner is professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Würzburg. Her research interests include the synthetic, biomolecular and structural chemistry of natural and artificial nucleic acids, with a focus on natural RNA modifications and in vitro selection of ribozymes and other catalytic and functional nucleic acids.

Claudia studied Chemistry in Vienna and in Zürich, and she earned a PhD degree from the Leopold-Franzens-University Innsbruck. After postdoctoral research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, USA), she joined the Max Planck Institute for biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen as a Max Planck research group leader. In 2014, she was appointed professor for biomolecular label chemistry at the Georg-August-University Göttingen. Since 2017 she holds the Chair of Organic Chemistry I at the Julius-Maximilians-University Würzburg.

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After completing his D.Phil. in 2008 at the University of Oxford, U.K., he undertook postdoctoral work at the Max-Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Germany, and the ETH Zürich, Switzerland, and worked as a Group Leader at Alfama Lda in Portugal. He started his independent research career in 2013 at the University of Cambridge as a Royal Society University Research Fellow. In 2018 he was appointed University Lecturer (Tenured) and recently has been promoted to Reader (Associate Professor). Gonçalo is the recipient of two European Research Council grants; a starting grant and a proof-of-concept grant, and was awarded the Harrison–Meldola Memorial Prize in 2016 and the MedChemComm Emerging Investigator Lectureship in 2018, both from the Royal Society of Chemistry. His research group interests focus on the use of chemistry principles to tackle challenging biological problems for understanding and fight cancer.

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Thomas Carell (Ph. D) 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) to start independent research. He subsequently accepted a full professor position for Organic Chemistry at the Philipps-Universität in Marburg (Germany) and in 2004 he moved to his current position at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich (Germany), where he is heading a research group focusing at chemical biology. Thomas Carell founded the company Baseclick GmbH. 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 (knighted) from the Federal Republic of Germany. Thomas Carell obtained the Leibniz award from the DFG in 2003 and an ERC advanced grant in 2017. Thomas Carell is the speaker of the Excellence Cluster (EXC114) on protein chemistry and of the DFG funded collaborative research center CRC-1309 on Chemical Epigenetics. Since 2019, Thomas Carell is a member of the BASF SE supervisory board.

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Global Head, Chemical Biology and Therapeutics Department, Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research since 2021. John has been with Novatis in progressive roles since 2004 when he joined the Global Discovery Chemistry department to help found the Chemical Genetics group there.

Previously, Dr. Tallarico served as Head of Chemical Technology, an Institute Fellow at the Harvard Institute of Chemistry and Cell Biology (ICCB) and an instructor in the Department of Cell Biology. The Harvard ICCB is a joint initiative of Harvard Medical School and Harvard University where research was focused on developing the nascent field of chemical genetics.

Dr. Tallarico’s post-doctoral studies were performed at Harvard Medical School and Harvard University as a Fellow of the Cancer Research Fund of the Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell Foundation. It was at this time, that Dr. Tallarico began his work in the field of chemical genetics where he worked with a team of researchers to build the chemical technology platform central to the ICCB discovery efforts. His laboratory was specifically interested in bringing the power of chemistry to help understand biological systems.

Dr. Tallarico received his B.A in Chemistry at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio in 1993, and his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry at Boston College in 1999.

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Marcus Bantscheff graduated in Chemistry at the University of Konstanz and obtained his PhD degree from the University of Rostock. After a short postdoc at the Proteome Center in Rostock, Marcus joined Cellzome in 2002 where he has served in several functions including Director of Analytical Sciences focussing on developing Cellzome’s core technologies in quantitative proteomics and chemoproteomics including Kinobeads™. Marcus joined GSK upon Cellzome’s acquisition in 2012 where he currently serves as Senior Scientific Director in the Genomic Sciences department heading the Functional and Chemical Proteomics and Metabolomics team and leading an integrated target discovery matrix. Marcus’ published work focuses on the development and application of proteomics, chemical biology and computational approaches to characterize targets, disease mechanisms and mechanism-of-action of bioactive molecules. He is an inventor on several patents including Cellzome’s Kinobeads™ technology, has co-authored more than 100 publications, and serves as a reviewer for reputed journals and funding bodies.

