Virtual Event Speakers
 Rommie Amaro, PhD Rommie Amaro, PhD, is Professor and Endowed Chair of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego. Research in the Amaro Lab is broadly concerned with the development and application of state-of-the-art computational methods to address outstanding questions in drug discovery and molecular-level biophysics. Her lab works closely with experimental collaborators to catalyze the discovery of new potential therapeutic agents including for cancer. The Amaro Lab is also keenly interested in developing new multiscale simulation methods and novel modeling paradigms that scale from the level of atoms to whole cells, and beyond. Key areas of her research program entail computational translational research, addressing complexity in molecular recognition, and computational virology. In 2010 Dr. Amaro was selected as an NIH New Innovator for her work developing cutting-edge computational methods to help discover new drugs. The following year, Dr. Amaro received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. In 2020, she won the ACM Gordon Bell Special Prize for COVID-19 Research. Dr. Amaro earned her Ph.D. in chemistry and bachelor's degree in chemical engineering with high distinction from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and was a NIH Kirschstein-National Research Service Award (NRSA) postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Diego. |
 Michelle Arkin, PhD Michelle Arkin, PhD, is Professor and Chair of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco and co-director of the Small Molecule Discovery Center. Her lab focuses on developing chemical probes and drug leads for novel targets, with a particular interest in protein-protein interactions and protein-degradation networks. Dr. Arkin holds leadership roles in the Academic Drug Discovery Consortium (ADDC), the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS), and the ATOM research initiative (focused on the application of AI in drug discovery). Prior to joining the faculty at UCSF, Dr. Arkin was the Associate Director of Cell Biology at Sunesis Pharmaceuticals, where she helped discover protein-protein interaction inhibitors for IL-2 and LFA-1 (Lifitegrast, marketed by Novartis). Dr. Arkin is cofounder of Ambagon and Elgia Therapeutics. |
 David Baker, PhD David Baker, PhD, heads the Institute for Protein Design and is a Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Washington. Dr. Baker also holds Adjunct Professor Appointments in the Departments of Bioengineering, Genome Sciences, Physics, Chemical Engineering and Computer Science. Some of Professor Baker’s honors include Biochemical Society Centenary Award, National Academy of Sciences, and HHMI Assistant Investigator. Professor Baker’s research is focused on the prediction and design of protein structures, protein folding mechanisms, protein-protein interactions, protein-nucleotide interactions, and protein-ligand interactions. His laboratory’s approach is to use experiments to understand the fundamental principles underlying these problems, to develop simple computational models based on these insights, and to test the models through structure prediction and design. Professor Baker and his colleagues continually improve their methodology by iterating between computational and experimental studies. Such efforts have culminated with recent success in de novo protein structure prediction using their RoseTTAFold methodology. Dr. Baker earned his BA from Harvard and his PhD from UC Berkeley. |
 Andreas Bender, PhD Andreas Bender, PhD, is a Director for Digital Life Sciences at Nuvisan in Berlin, as well as a Reader for Molecular Informatics with the Centre for Molecular Science Informatics at the Department of Chemistry of the University of Cambridge. In his work, Dr. Bender is involved with the integration and analysis of chemical and biological data from different sources, such as structural and bioactivity data, gene expression readouts, cellular imaging data, pathway information, etc. The computational analysis of this information is in his research aimed at understanding phenotypic compound action – such as cellular readouts and organism-level effects – on a mechanistic level, predicting molecular properties related to both compound efficacy and toxicity, as well as eg compound repurposing. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge and worked in the Lead Discovery Informatics group at Novartis in Cambridge, Massachusetts as well as at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and at AstraZeneca before his current post. |
 Sara Buhrlage, PhD Sara Buhrlage, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in Dana-Farber’s Cancer Biology Department and Harvard Medical School’s Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology Department. Her research group focuses on the development of first-in-class inhibitors and prototype drugs for deubiquitylating enzymes (DUBs) that can be utilized to pharmacologically validate members of the gene family as new targets for cancer treatment and other diseases. Prior to joining as a faculty member in July 2015, Dr. Buhrlage was a professional track scientist at Dana-Farber in the medicinal chemistry core laboratory. In this role she collaborated with Institute researchers to pharmacologically validate novel targets of disease and study mechanisms of oncogenesis and drug resistance. Dr. Buhrlage completed a Doctor of Philosophy in organic chemistry, under the direction of Professor Anna Mapp, PhD, from the University of Michigan, where she successfully designed, synthesized and characterized small molecules that bind the transcriptional co-activator CBP and upregulate transcription when tethered to DNA. Following completion of her Doctor of Philosophy, Dr. Buhrlage trained for two years in medicinal chemistry at the Broad Institute. |
