Invited speakers

"From Mechanism to Intervention: Inhibiting α-Synuclein Aggregation"

Dr Jean Baum is the distinguished professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, where she is also vice dean for research and graduate education in the school of arts and sciences, and also vice chair of the department of chemistry and chemical biology.  Professor Baum uses both solution- and solid-state NMR in her research. Her research investigates the structure and dynamics of proteins, including alpha-synuclein, which can aggregate to form amyloid fibrils, and collagen. The molecular interactions involved in the assembly of the functional and pathological forms of these proteins can be elucidated by NMR investigations. Since May 2020, her research has included studying the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein using a combined experimental and computational approach. Professor Baum has been the recipient of the following prestigious awards. Fulford Junior Research Fellow, University of Oxford, England; Henry Rutgers Research Fellow; Merck Faculty Development Award; Searle Scholar; Johnson and Johnson Discovery Research Fund; Camille & Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award; Margaret O. Dayhoff  Biophysical Society Award; Rutgers University Board of Trustees Scholarly Excellence Fellowship; Alfred P. Sloan Fellow; Visiting fellow, Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, England.

"Phytoglycogen as a model system to study the hydration properties of polysaccharides"

John Dutcher is a Professor of Physics and the CEPS Research Chair in Novel Sustainable Nanomaterials at the University of Guelph, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. His research program focuses on the science of natural, sustainable nanomaterials and efforts to make synthetic polymers more sustainable (https://www.uoguelph.ca/physics/research/dutcher-group/). He is a former Senior Canada Research Chair in Soft Matter and Biological Physics (2006-2020), and he served as the Director of the BSc Nanoscience program at the University of Guelph from 2010-2023. Two Guelph-based companies, Mirexus Biotechnologies and Glysantis Biotech, have been spun out of his lab, commercializing a natural, sustainable nanotechnology for use in personal care, nutrition and biomedical applications. For the development of this technology, he received the 2017 University of Guelph Innovation of the Year award.

"The awesome power of fluorine NMR - from drugs to cells"

Angela M. Gronenborn currently holds the UPMC Rosalind Franklin Professorship in the Department of Structural Biology and is also a Professor of Bioengineering and Chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. She obtained her PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Cologne (Germany). After post-doctoral training, she started her independent career at the National Institute of Medical Research in Mill Hill, London, and subsequently led research groups at the Max Planck Institute in Munich, The Laboratory of Chemical Physics at the NIH, and since 2006 at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School. Throughout her career, she has been involved in developing NMR methodology for characterizing structure, dynamics and function of biological macromolecules and she uses NMR, crystallography and cryoEM in integrative structural biology studies. In the area of HIV research, she directs the Pittsburgh Center for HIV Protein Interactions (PCHPI). Angela Gronenborn serves on numerous Scientific Advisory and Editorial Boards and has held leadership positions in professional societies. She has trained more than 50 graduate students and post-doctoral fellows and authored more that 500 peer-reviewed publications. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (USA), the Norwegian Academy of Arts and Letters, the German National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

ATF4 Governs Organelle Network Topology, Energetic Flux, and Structural Scaling in Muscle

Dr. Antentor Hinton is the Ernest E. Just Early Career Investigator, a Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Science Leadership Investigator, and a Burroughs Wellcome Fund CASI Investigator. He is an Assistant Professor of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine Basic Sciences, with joint appointments in the Division of Cardiology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the Department of Biomedical Sciences at Meharry Medical College.

With an h-index of 38, Dr. Hinton has published over 160 papers, delivered more than 200 invited talks, and received over 60 awards, including the ASCB Mentoring Keynote Award and the Vanderbilt Postdoc Faculty Mentor of the Year Award. He has trained and mentored over 90 trainees across graduate, medical, postdoctoral, and undergraduate levels. His mentees have earned major distinctions, including Fulbright and Marshall Scholarships, and have secured competitive residencies and faculty positions. He also serves as an Associate Editor for Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences and Current Protocols and is on the editorial boards of Circulation Research, Aging Cell, and several other leading journals.

Predicting Allostery, the “Second Secret of Life”

Sandro Keller is Full Professor of Biophysics and Head of the Biophysics Division at the University of Graz, Austria. His research integrates biophysics, physical chemistry, and molecular biology to study membrane proteins and develop innovative membrane mimetics. His group is pioneering native nanodiscs for extracting membrane proteins in their native lipid environments, fluorescence-based microfluidic methods to quantify protein-protein interactions, and computational approaches to predicting protein allostery. After receiving his Ph.D. from Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany, he led an independent research group at the Leibniz Institute of Molecular Pharmacology in Berlin before joining the University of Kaiserslautern, where he also served as Dean of the Faculty of Biology. His awards include the Stig Sunner Memorial Award from CALCON and the Breast Cancer Research Award from the Austrian Cancer Aid.

Dr. Klinman received her A.B. and Ph.D from the University of Pennsylvania, and carried out postdoctoral research with Dr. David Samuel at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, and Dr. Irwin Rose at the Institute for Cancer Research, Philadelphia. She is currently Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School in the Department of Chemistry, the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, and the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) at UCB. Professor Klinman has made fundamental contributions to enzyme chemistry, many of which have led to paradigm shifts: a major breakthrough was her demonstration of hydrogen tunneling in biological hydrogen transfer reactions. Such observations provided strong support for the central role of protein dynamics in enzyme catalysts. Recent results - that combine temperature and time dependent hydrogen deuterium exchange with Stokes shift measurements - implicate a rapid and directed activation of the protein scaffold in the initiation of enzyme-based quantum tunneling. Extension of such studies to a range of different types of enzyme reactions leads to a generalized probabilistic model for enzyme turnover, that depends on long-range thermal energy transfer from site-specific protein/solvent interfaces to the active site. These findings have broad implications for enzyme evolution and design.

"Understanding and visualizing medicine-making synth(et)ases"

Martin Schmeing performed graduate research with Tom Steitz at Yale University, studying the architecture and mechanism of the large ribosomal subunit, obtaining his PhD in 2004. He then performed postdoctoral training at the LMB, Cambridge, with Venki Ramakrishnan, using cryo-EM and X-ray crystallography to investigate initiation and elongation of translation. Martin established his own laboratory at McGill University in 2010, where he studies nonribosomal peptide synthetases (NRPSs) and other dynamic macromolecular biosynthetic megaenzymes using structural, biophysical, biochemical, cell biology and genetic approaches. Martin is currently a James McGill Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and the Director of the McGill Centre de recherche en biologie structurale.

"Self-Assembly of the Tau Protein: Implications for Neurodegeneration"

Joan Emma Shea obtained her BSc from McGill University and her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where her research considered Brownian motion. She was awarded a NSERC post-doctoral fellowship, and joined Charles L. Brooks III at the University of California, San Diego and Scripps Research. Dr. Shea joined the James Franck Institute at the University of Chicago in 2000, where she spent one year before moving to the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2008. Professor Shea’s work considers the chemistry of cellular processes, including in vivo protein folding. In particular, the study of  intrinsically disordered proteins  and their self-assembly into fibrillar aggregates and/or undergoing a process called liquid-liquid phase separation. Shea studies these processes using computational and statistical approaches. In 2019, Shea was elected as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Physical Chemistry (A, B and C), being the first woman holding this position in the history of the journal. She is the recipient of  the 2002 National Science Foundation CAREER Award, 2003 David and Lucile Packard Award, 2004 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow; as well as being elected as fellows of the American Physical Society (2011), and the American Chemical Society (2022).