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Rachel is Senior Vice President of Drug Discovery for Cancer Research Horizons, Cancer Research UK. Rachel has over 20 years’ experience in pre-clinical drug discovery, incorporating target identification through to drug candidate nomination, across a number of companies. She has contributed to the discovery and characterisation of numerous drug candidates, and 3 marketed medicines, across a diverse range of disease areas including oncology, neuroscience, respiratory, cardiovascular and anti-infectives.

Rachel is also an Expert-in-Residence at the University of Oxford.

Prior to joining Cancer Research Horizons in 2021, Rachel was Executive Director and Head of Mechanistic Biology & Profiling at AstraZeneca, with global responsibility for in vitro mechanism of action studies, SAR biology profiling, Wave1 DMPK and pre-clinical safety screening across the UK, US and Sweden. Previously, Rachel held roles of increasing responsibility at Pfizer in Sandwich, GlaxoSmithKline in Stevenage and Pfizer Neusentis in Cambridge. Rachel gained her PhD in Mechanistic Enzymology from the University of Birmingham and completed post-doctoral studies at the University of Oxford.

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Dorothee Kern is a Professor of Biochemistry at Brandeis University and the chair of the graduate program in biophysics and biochemistry. She has been an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 2005. Dorothee strives to understand how proteins function by understanding how they move at atomic resolution. She uses biophysical analytical methods, such as nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), x-ray crystallography, fluorescence and computation, to analyze protein dynamics. She has followed the high-speed motion of enzymes during biocatalysis and allosteric regulation, providing unexpected insights into how conformational change are essential for biological reactions. She has recently expanded the concept of protein motion to the evolution of proteins over billions of years by reconstructing evolutionary trajectories over billions of years in vitro. Dorothee pursues a new vision of protein dynamics and allosteric networks at the heart of improved drug design, is founder of Relay Therapeutics and MOMA Therapeutics with the mission of exploiting protein dynamics for expanding therapeutics. Dorothee grew up behind the iron curtain in east Germany where she received her BS and MS biochemistry from the Martin Luther University in Halle, where she finished her PhD after the fall of the Berlin wall. Before moving to California for her post-doc at UC Berkeley, Dorothee was captain of the German National Basketball team for many years and won an MVP award. In 1998, she joined the faculty of Brandeis University and transferred her leadership skills from the basketball court to the lab. Kern’s insights into protein dynamics and function have been recognized with the election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the German National Academy of Science Leopoldina, the Pfizer Award in Enzyme Chemistry and the Dayhoff and National Lecture Awards from the Biophysical Society. Dorothee grew up behind the iron curtain in east Germany where she received her BS and MS biochemistry from the Martin Luther University in Halle, where she finished her PhD after the fall of the Berlin wall. Before moving to California for her post-doc at UC Berkeley, Dorothee was captain of the German National Basketball team for many years and won an MVP award. In 1998, she joined the faculty of Brandeis University and transferred her leadership skills from the basketball court to the lab. Kern’s insights into protein dynamics and function have been recognized with the election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the German National Academy of Science Leopoldina, the Pfizer Award in Enzyme Chemistry and the Dayhoff and National Lecture Awards from the Biophysical Society.

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Dr. Alessandra Magistrato is research director at of Italian National Research Council (CNR-IOM) c/o International School for Advanced studies, Trieste Italy, where she leads the group computational biology. She obtained her PhD in computational Chemistry at ETH Zentrum, Zuerich, Switerland, and she was postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.