 Feixiong Cheng, PhD Feixiong Cheng, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine (CCLCM) and Assistant Staff in the Genomic Medicine Institute at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute. Dr. Cheng is a systems pharmacogenomicist and data scientist by training, with extensive expertise in analyzing, visualizing, and mining data from real world (e.g., electronic health records (EHRs) and health care claims) and experiments that profile the molecular state of human cells and tissues by genetics, genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and interactomics, for drug discovery and patient care. The primary goal of his lab is to combine tools from genetics and genomics, EHRs, artificial intelligence, network medicine, bioinformatics, computational biology, and experimental systems biology assays, to address the challenging questions toward understanding of human complex diseases (including Cancer, Cardio-Oncology, and Alzheimer’s disease). Dr. Cheng conducted postdoctoral research at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute with a joint appointment at Northeastern University, and also Vanderbilt University Medical Center. |
 Artem Cherkasov, PhD Artem Cherkasov, PhD, is a Professor of Medicine at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada) and a Director of Therapeutics Development at Vancouver Prostate Centre. Research interests include Computer-Aided Drug Discovery (CADD), A.I., Cheminformatics, and development of precision cancer therapies. Dr. Cherkasov co-authored more than 200 research papers, 80 patent filings and several book chapters. During his tenure at the UBC, Dr. Cherkasov has been a principal applicant or co-applicant on a number of successful grants totaling over 80M dollars, and licensed 8 drug candidates to big pharma companies, major international venture funds and spin off companies. |
 Victoria A. Feher, PhD Victoria Feher, PhD, is Senior Director in the drug discovery group at Schrödinger, Inc. Dr. Feher originally trained in the fields of biophysics and biochemistry and has applied her broad background over the last 20 years as a computational modeler at Takeda Pharmaceuticals, Quorex Pharmaceuticals and as Assistant Director for the Center of Drug Discovery Innovation at UC San Diego. Dr. Feher has over 40 peer-reviewed publications and is co-inventor on numerous patents including for TAK659, an oncology drug currently in Phase II clinical trials. Dr. Feher is currently a member of the Leadership Team for Schrödinger’s drug discovery group and oversees a number of Global Health drug discovery collaborative projects. |
 Fleur Ferguson, PhD Fleur Ferguson, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Research in the Ferguson laboratory applies chemical synthesis, biochemistry, mass spectrometry and cell biology towards the goal of developing new therapeutic strategies in cancer and neurodegenerative disorders. Her research seeks to enable dissection of the cellular signaling networks underlying disease through development of selective tool compounds that act via inhibition, targeted degradation, proximity mediated pharmacology, or alterations of posttranslational modifications. Dr. Ferguson earned her M.Sc in Chemistry from Imperial College (London), PhD in chemistry from the University of Cambridge, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. |
 Marc Ferrer, PhD Marc Ferrer, PhD, is currently the Director of the 3D Tissue Bioprinting Laboratory at the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), a multidisciplinary group established in 2018 with the goal of creating, validating, and using 3D bioengineered tissues for disease modeling and predictive drug discovery and development. Previously, Dr. Ferrer was a Team Lead at the NIH Chemical Genomics Center for 8 years, working on the discovery of small molecule probes to study protein function. Before joining NIH in 2010, Dr. Ferrer was Director of Assay Development and High Throughput Screening at the Department of Automated Biotechnology, at Merck Research Laboratories. Dr. Ferrer received a BSc degree in Organic Chemistry from the University of Barcelona, and a Ph.D. degree in Biological Chemistry from the University of Minnesota. |
