July 6-7, 2022

2nd Transatlantic ECI GPCR Symposium


About the Event

The second Transatlantic ECI GPCR symposium is a 2-day event aimed at Early Career Investigators. This event was organized by Paula Morales (Instituto de Quimica Médica, CSIC), John Janetzko (Stanford University), Magdalena M. Scharf (Karolinska Institutet), and Cory P. Johnson (University of Maine). The symposium seeks to promote collaboration among early-career scientists in the GPCR field and to transfer the experience of more established researchers to ECIs to guide their future careers.

About the Event

This 2-day symposium will provide opportunities for postdoctoral scientists and graduate students to present their research to an international community in a virtual format and to participate in diverse sessions aiming to inspire and guide their future career and research. All attending ECIs can actively participate by presenting posters or oral presentations, asking questions during the career panel and get in touch with GPCR leaders during lunch sessions (or breakfast/ dinner depending on individual timezone).

More information on planned sessions below and in Sessions!

Abstracts of ECI presentations and posters can be found in the abstract booklet! Also, check out this poster pitch stream!

ECI participation

All attending Early Career Investigators are encouraged to actively present their research during the meeting! Oral presentations and posters will be selected by the organizing committee from submitted abstracts.

→ 15 oral presentations by ECIs in four ECI sessions
→ 2 interactive poster sessions
→ posters & accompanying short video presentation accessible throughout the symposium week

Keynote Speakers

  • Keynote 1: David E. Olson

    Keynote 1: David E. Olson

    UC Davis, USA

    David studied chemistry and biology at Union College before receiving his Ph.D. in chemistry from Stanford University. He completed his postdoctoral training in neuroscience at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. David joined the faculty at UC Davis in 2015, where he established a research program at the interface of chemistry and neuroscience. His research focuses on understanding how small molecules influence neural plasticity, learning, memory, and mood. In 2019, he co-founded Delix Therapeutics—a company developing non-hallucinogenic analogs of psychedelics for treating a variety of brain disorders.

  • Keynote 2: Miriam Stoeber

    Keynote 2: Miriam Stoeber

    University of Geneva, Switzerland

    Miriam obtained her PhD at the ETH Zurich in 2013 and then joined Kay Grünewald’s group at the University of Oxford as a postdoc. In 2014, she moved to the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) where she was as a postdoc in the group of Prof. Mark von Zastrow. Miriam started her own research group in summer 2019, and their work aims to understand how GPCRs function in the cellular context and more specifically, how receptors in different cellular organelles translate ligand-binding into precise signaling outcomes.

Career Panel

Researchers with diverse backgrounds and at different career levels will answer and discuss ECI questions!

  • Aashish Manglik

    Aashish Manglik

    UCSF, USA

    Aashish Manglik, MD, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Anesthesia at UCSF. Aashish received his BA in Biology and Chemistry from Washington University in St Louis and his MD/PhD from Stanford University. Aashish was named a Pew, Searle, Klingenstein, Vallee and Mallinckrodt Scholar, is a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator, and is a recipient of the NIH Director’s Early Independence Award.

  • Jana Selent

    Jana Selent

    Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute/Pompeu Fabra University, Spain

    Jana Selent is an Associate Professor at the Pompeu Fabra University and a Group Leader at the Hospital del Mar Research Institute in Barcelona, Spain. She is interested in understanding the molecular mechanisms that drive the complex functionalities of GPCRs using molecular dynamics simulation. In this line, her group coordinates a community-driven initiative that aims to uncover the dynamics of the entire 3D-GPCRome (www.gpcrmd.org). Currently, she is also the vice-chair of the ERNEST cost action to promote interdisciplinary research and to establish the groundwork for a holistic map of signal transduction.

  • JoAnn Trejo

    JoAnn Trejo

    UCSD, USA

    JoAnn is professor of Pharmacology at UC San Diego School Medicine, Department of Pharmacology. She earned her PhD and MBA at UC San Diego and completed her postdoctoral fellowship at UC San Francisco. She is best known for her discoveries of how cellular responses are regulated by GPCRs in the context of vascular inflammation and cancer. Dr. Trejo’s work has established new paradigms for how GPCRs drive inflammatory signaling from subcellular compartments. She is also a recognized leader for her work embracing mentorship, and her effective strategies to enhance diversity of the biomedical workforce and inclusive excellence. In 2020, JoAnn was elected as an American Society for Cell Biology Fellow and 100 Inspiring Hispanic / Latinx Scientists in America and elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2021.