The Magistrato Lab research activity is devoted to the development and application of state-of-the-art computational methods for multi-scale molecular simulations. We aim to investigate the structure, function, and dynamics of complex biological systems and to the development of small-molecule inhibitor to modulate their function. Our research activity ranges from the study of pharmacologically relevant enzymes, to that of protein/RNA machineries, metal ions transporters and cytolytic toxins. Our research lies at the interface of chemistry, biology and medicinal chemistry and involves collaborations with various experimental labs

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Tom W. Muir received his B.Sc in chemistry from the University of Edinburgh in 1989 and his Ph.D. in chemistry from the same institute in 1993 under the direction of Professor Robert Ramage. After postdoc studies with Stephen B.H. Kent at The Scripps Research Institute, he joined the faculty of The Rockefeller University in 1996, where he was, until 2011, the Richard E. Salomon Family Professor and Director of the Pels Center of Chemistry, Biochemistry and Structural Biology. In 2011, Dr. Muir joined the faculty of Princeton University as the Van Zandt Williams Jr. Class of ’65 Professor of Chemistry.

He served as Chair of the Chemistry Department until 2020. He has published over 250 scientific articles in the area of chemical biology and is best known for developing methods for the preparation of proteins containing unnatural amino acids, posttranslational modifications and spectroscopic probes. These approaches are now widely employed in academia and industry. His current interests lie in the area of epigenetics, where he tries to illuminate how chemical changes to chromatin drive different cellular phenotypes.

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Alice Ting is a Professor of Genetics, Biology, and by courtesy, Chemistry at Stanford University. Alice’s work straddles the interface of chemistry and biology and the molecular technologies she has developed, including enzyme-catalyzed proximity labeling, have been widely adopted in cell biology and neuroscience to probe organelle proteomes and protein interaction networks. She has received the NIH Pioneer Award, the Arthur Cope Scholar Award, and the McKnight Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Award. Alice has been a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub investigator since 2017. Prior to Stanford, Alice was Professor of Chemistry at MIT and she received her training at Harvard with EJ Corey, UC Berkeley with Peter Schultz, and UCSD with Roger Tsien.

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Matthew Vander Heiden is the Director of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and is the Lester Wolfe Professor in Molecular Biology in the Department of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also an Institute Member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, and an Instructor of Medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Vander Heiden received his MD and PhD degree from the University of Chicago. He also completed clinical training in Internal Medicine and Medical Oncology at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital / Dana-Farber Cancer Institute prior to completing a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School. His laboratory studies how metabolism is regulated to meet the needs of cells in different physiological situations with a focus on understanding the role of metabolism in cancer.

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Marc Vendrell graduated in Chemistry at the University of Barcelona in 2007 before joining the Singapore Bioimaging Consortium to work in synthetic fluorophores for optical imaging. In 2012 he started his independent career as an Academic Fellow at the University of Edinburgh to develop and translate optical probes for imaging immune cells in humans. His research has led to several license agreements with industry to commercialise chemical technologies worldwide (Trp-BODIPY, ApoTracker, SCOTfluors) and been recognised with international awards and distinctions: ERC Consolidator Grant (2017), Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2017), Marcial Moreno Lectureship (2018) and SRUK Emerging Talent Award (2019). Since 2020, he is appointed as Personal Chair of Translational Chemistry and Biomedical Imaging and is the Lead for IRR Chemistry Hub and the API Synthesis Unit at the College of Medicine in Edinburgh.

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Martin Blackledge studied Physics at the University of Manchester, and obtained his doctoral thesis at the University of Oxford in 1987 under the supervision of Professor George Radda, developing methods for spatial localization of phosphorus NMR spectra in vivo. In 1989 he joined the group of Professor Richard Ernst where he developed NMR-based tools to study the conformational dynamics of biomolecules using exchange NMR and ensemble averaged structural data. He joined the Institut de Biologie Structurale (IBS) in Grenoble in 1992 where he is group leader and deputy director. The Blackledge group uses high resolution NMR, often combined with complementary biophysical techniques and advanced molecular simulation, to characterize the role of conformational flexibility in biological function on a broad range of time and length scales, from molecular recognition dynamics in folded proteins, to dynamics of large multi-domain assemblies to the study of the fundamental biophysics underlying dynamic modes exhibited by proteins. These techniques are used to describe the conformational behaviour and dynamics of highly flexible or intrinsically disordered proteins under physiological conditions, to map their interaction trajectories at atomic resolution and to describe their role in the stabilisation of membraneless organelles. Amongst other applications these methods are applied to understand the function of highly dynamic protein assemblies involved in viral replication, a research topic currently supported by an ERC Advanced Grant.