 Marti Head, PhD Marti Head, PhD, is Director of the Joint Institute for Biological Sciences (JIBS) and Director of Computational Biomedical Initiatives at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Dr. Head’s role is to reimagine what a re-energized JIBS might look like and to collaboratively build a cohesive, all-of-lab strategy for biomedical research at ORNL. Most recently, she led the “Molecular design and analysis to inform therapeutics related to COVID-19” project supported by the DOE Office of Science through the National Virtual Biotechnology Laboratory, a consortium of DOE national laboratories focused on response to COVID-19, with funding provided by the Coronavirus CARES Act. Prior to joining ORNL, Dr. Head spent 20 years in R&D at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) Pharmaceuticals. During her time at GSK, she built and led a team responsible for creatively and proactively using computational tools to design potential drugs, to understand how those potential drugs interact in biological systems, to move the most promising candidates into clinical trials as quickly as possible, and to develop and validate cutting-edge computational algorithms. Her team was involved in all therapeutic areas in GSK’s US research sites; her team’s research had a direct impact on >500 drug discovery programs, >100 clinical candidate selections, and two marketed drugs. Her personal area of specialization was in the discovery and development of anti-infective agents. Dr. Head moved into a data analytics role during her last four years at GSK, leading a collaboration between GSK and Palantir, a Silicon-Valley-based data integration and exploration company, solving data challenges in the R&D, clinical, manufacturing, vaccines, and corporate areas of GSK, and building a new Insights from Data team. Dr. Head’s training is in computational chemistry, with a research focus on systems-level modeling of biological systems, computational geometry and geometric properties of protein structures, and statistical thermodynamics of non-covalent interactions between proteins and small-molecule ligands. |
 Susan Lea, D. Phil Susan Lea, D.Phil, is the Chief of the Center for Structural Biology at the Center for Cancer Research in the National Cancer Institute. Susan’s research career started with a D.Phil. in the Laboratory of Molecular Biophysics (1990-1993) at the University of Oxford with Prof. David Stuart F.R.S. using cutting-edge X-ray crystallography to study foot and mouth disease virus. In 1995 she established her independent group in the Department of Biochemistry, Oxford, with one of the first Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowships. At that time the group focused on structural and functional studies of human enteroviruses and their receptors, which commonly complement system molecules. In 1999 she was appointed to a tenured academic position (university lecturer) in the Department of Biochemistry, Oxford, and continued to grow a program increasingly focused on human complement system regulation and pathogen evasion. This led to an interest in bacterial pathogenesis systems which expanded when she moved her group to the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, Oxford, in 2000. She was appointed to the Chair in Microbiology in that Department in 2016. Dr. Lea’s research focuses on the use of mixed structural methods to study host-pathogen interactions and other medically important molecular pathways. Her laboratory uses and develops cutting-edge structural methods including cryo-electron microscopy and X-ray crystallography to define molecular mechanisms involved in health and disease states. |
 Andrew Leach, PhD Andrew Leach, PhD is Head of Chemical Biology and Head of Industry Partnerships at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI). He studied Chemistry as an undergraduate and postgraduate at the University of Oxford and as a SERC/NATO post-doctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco. After three years at the University of Southampton he joined GlaxoSmithKline where over more than 20 years he was involved in the development and application of new platform capabilities for drug discovery in areas including computational chemistry and cheminformatics, fragment-based drug discovery, cardiovascular safety, proteomics and biological mass spectrometry. He also contributed to therapeutic projects and led GSK’s early Discovery portfolios against protease, ion channel and epigenetic targets. At the EBI he is responsible for a number of widely used resources including ChEMBL, SureChEMBL, UniChem and ChEBI. His group is also involved in various international collaborations and consortia including Illuminating the Druggable Genome, Open Targets and EUbOPEN. His industry team works with the many commercial organisations and companies that make extensive use of the EBI's resources. |
 Nir London, PhD Nir London, PhD is currently the Alan and Laraine Fischer Career Development Chair in the Department of Chemical and Structural Biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science where he has been since 2015. Dr. London’s lab is developing new technologies to discover and functionalize covalently acting compounds and applies them to drug discovery and chemical biology. Dr. London was recently awarded the Young Investigator in Academia award by the European Federation of Medicinal Chemistry and Chemical Biology. Dr. London completed his PhD in computational structural biology at the Hebrew University and conducted post-doctoral training under the direction of Brian Shoichet at UCSF. |
