PLENARY SPEAKERS

Cynthia Burrows is the Thatcher Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Her studies in organic chemistry at University of Colorado, Cornell University and Université Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg, led eventually to her present interests in the chemistry and biochemistry of modified bases in DNA and RNA with a focus on oxidative stress. This work led to the discovery of an epigenetic role for oxidized DNA bases in G-quadruplex motifs along with new single-molecule methods for understanding nucleic acid folding, the impact of base modifications, and sequencing. Burrows is the recipient of several ACS awards and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009 and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2014. She also serves as Editor-in-Chief of Accounts of Chemical Research.

Speech Title: Protein Nanopores Reveal Single-Molecule Behavior of DNA & RNA

Pr. Philippe Compain received his Engineer degree in chemistry at CPE Lyon. In 1998, he was awarded the Dina Surdin Prize from the French Chemical Society for his Ph. D research on the synthesis of spiro alkaloids by way of 1,2-chirality transfer (group of Prof. J. Goré, University of Lyon I). After a postdoctoral stay at Montreal with Prof. S. Hanessian on hetero Diels-Alder reactions, he was appointed Chargé de Recherche (researcher) at CNRS in the group of Prof. O. R. Martin in Orléans. In 2008, he accepted a full professorship at the University of Strasbourg. He is now Professor of Organic Chemistry in this University and at the European Engineering School of Chemistry, Polymers and Material Science (ECPM). His research interests span from the development of new synthetic methodologies to the synthesis of carbohydrate mimics of biological interest. He is co-editor of a book untitled Iminosugars: from synthesis to therapeutic applications (Wiley-VCH). In 2010, Pr. Compain has been made Junior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF) and elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2016. He is currently Vice President of the Groupe Français des Glycosciences (GFG, the French network in Glycoscience).

Speech Title: Pushing the limits of the Inhibitory Multivalent Effect in Glycoscience

Prof. Dorota Gryko obtained her Ph.D. from the Institute of Organic Chemistry at the Polish Academy of Sciences under the supervision of Prof. J. Jurczak. After a post-doctoral stay with Prof. J. Lindsey at North Carolina State University, she started an independent career in Poland. She received two prestigious TEAM grants from the Foundation for Polish Science and in 2019 was awarded by the Minister of Science and Higher Education for her outstanding scientific achievements.

Her current research interests are focused on light-induced processes with particular attention being paid to porphyrinoids catalysis as well as on vitamin B₁₂ chemistry.

Speech Title: Vitamin B12 – an intriguing bioheterocycle

Andreas Herrmann studied chemistry at the University of Mainz (Germany). From 1997 to 2000 he pursued his graduate studies at the Max-Planck-Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz. Then he worked as a consultant for Roland Berger Management Consultants in Munich (2001). In the years 2002 and 2003 he returned to academia working on protein engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich. In 2004 he was appointed as a head of a junior research group at the Max-Planck-Institute for Polymer Research. In 2007 he moved to the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, where he held a chair for Polymer Chemistry and Bioengineering. Since 2017 Prof. Herrmann is scientific board member of the DWI Leibniz-Institute for Interactive Materials, Aachen, Germany and Professor of Macromolecular Chemistry and Systems at RWTH Aachen University.
The Herrmann group investigates engineered biomacromolecuels and bioorganic hybrid materials for biomedical and technological applications. Prof. Herrmann was awarded the Reimund-Stadler-Prize from the German Chemical Society (GDCh) in 2008 and the Dr. Hermann-Schnell-Prize (GDCh) in 2009. For work on nucleic acid hybrid materials he received an ERC Starting Grant from the European Commission (2009) and a VICI Grant from the NWO (2010). In fall 2012 a team around Prof. Herrmann won the Dutch Venture Challenge organized by the Netherlands Genomics Initiative (NGI) and in 2013 he was awarded the Eyenovative prize from Novartis. In 2016, he received an ERC Advanced Grant from the European Commission.

Speech Title: Activation of drugs, proteins and genes by ultrasound

Jørgen Kjems studied chemistry and physics at Aarhus University from where he received his PhD degree in field of RNA in 1989. After being a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA 1989-1990 and at MIT, Cambridge, USA 1990-1991 he returned to Department for Molecular Biology, University of Aarhus where he became associated professor in 1994. In 2003 he was appointed as full professor in Nanoscience and was co-founder of the Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Centre (iNANO) which he headed 2014-2018. iNANO is a truly interdisciplinary, physically assembled, entity at University of Aarhus with active participation of about 50 senior researchers, 60 junior researchers and 150 PhD students. From 2017 until today he has headed the Danish National Research Foundation supported Centre for Cellular Signal Patterns, CellPat. He has received several prizes including the Novo Nordisk Prize in 2018. He has published around 400 international research papers. His research competencies include drug delivery, tissue engineering, bioimaging, RNA biomarkers and therapeutics, aptamer technology, miRNA and circRNA biologi and role in disease, RNA/DNA and protein based nanotechnologies.

