Professor Tobias Gulder, Technical University of Dresden and HIPS, Germany
Tobias A. M. Gulder holds degrees in Chemistry from the University of Würzburg (Diploma 2004, PhD 2008). After postdoctoral training at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography with Bradley Moore (2008-2010) he started his independent work as a Liebig and Emmy Noether fellow at the University of Bonn (2011-2014). In 2014 he accepted to offer to join the Technical University of Munich as Professor of Biosystems Chemistry at the Department of Chemistry and the Center for Integrated Protein Science Munich (CIPSM). In 2019 he became the Chair of Technical Biochemistry at the Technical University of Dresden.
He is interested in the structure, biosynthesis and synthesis of bacterial natural products. This includes the elucidation of new biosynthetic transformations and their application to the biocatalytic synthesis of natural products as well as the manipulation of biosynthetic pathways to generate new molecular structures
Professor Christine Beemelmanns, Saarland University and HIPS, Germany
Christine Beemelmanns holds a Diploma in Chemistry from RWTH Aachen (2006) and a PhD in Organic Chemistry from Freie Universität Berlin (2010). After postdoctoral stays with Keisuke Suzuki at Tokyo Institute of Technology and Jon Clardy at Harvard Medical School, Christine was appointed as a Junior Research Group leader in Natural Products Chemistry and Chemical Biology at the Hans-Knöll Institute in 2013. She was a visiting professor at UW Madison in 2020, and in 2022 first joined Leipzig University before accepting a position as Full Professor for Medicinal-Pharmaceutical Microbiota Research at Saarland University together with the Helmholtz Center for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS).
Christine combines natural product chemistry, applied microbiology and organic chemistry to discover and characterise microbial signalling and defence molecules, uncovering novel chemical structures with pharmaceutical potential.
Professor Heike Br枚tz-Oesterhelt, University of Tübingen, Germany
Heike Brötz-Oesterhelt holds a degree in Microbiology from the University of Bonn. After her PhD in 1997 she joined the Anti-Infectives Research Department of Bayer HealthCare, leading hit and lead discovery teams for 8 years. In 2004, she co-founded the anti-infective biotech company AiCuris, Wuppertal, Germany. In 2010 she returned to academia as a professor for Pharmaceutical Biology at the University of Düsseldorf, and in 2014 she became Chair of the Department of Microbial Bioactive Compounds at the University of Tübingen.
She is speaker of the Transregional Collaborative Research Centre TRR261 ‘Cellular Mechanisms of Antibiotic Action and Production’ and co-speaker of the Cluster of Excellence ‘Controlling Microbes to Fight Infection’. Heike is particularly interested in the molecular mechanisms of new antibacterial natural products and the operation modes of novel antibiotic targets.
Professor Nadja Cech, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, United States
Dr. Nadja B. Cech is Patricia A. Sullivan Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro (UNC Greensboro). Her research focuses on the application of mass spectrometry-based metabolomics to understand synergistic interactions in mixtures, and to identify biologically active constituents from plants and fungi. This work is applied to developing creative strategies to target drug resistant bacterial pathogens. Dr. Cech is the author of more than 60 research publications. In 2001 she received the Jack L. Beal Award for Best Paper in the Journal of Natural Products by a Young Investigator, and in 2017 she was awarded the Thomas Norwood Award for Undergraduate Research Mentorship.
Dr. Cech is a member of the National Institutes of Health-funded Center of Excellence for Natural Product Drug Interaction, and Co-Director of the Medicinal Chemistry Collaborative.
Professor Alessandra Eustaquio, University of Illinois at Chicago, United States
Alessandra S. Eustáquio holds a B.Sc. in Pharmacy and Biochemistry from the University of São Paulo, Brazil, and a Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Biology from the University of Tübingen, Germany. After postdoctoral training at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, she was a Principal Scientist in the Natural Products group of Pfizer’s Research & Development site in Connecticut, USA, for four years.
She is currently an Associate Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the College of Pharmacy, University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on natural product biosynthesis and the development of synthetic biology tools to facilitate access to natural and engineered molecules.
Dr Chengzhang Fu, Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research, Germany
Chengzhang Fu studied biotechnology from 2002 to 2006 at Zhejiang University, China. He received his PhD degree in biochemistry and molecular biology at the Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences 2011. In 2012, he became Alexander von Humboldt fellow in the group of Professor Rolf Müller at Saarland University, Germany. He worked as a postdoc scientist at the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS) from 2014. In 2019, he became a junior group leader at HIPS supported by the “Helmholtz International Labs” programme.
His group works on exploring, deciphering, and engineering biosynthetic gene pathways from bacteria by developing novel genome mining methods.