 Mary Matyskiela, PhD Mary Matyskiela, PhD is Executive Director of Molecular Sciences at Neomorph and brings more than 20 years of experience in the ubiquitin-proteasome field. Dr. Matyskiela is known for her work in elucidating the molecular mechanisms and expanding the horizons of molecular glue targeting through cereblon-CRL4 and is an author of foundational publications in the molecular glue field. At Neomorph, Dr. Matyskiela spearheads efforts to develop molecular glues as targeted protein degradation therapeutics. Dr. Matyskiela’s career has included appointments Celgene and Bristol Myers Squibb, where she spent 6 years working in targeted protein degradation drug discovery, most recently as Associate Director of Structural Biology and Proteomics, Oncology West. Dr. Matyskiela received her B.S. in Chemistry from Yale University, where she performed undergraduate research in the lab of Dr. Craig Crews and PhD from the University of California San Francisco working on ubiquitin ligase mechanisms. She performed postdoctoral research at the University of California Berkeley, studying the structure and function of the 26S proteasome. |
 Marc Nicklaus, PhD Marc Nicklaus, PhD, is a Senior Scientist in the Chemical Biology Laboratory of the Center for Cancer Research at the NCI. Dr. Nicklaus received his Ph.D. in applied physics from the Eberhards-Karls-Universitat, Tubingen, Germany, and then served as a postdoctoral fellow in the Molecular Modeling Section of the then called Laboratory of Medicinal Chemistry, NCI. Dr. Nicklaus became a staff fellow in 1998, and a Senior Scientist in 2002. In 2000, he founded, and has been heading since then, the Computer-Aided Drug Design (CADD) Group. Some of his areas of expertise include chemoinformatics, small-molecule databases, protein-ligand interactions, (quantitative) structure-activity relationships, computer-aided drug design, and computational chemistry. Dr. Nicklaus pioneered work on making large, small-molecule databases and related chemoinformatics tools available to the scientific public on the CADD Group’s web server. He also pioneered the analysis of conformational energies of small molecule ligands bound to proteins. As Head of the CADD Group, he oversees the group’s research program in chemoinformatics, fundamentals of protein-ligand interactions, and in silico screening for targets of high interest to NCI. He makes the latter resources available in collaborative projects to improve NCI’s efforts in hit identification and drug design. |
 Alison Ondrus, PhD Alison Ondrus, PhD, is currently an Assistant Professor in the Division of Chemistry & Chemical Engineering at Caltech. The Ondrus lab studies the molecular roles of metabolites in human health and disease. Dr. Ondrus received her BSc in Chemistry from the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada and her PhD in Organic Synthesis from MIT under the supervision of Prof. Mo Movassaghi. Dr. Ondrus performed postdoctoral studies at Stanford University and the Stanford University School of Medicine in the labs of Profs. Justin Du Bois and James Chen, respectively. |
 Tudor Oprea, MD, PhD Tudor Oprea, MD, PhD is Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine and Director of the Bioinformatics Shared Resource, at the University of New Mexico (UNM) Comprehensive Cancer Center. Dr. Oprea is a health informatics scientist whose interests encompass knowledge management applied to target and drug discovery, translational bioinformatics, target and drug repositioning, and health-record analytics. As Director for Screening Informatics for UNM’s Center for Molecular Discovery, and as Drug Discovery core member at the UNM Comprehensive Cancer Center, he has evaluated over 500 bioassays spanning hundreds of thousands of chemicals, and more than 50 target-based projects, which have led to the identification of 7 NIH-designated chemical probes. Dr. Oprea has further assisted with data analytics of the Danish National Population Health Registry (6.2 million patients over a 15-year period) and since 1989 has been developing machine-learning (ML) models initially applied to chemical informatics, and more recently for computational biology and medicine. |
 Adegboyega Oyelere, PhD Adegboyega Oyelere, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Georgia Tech, Atlanta, Georgia. He obtained his PhD in Chemistry at Brown University and did postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Scott Strobel at Yale University. Dr. Oyelere worked for about 4 years in pharmaceutical industry before starting his independent lab and has over 20 years’ experience in chemical biology and medicinal chemistry. The Oyelere lab research focus is on the design of targeted epigenetic modifiers and RNA-binding molecules as potential drug candidates for treating cancer, bacterial and protozoan infections, and metabolic diseases. Dr. Oyelere has published 73 manuscripts and book chapters, a co-inventor on over 100 patents applications (16 of which are issued patents) and ushered one compound in phase II clinical trials. Dr. Oyelere is the founder of Sophia Bioscience, a startup biotech company funded by NIH/NCI SBIR and Georgia Research Alliance grants. |