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Kim Bonger is Assistant Professor in chemical biology in the Synthetic Organic Chemistry group, part of the Kim BongerInstitute of Molecules and Materials (IMM) of Radboud University. She conducts research at the interface of chemistry and biology and works closely with research groups in the Radboud Institute for Molecular Life Sciences. Her research group combines organic synthesis with molecular biology and biochemistry to answer questions about diseases related to (auto) immunology.

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Samuele Cazzamalli studied Medicinal Chemistry at Universitá degli Studi di Milano, where he graduated with a thesis on the development of novel techniques for the application of biocatalysts in flow chemistry under the supervision of Prof. Carlo De Micheli. Samuele performed his PhD at ETH Zurich in the group of Professor Dario Neri with a focus on non-internalizing antibody- and small molecule-drug conjugates for the treatment of cancer. Samuele currently heads research in the field of Small Molecule Therapeutics at Philochem.

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Alberto Fernández-Tejada is Ikerbasque Research Professor and Group Leader of the Chemical Immunology Laboratory at CIC bioGUNE (Biscay, Spain).

He obtained his PhD in Chemistry with Prof. Corzana from the University of La Rioja (Spain) in 2009, and then carried out postdoctoral research with Prof. Gin and Prof. Danishefsky at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (USA) until 2014, funded through a Fulbright and a Marie Curie International Fellowship.

After further postdoctoral studies with Prof. Jiménez-Barbero (CIB-CSIC, CIC bioGUNE, Spain) and Prof. Davis at the University of Oxford (UK), in 2017 he started his independent career in CIC bioGUNE funded through an ERC Starting Grant.

His research program at the chemistry–immunology frontier is focused on the development of novel chemical tools to advance molecular adjuvants and vaccines and to gain insights into their mechanisms of action.

Recently, Prof. Alberto Fernández-Tejada has been awarded two ERC Proof of Concept grants to progress his synthetic adjuvant and vaccine candidates through preclinical stage, with the aim of moving them closer to commercialization.

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Prof. Dorothea Fiedler, Ph.D, is currently director at the Leibniz-Research Institute of Molecular Pharmacology (FMP) in Berlin, and holds a professorship in chemistry at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Her research group works in the area of chemical biology, and is focused on understanding a central group of cellular messengers, the inositol poly- and pyrophosphates. To uncover the signaling functions of these high-energy metabolites at the molecular level, the group uses methods in synthetic chemistry, peptide chemistry, biochemistry, molecular biology, proteomics and metabolomics.

After receiving a Diplom in Chemistry from the University of Wurzburg, Dorothea Fiedler conducted her graduate work in inorganic chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, under the guidance of Kennth Raymond and Robert Bergman. Following postdoctoral work in Kevan Shokat’s lab at UCSF, she became an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Princeton University in 2010. In 2015, she moved to the FMP and the Humboldt University, Berlin, where she continues to investigate cellular signaling pathways, using a combination of chemical and biological approaches.

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Beat Fierz was born in Basel, Switzerland, and studied Molecular Biology at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel from 1998 – 2001. He then became interested in quantitative aspects of biology and obtained a Diploma in Biophysical Chemistry under the supervision of Prof. Thomas Kiefhaber in 2002.

Subsequently, he performed his PhD studies (2002-2006) in Prof. Kiefhaber’s lab at the Biozentrum, where he investigated the dynamics of synthetic polypeptides and protein secondary structure elements using ultrafast time-resolved spectroscopy.

In 2007 he joined the laboratory of Prof. Tom W Muir at the Rockefeller University, New York, and later Princeton University, New Jersey. There, he studied the folding behavior of chromatin fibers as well as the stability of nucleosome particles, depending on histone post-translational modifications.

In 2012, Beat Fierz was appointed Tenure Track Assistant Professor for the newly created Chaire Fondation Sandoz en chimie biophysique des macromolécules. In 2019, he was promoted to Associate Professor at ISIC.