Professor Uli Kazmaier, Saarland University, Germany
Uli Kazmaier studied chemistry at the University of Stuttgart where he obtained his PhD working with U. Schmidt. Afterwards he joined the research groups of M.T. Reetz (Marburg) and B.M. Trost (Stanford) as a postdoc. In 1992, he moved to Heidelberg starting his own scientific work at the Institute of Organic Chemistry. In 2000, he received a Novartis Chemistry Lectureship and in 2001 an offer of a full professorship at University Bayreuth (rejected) and Saarland University, where he is since that time.
His current research interest is focused on new organometallic reagents and reactions especially for amino acid and peptide synthesis, and their application to natural product synthesis. Late-stage modification of peptides allows medicinal chemistry with natural products.
Professor Roger Linington, Simon Fraser University, Canada
Professor Linington received his undergraduate degree in chemistry from the University of Leeds and his Ph.D. in natural products chemistry from the University of British Columbia in Canada. He started his independent academic career at the University of California Santa Cruz before moving back to Canada in 2015. He is currently a Professor of Chemistry at Simon Fraser University where he holds a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Natural Products and High-Throughput Screening.
His research program focuses developing new tools in; chemical characterization of complex mixtures, phenotypic fingerprinting of bioactive metabolites and creation of informatics platforms to integrate chemical and biological datasets. Professor Linington’s research program integrates wet lab science in small molecule characterization with informatics tool development through the creation of open-source databases, webservers and informatics pipelines for small molecule discovery and characterization.
Professor Linington has interests in both the practical aspects of small molecule identification and the technical aspects of developing new computational methods in this area. This includes separation science, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, database design, and algorithm development. His team maintains the Natural Products Atlas, a database of all known microbial metabolites.
Professor Andriy Luzhetskyy, Saarland University and HIPS, Germany
Andriy Luzhetskyy holds degrees in Genetics and Biotechnology from Ivan Franko Lviv University, Ukraine (Diploma 1999, PhD 2004). Following his postdoctoral training at the University of Freiburg with Andreas Bechthold (2004-2010), he began his independent work as a Junior Group Leader at the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS) in Saarbrücken (2011-2015). In 2015, he was appointed Full Professor of Pharmaceutical Biotechnology at Saarland University.
His research interests lie in the discovery and development of bacterial natural products. This includes elucidating new biosynthetic pathways and applying them for the biosynthetic engineering of natural products to create novel molecular structures. Luzketskyy’s group focuses on the development and utilization of platforms for the heterologous production of natural products.
Professor Dong-Chan Oh, Seoul National University, South Korea
Dong-Chan Oh studied oceanography and chemistry at Seoul National University, Republic of Korea. He obtained Ph. D. in marine natural products chemistry at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 2006. After graduation, he joined Harvard Medical School as a postdoctoral research fellow and later worked as an instructor. In 2009, he started his independent academic career at Natural Products Research Institute, College of Pharmacy, Seoul National University in Korea. He conducted his research as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute International Early Career Scientist from 2012 to 2017. Dong-Chan Oh is currently a full professor of College of Pharmacy and the director of Natural Products Research Institute at Seoul National University.
His research focuses on the discovery, the structure elucidation, and the stereochemical determination of new bioactive natural products from microbes.
Professor Cassandra Quave, Emory University, United States
Cassandra Quave is Curator of the Herbarium and Associate Professor of Dermatology and Human Health at Emory University, where she leads natural product drug discovery research initiatives and teaches courses on medicinal plants, microbiology, and pharmacology.
She obtained a B.Sc. in Biology and Anthropology (Emory University, 2000) and Ph.D. in Biology (Florida International University, 2008). As a medical ethnobotanist, her work focuses on the documentation and pharmacological evaluation of plants used in traditional medicine.
Dr Quave’s research is supported by the NIH, industry contracts, and philanthropy. She is a Fellow of the Explorers Club, a past President of the Society for Economic Botany, a recipient of the Emory Williams Teaching Award and Charles Heiser, Jr. Mentor Award. She is the host of Foodie Pharmacology, a podcast dedicated to exploring the links between food and medicine.
She has authored more than 100 scientific publications, two edited books, and seven patents. Her research has been the subject of feature profiles in the New York Times Magazine, BBC Science Focus, National Geographic Magazine, Brigitte Magazin, NPR, PBS, and the National Geographic Channel. She is the author of a science memoir entitled The Plant Hunter: One Scientist’s Quest for Nature’s Next Medicines.
Dr Margherita Sosio, Naicons Srl, Italy
Margherita Sosio is co-founder and Microbiology Director at Naicons Srl, Milan. She brings more than 30 years of senior-level leadership experience in the biotech industry focused on anti-infective research and drug development. She has competencies in microbial genetic and molecular biology, in particular in genetics of antibiotic producers, including identification and characterization of antibiotic biosynthetic and resistance genes, screening of natural products for antimicrobial activity, and in characterization and development of antibiotics.