 Alexis Rohou, PhD Dr. Alexis Rohou is a Principal Scientist in structural biology at Genentech. He helps direct the cryogenic electron microscopy (cryoEM) facility to support drug discovery and basic research. Dr. Rohou specializes in algorithm and methods development for cryoEM image analysis and its applications to drug discovery. His collaborations span several therapeutic areas and involve solving structures of protein targets bound by small molecules, antibody fragments, or cyclic peptides, in some cases enabling nomination of molecules into clinical trials. He is also actively engaged in the development of state-of the art, open source software packages for cryoEM image processing (cisTEM) or information and lab management (gP2S) that together enable higher throughput and more reliable support of multiple projects in parallel. |
 Orit Rozenblatt-Rosen, PhD Orit Rozenblatt-Rosen, PhD, is Head of Cellular and Tissue Genomics and Executive Director at Genentech. Dr. Rosen is a pioneer of single-cell genomics, especially in the context of human tissues. She has played a key role in developing systematic pipelines for genomic profiling of single cells and nuclei from healthy and disease tissues such as cancer. Prior to joining Genentech, Dr. Rosen held scientific appointments in academia over a 20-year period first at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and then at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (including as lead scientist at the Broad for the International Human Cell Atlas Initiative. Dr. Rosen received her B.Sc and M.Sc degrees from Tel Aviv University, and PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science. She conducted postdoctoral studies at the Weizmann Institute of Science and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. |
 Yolanda Sanchez, PhD Yolanda Sanchez, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Molecular and Systems Biology at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and the Associate Director of Basic Sciences at the Norris Cotton Cancer Center, an NCI-Designated Comprehensive Cancer Center. In addition to work in genomic stability, Dr. Sanchez’s laboratory has also built genetic platforms that were used in synthetic lethal chemical screens for the identification of drugs and drug targets for the treatment of cancer, especially Nervous System tumors. Dr. Sanchez built an interdisciplinary team at Dartmouth, PENN and Jackson laboratories (JAX) for this program, which implemented novel cross-organismal, chemical, genomic, proteomic and bioinformatics strategies to identify potential therapeutic targets and lead molecules to be developed into new precision therapies for tumors with Ras-pathway dysregulation due to NF1 loss or KRAS mutation. The multidisciplinary team identified three new targets and therapeutic lead compounds, and the long-term objective for this work is to design Phase I trials with agents that target the pathways that are efficacious at shrinking the neurological and pancreatic tumors in their pre-clinical models. As a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Stephen Elledge’s laboratory, at the Baylor College of Medicine, Dr. Sanchez used biochemical and genetic approaches in yeast and mammalian cells to dissect the signaling pathways that regulate DNA replication and Mitosis following DNA damage. Her work showed that the pathways were conserved and that an evolutionarily conserved checkpoint kinase 1 (Chk1) functioned to regulate progression through mitosis following DNA damage. The discovery of Chk1 and its function led to the development of the human Chk1 kinase as an oncology target in Phase II clinical trials. |
 Ansuman Satpathy, M.D., Ph.D. Ansuman Satpathy M.D., Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Satpathy’s research group focuses on developing and applying genome-scale technologies to study fundamental properties of the immune system in health, infection, and cancer. Dr. Satpathy is a member of the Stanford Cancer Institute, the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, Immunology, Cancer Biology, and Biomedical Informatics Programs, Bio-X, and a faculty fellow in ChEM-H. Dr. Satpathy completed his M.D. and Ph.D. in immunology at Washington University in St. Louis, clinical residency in pathology at Stanford Hospital and Clinics, and postdoctoral training in genetics at Stanford University. |
 Min Shen, PhD Min Shen, PhD, is currently an Informatics Group Leader working at the Early Translation Branch, Division of Preclinical Innovation at the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS). Dr. Shen has expertise in high-throughput screening, cheminformatics, virtual screening, hit identification and lead optimization using various computational approaches. Dr. Shen came to NCATS in 2008 from Lexicon Pharmaceuticals, where she was the lead computational scientist responsible for drug candidate identification and optimization through ligand- or protein structure-based design and virtual screening. Dr. Shen received her B.S. degree in pharmaceutical sciences from Peking University School of Pharmacy, and a Ph.D. degree in computational chemistry from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. |