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Uwe Grether received his Diploma degree in Chemistry at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, where he subsequently earned his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry with Professor Herbert Waldmann in 2000. After that, he joined Professor James D. White’s group at Oregon State University for his postdoctoral research. In 2001, Dr. Grether started at the Pharma Research and Early Development unit of F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd. in Basel, Switzerland. He has a long standing professional experience as project team leader in drug discovery and development reaching advanced stages up to phase 3 clinical trials with multiple new molecular entities. Dr. Grether has profound knowledge on different target classes, a broad variety of indications, chemical biology, and expertise in due diligences. He has led academic as well as industrial external collaborations and is an intrapreneur of novel technologies for project and platform applications. Dr. Grether is co-author of more than 140 patents, research publications and book chapters. His research interests include medicinal chemistry, late stage functionalization and chemical probes focusing on holistic approaches toward a clinical end-goal.

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Stephan Hacker obtained his PhD degree working with Prof. Andreas Marx at the University of Konstanz and performed postdoctoral research with Prof. Benjamin Cravatt at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla. Afterwards, he moved to the Technical University of Munich as an independent group leader with a Liebig Fellowship. In 2021, he became Assistant Professor at the Leiden Institute of Chemistry. Stephan Hacker’s group develops covalent protein ligands targeting diverse amino acids as well as chemoproteomic technologies to study their target engagement with resolution of the modified amino acid residue in order to identify new target proteins for antibiotics.

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Luca studied chemistry at Imperial College London before obtaining a PhD in chemical biology from the University of Cambridge in 2014. He moved to the Max Planck Institute of molecular physiology as an Alexander von Humboldt post-doctoral researcher before taking up an assistant professorship at the Technical University of Denmark. As an associate professor in chemical biology, he now leads a research group focused on developing chemical tools to study sterol-mediated processes as well as new methods in natural product-inspired compound library synthesis.

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Manuel N. Melo is an auxiliary researcher and the head of the Multiscale Modeling lab within the MOSTMICRO unit of ITQB – Universidade NOVA de Lisboa. His work is centered on elucidating the molecular-level details of lipid-lipid, lipid-protein, and protein-protein interactions; recent collaborations also focus on modeling bacterial structures. Manuel's research employs coarse-grained, atomistic, and hybrid molecular dynamic simulations, and tackles both the construction of models (as a developer within the Martini coarse-grain framework) and their application to biological questions. Additionally, Manuel’s lab actively develops simulation and analysis software, with emphasis on large-scale parallelization of analysis.

Manuel pursued his Ph.D. on the molecular level interactions of antimicrobial peptides with cellular membranes, using spectroscopic techniques coupled to mathematical modeling. As a Marie Curie Fellow, and later as a Dutch NWO VENI Fellow, Manuel carried out postdoctoral work at the Marrink lab, at the University of Groningen — where he became involved in the development and application of the Martini coarse grain model.

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Dario Neri was born in Rome on 1. May 1963 and grew up in Siena (Italy). He studied Chemistry at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa and earned a PhD in Chemistry from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich), under the supervision of Professor Kurt Wüthrich (Nobel Prize Chemistry 2002). After a post-doctoral research internship (1992-1996) at the Medical Research Council Centre in Cambridge (UK), under the supervision of Sir Gregory Winter (Nobel Prize Chrmistry 2018), he became professor at ETH Zürich in 1996. Dario Neri has been Full Professor of Biomacromolecules at the Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences, ETH Zürich. In October 2020, he moved full-time to Philogen (www.philogen.com), a Swiss-Italian Biotech Company which he had co-founded in 1996 and in which he currently serves as Chief Executive Officer and Chief Scientific Officer, while retaining the ETH Professor title. He is also Honorary Senior Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge, UK.

