5th Annual CRBS Symposium

Cathy L. Drennan is the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Biochemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Professor and Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She received an AB in chemistry from Vassar College, and after teaching high school science and drama for three years, she returned to graduate school. Drennan received a PhD in biological chemistry from the University of Michigan, working in the laboratory of the late Professor Martha L. Ludwig. She was also a postdoctoral fellow with Professor Douglas C. Rees at the California Institute of Technology. In 1999, Drennan joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she has risen through the ranks to full professor in the Departments of Chemistry and Biology. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. Her research interests lie at the interface of chemistry and biology, combining X-ray crystallography with cryo-electron microscopy and other biophysical methods in order to “visualize” molecular processes by obtaining snapshots of metalloproteins in action.

Born on the island of Hawaii in the United States, Suliana Manley obtained a bachelor’s degree at Rice University in physics and mathematics in 1997, cum laude. She earned a PhD in physics at Harvard University, studying the non-equilibrium phase behavior of soft matter under the supervision of Prof. Dave Weitz in 2004. Subsequently, she conducted postdoctoral research on lipid bilayer membrane dynamics at MIT. She then joined the National Institutes of Health (USA) as a postdoctoral researcher in the cell biology laboratory of Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz. During this time, she developed a highly promising fluorescence method (sptPALM) for studying the dynamics of single proteins inside living cells. She became a tenure track assistant professor of physics at the EPFL in 2009, and was promoted to associate professor in 2016, then full professor in 2022. Honors include the Royal Microscopical Society Medal for Innovation in Light Microscopy (2019) and APS Fellowship (2020).

I am a full Professor at the University of Oxford, UK. Research in my group is focused on the molecular mechanisms of morphogen signaling and cell-to-cell communication, using structural, biochemical and cellular methods. I have managed a successful research group for over 15 years supported by significant sustained funding, including recent CRUK Programme and SRF Awards, an ERC Consolidator Award. I completed my Diploma in Chemistry majoring in Biochemistry (BSc and MSc) at the Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg, Germany, and received a PhD from the University of Bern, Switzerland, in Structural Biology and Biochemistry, working on bacterial sugar uptake at the membrane. For my postdoctoral studies I moved to Oxford, joining the group of Prof. Yvonne Jones, now working on human cell surface receptor signalling. This was followed by a Wellcome Trust-funded Research Career Development Fellowship and a CRUK-funded Senior Research Fellowship, which provided me with the opportunity to develop an internationally competitive laboratory focusing on the structural biology of receptor signal transduction at the plasma membrane.

Malik Chaker-Margot was born and raised in Montreal. He obtained his Bachelors of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine from Université de Montréal in 2013. He then moved to New York City, at The Rockefeller University (Tri-Institutional PhD Program in Chemical Biology) where he performed his graduate work in the laboratory of Sebastian Klinge on eukaryotic ribosome assembly and cryo-EM. He continued his training at Biozentrum of Universität Basel, working on the structure and function of large signaling proteins and complexes, before returning to Montreal in 2022. He aims to use his training to study two classes of molecules involved in cellular signaling with the use of cryo-electron microscopy: small GTPases and long non-coding RNAs. By using structural biology as his main approach, he hopes to unravel the molecular mechanism undergirding the involvement of these molecules in the regulation of cytoskeletal remodeling and cellular proliferation.

Lisa Munter obtained her PhD degree in Biochemistry in 2007 at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. Her PhD thesis was on the regulation of the processing of the amyloid precursor protein (APP), a key protein in the etiology of Alzheimer’s disease, for which she received the PhD award of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science. Her interest in Pharmacology and rhomboid proteases was raised during her postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She was in a semi-independent position back at the Freie Universität Berlin, before she became an Assistant Professor at McGill University in 2012, and then received tenure to Associate Professor in 2019. In her own lab, she developed new lines of research on Alzheimer’s disease. While still focusing on the basic molecular pathways leading to Alzheimer’s disease, she established a new research theme on rhomboid intramembrane proteases and a second theme on cholesterol transport, aiming to identify novel, effective drug targets. She holds a FRQS salary award and received the Maude Abbott award of McGill’s Faculty of Medicine and health Sciences for community engagement and teaching in 2021.