 Eline Sijbesma, PhD Eline Sijbesma, PhD, is amongst the founding scientists at Ambagon Therapeutics, Eindhoven Netherlands. Her work at Ambagon is focused on the development of first-in-class drugs through targeted stabilization of protein complexes, namely on endogenous tumor suppression activity of 14-3-3 proteins bound to transcription factors and oncoproteins that have proven challenging to modulate with conventional approaches. Her work has encompassed the exploration of fragment-based drug discovery to identify small molecule stabilizers, that act as 'molecular glues'. Dr. Sijbesma earned her MS and PhD degrees at Eindhoven University of Technology (Netherlands) and part of her studies were conducted at the Small Molecule Discovery Center (SMDC) in the group of Dr. Michelle Arkin at the University of California in San Francisco (UCSF) where she initiated a fragment-based drug discovery project that explores protein-protein interactions as novel drug targets. |
 M. Ryan Weil, PhD M. Ryan Weil, PhD, is the Director of Strategic and Data Science Initiatives (SDSI) at the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research. He and his team focus on collaborative development of innovative data and scalable computing and future computational infrastructure to accelerate cancer research and develop new treatments. As SDSI director, Dr. Weil brings a driving scientific focus for several interagency collaborative programs—in particular, the National Cancer Institute-Department of Energy Collaboration projects: Innovative Methodologies and New Data for Predictive Oncology Model Evaluation (IMPROVE) and the Accelerating Therapeutics for Opportunities in Medicine (ATOM) Consortium. Dr. Weil also leads scientific computing program development and next gen workforce capability initiatives for the NCI Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology. Dr. Weil has over 20 years of experience and leadership in health and life sciences, focusing on analytics, bioinformatics, and high performance computing. He has led transformative initiatives resulting in improved clinical decision support, quality of care, and improved efficiencies for national, public, and private healthcare organizations worldwide. For more than 10 years, Dr. Weil led collaborative projects with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other international multidisciplinary experts in cheminformatics and drug design. Dr. Weil received a BS in Microbiology from Texas A&M College Station and a Ph.D. in Molecular Biophysics from UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. |
 Pamela Williams, D.Phil Pamela Williams, D.Phil, is a senior director in the Molecular Sciences group at Astex Pharmaceuticals, Cambridge UK. Dr. Williams is a structural biologist and an authority of Fragment Based Drug Discovery. Dr. Williams is the recipient of the prestigious Biochemical Society’s Industry and Academic Collaboration Award. Her current focus is on the integration of cryo-EM structure determination into the drug discovery process, building upon her interest in structure-based drug discovery technologies. Before joining Astex Pharmaceuticals, Dr. Williams was a postdoctoral research associate at the Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, where her work focused on the X-ray structure determination of metalloenzymes involved in electron transfer and xenobiotic metabolism. Dr. Williams has a DPhil in Molecular Biophysics from Oxford University. |
 Hao Wu, PhD Hao Wu, PhD, is the Asa and Patricia Springer Professor of Structural Biology and Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The Wu laboratory of mechanistic immunology focuses on elucidating cellular and structural regulation in innate immune pathways, in particular the inflammasome pathway. Activation of inflammasomes, IL-1 and IL-18 signaling, and pyroptotic cell death plays an important role in host defense against infection and cancer, whereas excessive inflammation driven by inflammasomes and the cytokine signaling pathways is causal or associated with many inflammation-driven diseases such as cardiovascular conditions and neurodegeneration. Her research provides new opportunities for drug targeting by therapeutic intervention of supramolecular complexes in cellular innate immunity. Among other biophysical methods, the Wu lab utilizes: 1) cryo-EM to provide a detailed understanding of molecular complexes which includes a large number of membrane proteins, 2) drug screening and validation of potential therapeutics in immune diseases and cancers, and 3) cellular imaging and other tools to delineate the assembly of supramolecular complexes in cells. |
 Peijung Zhang, PhD Peijung Zhang, PhD, is a professor of structural biology and a Wellcome Trust Investigator at the Nuffield Department of Medicine at Oxford University. Professor Zhang’s research is aimed at an integrated, atomistic understanding of molecular mechanisms of virus and bacterial infections by developing and combining novel technologies for high-resolution cryo-EM and cryo-electron tomography with complementary computational and biophysical/biochemical methods. Her current research efforts focus on HIV-1 capsid assembly, maturation, and interactions with host cell factors such as CypA, TRIM5α, TRIMCyp, CPSF6 and MxB to decipher their underlying functional roles. In bacteria, the Zhang laboratory investigates chemotaxis signaling pathways with the long-term goal of mapping out the signaling pathway by assembling the structural “snapshots” of signaling states. All of Professor Zhang’s research is complemented with ongoing developments of novel cryo-EM methods and technologies. Such technological advancements include correlative microscopy, cryo-FIB/SEM and high-resolution sub-tomogram classification and averaging. |