The research activities of the Neri group and of Philogen focus on the engineering of therapeutic antibodies for the therapy of cancer and other angiogenesis-related disorders and on the development of DNA-encoded chemical libraries. Two of the antibody products of Philogen are currently being investigated in Phase III clinical trials in Europe and in the United States, while the broader clinical-stage pipeline of Philogen is composed both of antibody-based and of small molecule-based pharmaceuticals.

Dario Neri has published more than 400 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals. He is the recipient of the ISOBM Abbott Prize 2000, of the Amgen-Dompe’ Biotec Award 2000, of the Mangia d’Oro 2001, of the Prous Award 2006 of the European Federation of Medicinal Chemistry, of the Robert-Wenner-Prize 2007 of the Swiss Cancer League, of the SWISS BRIDGE Award 2008, of the Prix Mentzer of the French Medicinal Chemistry Society in 2011, of the Phoenix Prize 2014, of an ERC Advanced Grant in 2015, the 6th World ADC Award in 2019 and the Paul Harris Fellow Award in 2022.

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Mikhail Savitski studied physics and mathematics before taking up a Ph.D. in mass spectrometry-based proteomics at Uppsala University. Following that he spend a period of time in industry as a Group Leader developing new methods for studying interaction between proteins and small molecules. Since 2016 he is Team Leader and Head of Proteomics Core Facility at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, EMBL. At EMBL he is heading a research group focused on studying post-translational regulation as well as the proteomics core facility which provides state of the art proteomics service to EMBL as well as the rest of the world. His research group focuses on understanding how proteins are regulated in their activity in response to perturbations by studying post-translational modifications, protein-protein, and protein-metabolite interactions.

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Meha joined the Chemical Biology Team at AstraZeneca in August 2020 having worked with MNK-inhibitors for her postdoc at University of Basel, Switzerland. The multidisciplinary study combined in vitro pharmacology, functional genetics and Mass Spectrometry based proteomics to elucidate novel mechanism of action of MNK signaling in ribosomal control of new protein synthesis in neurons. Her Proteomics expertise comes from her work at Prof John Yates laboratory at The Scripps Research Institute, San Diego USA in 2014, where she developed novel phosphopeptide enrichment methods to map signaling changes in brains of nicotine-addicted mice. In the Chemical Biology and Proteomics Team at AstraZeneca she is using chemical and proteomics means to uncover and harness disease-relevant biology for delivering new therapeutic paradigms. Meha completed her PhD from ICGEB, India in 2010.

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Anna Vulpetti has over 25 years of experience in drug discovery in Pharma, at Pharmacia & Upjohn, Pharmacia, Pfizer, and since 2006 at Novartis. She is an Associate Director in the Global Discovery Chemistry department at Novartis with experience from hit finding technologies to hit-to-lead and late-stage optimization. By working interdisciplinary across different disease areas, she impacted multiple pipeline projects through molecular designs, knowledge in medicinal chemistry and structural chemistry. Anna Vulpetti has co-authored more than 80 peer-reviewed scientific papers and many patents.

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Born in Basel, Sebastian Deindl is a Professor of Molecular Biophysics at Uppsala University in Sweden. He received his Master of Biochemistry from the University of Tübingen in 2004 and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2009 under the supervision of John Kuriyan. He then worked with Xiaowei Zhuang as a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University from 2009 to 2014. Sebastian has received several awards including a recent ERC Advanced Grant and the EMBO Young Investigator Award.

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Richard is an Associate Professor in Chemical Biology within the Leicester Institute of Structural and Chemical Biology and School of Chemistry at the University of Leicester, UK. His research is focussed on the application of chemical synthesis and chemical biology approaches for the development of novel pharmaceutical modalities. In particular, his group has a keen interest in the discovery, design and evaluation of molecular glues. Prior to joining the University of Leicester Richard held a Marie Curie fellowship at the Eindhoven University of Technology (NL) and undertook a post-doctoral research project at the University of Leeds (UK).