Among her accomplishments and responsibilities, she has contributed to the dalbavancin production process, to the optimisation of a production process for a new antibiotic and she played a leading role in the preparation of a master cell bank for a marketed antibiotic.
Margherita holds a degree in Agricultural Sciences from the University of Milan and conducted her postdoctoral research at ETH, Zuerich. Before joining Naicons in 2007, she held positions as a research scientist in different pharma companies including Biosearch Italia-Vicuron in Gerenzano (Italy), where she held various positions with increasing responsibility over her 20-year tenure.
Margherita is the co-author of over ninety scientific papers and seven patent applications in the field of antibiotics.
Professor Eriko Takano, University of Manchester, United Kingdom
Eriko Takano is a Professor of Synthetic Biology in the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, Department of Chemistry, School of Natural Sciences, Faculty of Science and Engineering, at the University of Manchester since 2012. In 2014, she was appointed as one of the three directors for the EPSRC/BBSRC-funded Manchester Synthetic Biology Research Centre, SYNBIOCHEM. In 2018, she was appointed as the deputy head of Department of Chemistry.
Eriko graduated from Kitasato University in Japan and did her undergraduate project with Prof Satoshi Omura (2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine), before working at an R&D facility for a company, Meiji Seika Kaisha, for several years. After leaving industry, she obtained her PhD at the John Innes Institute, Norwich, UK, in 1994 on the regulation of antibiotic production in Streptomyces coelicolor. Before her arrival in Manchester, she had been Associate Professor at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, and Assistant Professor (C1) at the Department of Microbiology / Biotechnology, University of Tübingen, in Germany.
Eriko is internationally recognized as a pioneer in the synthetic biology of microbes for antibiotic production. Her interests are in bioinformatics software development for designing natural products producers; untargeted metabolomics for chassis engineering in Streptomyces; secondary metabolite biosynthesis pathway assembly; and regulatory circuit engineering through signalling molecules and non-coding RNAs.
She has published 103 peer-reviewed papers and four book chapters and holds five patents. She is the Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology and has served as an expert advisor for the European Commission Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks on synthetic biology, where she contributed to a series of three official Opinions with major impact on the development of the field.
Professor Hidetoshi Tokuyama, Tohoku University, Japan
Hidetoshi Tokuyama is a Professor at the Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan. He obtained a BSc., MSc., and PhD in Chemistry from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1990, 1992, and 1994, respectively, in the group of Professor Eiichi Nakamura. After spending a year as a postdoctoral fellow in the group of Professor Amos. B. Smith, III at the Department of Chemistry, University of Pennsylvania, started his academic career as an assistant professor in the group of Professor Tohru Fukuyama at the Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, the University of Tokyo in 1996, where he was promoted to a lecturer and later an associate professor. Since 2006, he has been a full professor at the Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Tohoku University.
Professor Tokuyama's research focuses on the development of synthetic methodologies including highly chemoselective functional group interconversions and the construction of N-containing heterocycles, and the total synthesis of structurally complex natural products.
Professor Christopher Vanderwal, University of California, Irvine, United States
Professor Vanderwal earned his doctorate in chemistry from the Scripps Research Institute working with Professor Erik Sorensen on the total synthesis of the potent cytotoxin FR182877. He next joined the group of Professor Eric Jacobsen at Harvard University as a Jane Coffin Childs postdoctoral associate, where he worked on asymmetric Lewis acid catalysis. In 2005, Professor Vanderwal began his independent academic career at the University of California, Irvine. He was promoted with tenure to Associate Professor and was named a UCI Chancellor’s Faculty Fellow in 2011, and two years later he was promoted to Professor and appointed Vice Chair of Chemistry for Graduate Affairs.
Professor Vanderwal’s research focuses on the synthesis of complex natural products, including alkaloids, terpenoids, and polyhalogenated secondary metabolites. He develops target-specific but potentially broadly applicable methods en route to the natural product goals, and frequently engages in post-synthesis collaborative experiments to investigate the biological activity of the target and synthetic analogues.
Professor Changsheng Zhang, South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, CAS, China
Changsheng Zhang obtained a BSc. in Biology (Shanghai Jiaotong University, China, 1994) and an MSc. in Biotechnolgy (East China University of Science and Technology, 1997). In 2002, he obtained his Ph.D in Chemical Microbiology (Bergische University of Wuppertal, Germany) with Prof. Dr. W. Piepersberg. He carried out postdoctoral research on natural product glycosylation studies with J. S. Thorson at University of Wisconsin, Madison (2003-2008). In 2008, he joined the South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, China Academy of Sciences.
His research interest focuses on marine polycyclic natural product discovery and biosynthesis.