Speech Title: Self-assembled nucleic acid nanostructures for drug targeting, bioimaging, and biosensing

Stefan Matile is a Full Professor in the Department of Organic Chemistry at the University of Geneva and a founding member of the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Chemical Biology and the NCCR Molecular Systems Engineering. In 2010, he became an ERC Advanced Investigator. Educated at the University of Zurich (PhD, with Wolf Woggon) and Columbia University in New York (postdoc, with Koji Nakanishi), he started his independent academic career as an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University, Washington DC, before moving to Geneva. He likes supramolecular systems in action, at work. He is particularly passionate about the integration of unorthodox interactions into functional systems, hoping that new ways to get in touch would provide access to structures and functions that are needed to ultimately tackle otherwise intractable challenges. Current functions of interest cover systems catalysis with anion-π interactions, chalcogen and pnictogen bonds, extreme sulfur chemistry to find new ways to enter into cells (and hinder viruses to do the same), and mechanochemical fluorescent probes that change color like lobsters during cooking to image physical forces in biology.

Speech Title: Translational Supramolecular Chemistry

Jens Müller obtained his PhD at TU Dortmund University in 1999 (with Bernhard Lippert) and subsequently worked as a postdoc with Stephen J. Lippard (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Gerhard Wagner (Harvard Medical School). In 2002, he returned to TU Dortmund University as an independent research group leader. Since 2008, he is Professor for Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Münster. He also serves as an editor for Inorganica Chimica Acta. His research focuses on the bioinorganic chemistry of nucleic acids, ranging from metal-modified nucleic acids to guanine quadruplexes.

Speech Title: Metal-Modified DNA: Merging Bioinorganic Chemistry with Supramolecular Chemistry

Rachel O’Reilly is currently a Professor of Chemistry and Head of School at the University of Birmingham. She got her first degree from the University of Cambridge and went on to complete her PhD at Imperial College, London in 2003 with Professor Vernon Gibson. She then moved to the US to under the joint direction of Professors Craig J. Hawker and Karen L. Wooley. In 2006 she took up a Royal Society Fellowship at the University of Cambridge and then in 2009 she moved to the University of Warwick and in 2012 was promoted to full professor. She moved to Birmingham in 2018. Her group undertakes research in the area of catalysis, responsive polymers, nanostructure characterization and DNA nanomaterials. She has published over 200 papers to date and has received a number of awards, including the IUPAC-Samsung young polymer scientist award in 2012, and in 2013 the American Chemical Society Mark Young Polymer Scientist award. In 2017 she was awarded the Macromolecules/Biomacromolecules young investigator award from the ACS in recognition of her innovative research in polymer science and in 2020 the RSC Corday-Morgan Prize. She is on the reviewing board of editors for Science, on the editorial advisory board of JACS and an associate editor for Macromolecules.

Speech Title: Precision polymer nanoparticles

Coming soon

Speech Title: Coming soon

Dr. Ling Peng is a research director at the French National Scientific Research Center (CNRS) and a group leader in the Interdisciplinary Center on Nanoscience in Marseille (CINaM) at Aix-Marseille University in France. She has been working actively at the interface of chemistry and biology, and in particular, developing functional dendrimers for biomedical applications, molecular probes for exploring biological events and triazole nucleoside derivatives for drug discovery. She has pioneered bio-inspired structurally flexible dendrimers and self-assembling supramolecular dendrimers for biomedical applications such as drug delivery, gene therapy and bioimaging. One of these dendrimers has been scheduled for clinical study. Dr. Ling PENG has co-authored more than 100 scientific papers, 8 patents and 14 book chapters. She was awarded with the Prize of Dr & Mme Henri Labbé of the French Academy of Sciences in 2017 and granted as distinguished member of the French Chemical Society in 2020. Her research team was labelled by La Ligue Contre le Cancer in France.

Speech Title: Self-assembling supramolecular dendrimers for biomedical applications

Prof. Dipankar Sen graduated obtained his Ph.D. in Chemistry at Yale University, with Donald M. Crothers., followed by postdoctoral work in Cellular and Developmental Biology at Harvard University with Walter Gilbert. He has been on the faculty at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, since 1991 and is currently Professor of Chemistry and also Professor of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry. His research interests focus on the fundamental chemical and physical properties of DNA and RNA, nucleic acid catalysis, biosensors, and G-quadruplexes.

Speech Title: Coming soon

Prof. Peter “Pierre” Strazewski is full professor in the Institut de Chimie et Biochimie Moléculaires et Supramoléculaires at the Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 and team leader of CO2Glyco. He got his PhD degree in Organic Chemistry at the University of Basel in 1986. After a time as research assistant in the group of his PhD supervisor Prof. Christoph Tamm, he spent his post-doctoral studies with Dr. Olga Kennard, Director of the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre and PI in the Chemistry Department of the University Cambridge, UK, where he studied the crystallisation and structure of mispaired synthetic DNA and RNA. Back in the Chemistry Department in Basel, he started in 1990 his independent research focusing on the mispairing thermodynamics of RNA and on puromycin as the key junction for synthetic amphiphilic peptidyl-RNA conjugates. After moving to Lyon in 2001, he extended his research with microscopic observations of phospholipidic vesicles as evolvable compartments for membranophilic peptide-RNA conjugates. He is a founding member of the European Systems Chemistry community, author of several book chapters and focuses now on self-evolvable compartmentalised chemical systems for the understanding of the emergence of RNA-mediated peptide synthesis in lipid vesicles and, ultimately, the origin of translation in synthetic cells.

Speech Title: Preparing for self-evolving synthetic cells: The importance of translation in evolving mixed-lipid compartments