  • Martha Sommer

    Martha Sommer

    ISAR Bioscience, Germany

    Martha works on elucidating the molecular details of how arrestins interact with GPCRs with the ultimate goal of understanding the complex functional versatility of the arrestins. She began these studies as a doctoral student in Portland, Oregon USA, and from 2013-2021 she led her own research group at the Charité Medical University in Berlin. A few years ago Martha founded an international consortium, the European Research Network on Signal Transduction (ERNEST) that is funded by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). In November 2021, Martha joined ISAR Bioscience near Munich, Germany as Director of the new GPCR Signalling Platform.

  • Sri Kosuri

    Sri Kosuri

    Octant, USA

    Sri is a biologist that has helped build technologies, labs, and companies in synthetic biology, functional genomics, and bioinformatics over the last 20 years. He is passionate about developing more rational ways to understand and engineer biology. Sri is a co-founder at Octant and an Associate Professor at UCLA in the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department, where his lab has worked on building large-scale ways of empirically exploring questions in protein biochemistry, human genetic variation, gene regulation, chemical biology, synthetic biology, and functional genomics. Sri previously worked at the Wyss Institute and Harvard, where he built numerous technologies in gene synthesis, DNA information storage, gene editing, and large-scale multiplexed assays. He helped build Gen9, a gene synthesis company, as a member of the SAB and was the first employee of Joule Unlimited, an engineered algal biofuel company. He is a Searle Scholar (2015), NIH New Innovator (2014), and received his ScD in Biological Engineering at MIT and BS in Bioengineering at UC Berkeley.

  • Chris De Graaf

    Chris De Graaf

    Sosei Heptares

    Chris de Graaf has over 16 years of experience as computational chemist in GPCR drug discovery research, with more than 140 publications (June 2022). Dr. Chris de Graaf is Senior Director and Head of Computational Chemistry at Sosei Heptares (www.soseiheptares.com). Following PhD studies in computational medicinal chemistry and molecular toxicology at VU University Amsterdam in 2006, Dr. De Graaf worked as postdoctoral fellow at the University of Strasbourg and AstraZeneca on the development and application of novel GPCR structural modeling and virtual ligand screening techniques. In 2009, Chris de Graaf obtained a NWO Veni grant to develop a research line in the computational prediction of structural protein–ligand interactions and was appointed Assistant Professor in the Division Medicinal Chemistry at VU University Amsterdam. Since 2018 Chris de Graaf is Head of Computational Chemistry at Sosei Heptares, where he is leading the development and application of computer-aided drug discovery approaches across the GPCRome.

Do you want more? Check out the Frontiers Research Topic on New Approaches for the Discovery of GPCR ligands connected to this meeting! Open for submission now!

Symposium Organizers

Magdalena Scharf (Karolinska Institutet), John Janetzko (Stanford University), Paula Morales (Spanish National Research Council), and Cory Johnson (University of Maine).

Symposium Organizers

COST Action CA18133 ERNEST

COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology, http://www.cost.eu/) is a funding agency that connects research initiatives across Europe and enables scientists to grow their ideas by sharing them with their peers. ERNEST aims to create a diverse multidisciplinary network of researchers, including all career levels and inclusive of underrepresented target groups (www.ernest-gpcr.eu). ERNEST offers bi-annual meetings, scientific exchanges and other initiatives to enable networking and cooperation between signal transduction researchers within the EU/COST Region and beyond. Central to ERNEST's mission is the promotion, training and advancement of Early Career Researchers. We extend our thanks to the COST Association and ERNEST for helping organize this symposium.

COST Action CA18133 ERNEST

Thanks to our Sponsors!

  • ConfometRx
  • Montana Molecular
  • Greenstone Biosciences
  • The University of Maine
  • Frontiers in Endocrinology
  • ACS Pharmacology & Translational Science
  • Boehringer Ingelheim
  • DR. GPCR
  • EFMC - European Federation for Medicinal Chemistry and Chemical Biology
  • Sociedad Española de Química Terapéutica (SEQT)
  • Molecules

Location

Online event

Registration period

March 27, 2022 - 09:00 until July 5, 2022 - 12:00

Submission period

March 27, 2022 - 09:00 until June 17, 2022 - 23:30

Contact us

If you have any questions, please contact ecigpcrsymposium@gmail.com .

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