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I am currently a postdoctoral fellow at the LMU in Munich focusing on the design of artificial proproteins. With my innovative approach, I aim to advance pharmacotherapy beyond small molecule drugs and towards more targeted therapies tailored to specific diseased tissues. During my PhD at McMaster University, I gained expert knowledge in enzymology. Besides diving deep into enzyme kinetics, I received training in X-ray crystallography to structurally characterize binding interactions of our small molecules. Inspired by the “Resolution Revolution” in Cryo-EM, I continued my structural biology journey by joining the MRC-LMB in Cambridge. There, I focused on the regulation of the mTORC1 complex, the major regulator of cell growth and proliferation. The aspects of metabolism finally led me to Munich where I am now testing my in vitro hypotheses in cellular assays as well in vivo on the model organism D. melanogaster. With these tools in hand, I am now thrilled to develop engineered therapeutically relevant proproteins that can be activated by tissue- or disease-specific proteases, to explore novel treatment options for a targeted pharmacotherapy.

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After completing degrees in Chemistry and Biological Sciences, Dr. Rachel Hevey pursued her PhD at the University of Calgary (Canada) focused on glycoconjugate vaccines and carbohydrate-based ligands of bacterial toxins. In 2013, she joined the University of Basel (Switzerland) as a postdoctoral researcher, leading a new project to help elucidate the role of siglecs in diabetes, and developing glycomimetic antagonists of therapeutically-relevant lectins. In 2015 she was promoted to her current position as a Research Associate in the Dept. Pharmaceutical Sciences, with research interests focused on the development of glycan- and glycomimetic-based therapeutics.

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Prof. Limongelli graduated in medicinal chemistry in 2004 at University of Naples (Italy) where he also did his PhD in drug sciences. He moved to ETH Zurich in the group of Prof. Michele Parrinello for the postdoc. Then, he got a tenure position at University of Naples before reaching the Università della Svizzera italiana in Lugano where he is currently full professor in pharmacology at the faculty of biomedical sciences and director of the Euler Institute. He obtained an ERC grant on computational methods development applied to GPCRs and received awards and recognitions for his research including the USERN Prize as top 5 scientists in physical and chemical sciences. He is in the top 2% of most cited scientists in the world.

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Micah Niphakis received his Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Kansas, where he developed synthetic approaches to access phenanthropiperidine natural products for studying their anti-cancer properties. He then joined the Cravatt lab at Scripps Research as a postdoctoral fellow to study chemical biology. During this time, his research focused on developing chemical tools to study the endocannabinoid system, which led to the discovery of highly selective, covalent MAGL inhibitors and photoaffinity probes to globally map lipid binding proteins.
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In 2014, Micah joined Abide Therapeutics, where he led the development and implementation of an industrialized serine hydrolase-directed chemoproteomics platform. He also spearheaded chemical library enhancement efforts to facilitate the discovery of novel covalent inhibitors targeting active-site nucleophiles.
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Micah joined Lundbeck as a part of Abide’s acquisition in 2019. He has continued his role in leading platform and chemical library development efforts, with an expanded mission to uncover chemical tractability for historically challenging targets using proteome-wide ligand discovery platforms.

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Here few lines: Rita graduated in Pharmaceutical Sciences and Technologies at the University of Salerno in 2011. She got a 5 year PhD fellowship at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa, where, after spending 18 months in the lab of Prof Overkleeft in Leiden, got the title of doctor in Drug Discovery. She spent 2 years in Dublin Trinity College as postdoctoral fellow and 3 years at Imperial College London as a Marie Curie fellow. She joined Utrecht University last year as Assistant Professor in chemical biology to start her independent career.

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Slava Ziegler, born in Bulgaria, started studying Molecular Biology at the Kliment Ochridski University in Sofia, Bulgaria, and after a year she moved to Germany to study Biochemistry at the Ruhr University Bochum. She obtained her PhD in 2004 at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology (Dortmund, Germany) working on tumor genetics and Wnt signaling. She then joined the Institute of Pathology at the University of Duesseldorf to explore mechanisms of tumor invasion and metastasis. Since July 2009 she has been leading a project group in the department Chemical Biology of Prof. Dr. Herbert Waldmann at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology with focus on cell-based assays for exlporing bioactivity of small molecules and identification and validation of the targets of bioactive compounds.

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