Speakers and Biographies

This page contains biographies of the invited speakers at Chemistry in the New World of Bioengineering and Synthetic Biology.

Jason Chin

Jason Chin is a Group Leader at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (MRC-LMB), and a fellow in the Natural Sciences at Trinity College, Cambridge University. Jason was an undergraduate at Oxford University and obtained his PhD as a Fulbright grantee for his work with Professor Alanna Schepartz at Yale University.  In 2001 Jason joined Professor Peter Schultz's lab at Scripps as a Damon Ruyon Fellow.  From July 2003 to early 2007 he was a tenure-track group leader at MRC-LMB.  He became an EMBO Young Investigator in 2005 and a tenured group leader at MRC-LMB in 2007.  

Jason's work spans chemical biology and synthetic biology. He created the first method to systematically expand the eukaryotic genetic code. He created and applied the first method to introduce photochemical probes into proteins in both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells and map protein interactions in vivo. His lab has shown that it possible to evolve and reprogramme the ribosome, long thought un-evolvable, to invent new forms of gene regulation, gain insight into ribosome function, and create new genetic codes.   His lab is currently applying the tools they have developed in numerous areas, with a particular emphasis on deciphering how information for organism function is combinatorially encoded in post translational modifications.

Joshua Edel

Joshua Edel has received his PhD in physical chemistry at Imperial College London in 2004, his thesaural studies focusing on the development of single molecule detection within microfluidic systems. This was followed by postdoctoral training in Nanobiotechnology at Cornell University with Professor Harold Craighead. In 2005 he was awarded a research fellowship at the Rowland Institute at Harvard University to study the structure and interactions of individual biomolecules in their native cellular environment. In July 2006 he was appointed to a joint lectureship between the Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Department of Chemistry at Imperial College London. His core research focus is in the development of nanofluidic devices to study and further understand biophysical systems at the single molecule level.

Duncan Graham

Professor Duncan Graham is director of the Centre for Molecular Nanometrology at the University of Strathclyde where the grouping is focused on creating new methods of bioanalysis based on nanoparticle based sensors and optical spectroscopy, and in particular SERRS. He has published close to 100 papers and has been awarded the SAC silver medal, Nexxus young life scientist of the year and was recently elected to the fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Henry Hess

Henry Hess is currently an assistant professor at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering of the University of Florida. He received a diploma in physics from the Technical University Berlin in 1996, and obtained his Dr rer. nat. (summa cum laude) in experimental physics from the Free University of Berlin in 1999 under the guidance of Ludger Woeste. His postdoctoral studies were conducted from 2000 to 2002 at the Department of Bioengineering, University of Washington, where he also served as a research assistant professor (2002-2005). He received the Wolfgang Paul Award of the German Society for Mass Spectrometry (2000) and, together with his postdoctoral mentor Viola Vogel, the Philip Morris Forschungspreis (2005).

Luc Jaeger

Dr. Luc Jaeger received his PhD in Structural Biochemistry and Biophysics from the University Louis Pasteur of Strasbourg, France, in 1993. After postdoctoral studies at the Scripps Research Institute (La Jolla, CA) he worked as a CNRS research scientist at the "Institut de Biologie Moléculaire et Cellulaire" in Strasbourg from 1995 to 2002. In 2002, he joined as a faculty the department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the Biomolecular Science and Engineering Program at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB). He is also affiliated to the California NanoSystem Institute and the Material Research Laboratory (MRL) at UCSB. 

Luc Jaeger present scientific interests encompass the understanding of the fundamental assembly and folding rules governing the three-dimensional shape of complex natural nucleic acids, especially RNA, and their use to synthesize and characterize artificial programmable nucleic acid-based nano-materials with novel responsive, recognition and catalytic properties. He is also interested in questions related to structural molecular evolution, self-organization and emergence of complexity. His research combines a broad range of theoretical and experimental approaches at the interfaces of chemistry, biology, and physics.

Jacob Klein

Jacob Klein works in the area of soft matter. In recent years he has studied the effect of molecular confinement on liquids and macromolecules, and on understanding the nanotribology of aqueous systems, particularly biological lubrication. From 2000-2007 he was the Dr. Lee's Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford.

Víctor de Lorenzo

Víctor de Lorenzo is Professor of Research at the Spanish National Centre of Biotechnology. He was born in Madrid in 1957 and he studied Chemistry at the Complutense University until 1980. He completed his PhD in Biochemistry in the Autonomous University in 1983. He then started a series of postdocs, which led him first to the Pasteur Institute (1984, working with A.P. Pugsley), then to the University of California in Berkeley (1985-1987, with J.B. Neilands) and finally to the Laboratory of K.N. Timmis in the University of Geneva (1988) and later in the GBF in Braunschweig (1989-1991). He joined the Spanish Research Council (CSIC) in 1991. Since then, he has led a large number of projects on the genetic programming of soil bacteria as agents to remediate environmental pollution.

Milan Mrksich

Milan Mrksich earned his PhD at Caltech and was an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard.  He started his independent position in 1996 and now directs a laboratory that engineers interfaces between materials and biological environments for studies of cell function and for the development of high throughput tools in biology.  Dr. Mrksich serves on several industrial, governmental and journal advisory boards and has received the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, the TR100 Young Innovator Award, and the ACS Arthur C. Cope Young Scholar Award.

Samuel Stupp

Professor Samuel Stupp earned his B.S. in Chemistry from the University of California at Los Angeles and his Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from Northwestern University in 1977. He was a member of the faculty at Northwestern until 1980 and then spent 18 years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he was appointed in 1996 Swanlund Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Chemistry, and Bioengineering.

In 1999, he returned to Northwestern as a Board of Trustees professor of Materials Science, Chemistry, and Medicine, and later was appointed Director of Northwestern's Institute for BioNanotechnology in Medicine.

Professor Stupp is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and fellow of the American Physical Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, World Technology Network, and World Biomaterials Congress. His awards include the Department of Energy Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Materials Chemistry, a Humboldt Senior Award, the Materials Research Society's Medal Award, and the American Chemical Society Award in Polymer Chemistry for his work on supramolecular self-assembly.

In 2005 Professor Stupp was listed in the Scientific American 50 Leaders Shaping the Future of Technology. His research is focused on self assembly of materials with special interest in regenerative medicine, cancer therapies, and solar energy technologies.

Andrew Turberfield

Andrew Turberfield is a physicist working on nanofabrication by biomolecular self-assembly, including the construction of synthetic molecular motors from DNA.  His background is in low-temperature semiconductor spectroscopy, and his other research interest is the development of optical techniques for the fabrication of three-dimensional photonic crystal structures and devices.

Ron Weiss

Ron Weiss is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University, and also holds a faculty appointment in the Department of Molecular Biology. He received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering (2001). His research focuses primarily on synthetic biology, where he programs cell behavior by constructing and modeling biochemical and cellular computing systems. A major thrust of his work is the synthesis of gene networks that are engineered to perform in vivo analog and digital logic computation. He is also interested in programming cell aggregates to perform coordinated tasks using cell-cell communication with chemical diffusion mechanisms such as quorum sensing. He has constructed and tested several novel in vivo biochemical logic circuits and intercellular communication systems. Weiss is interested in both hands-on experimental work and in implementing software infrastructures for simulation and design work.

For his work in Synthetic Biology, Weiss has received MIT's Technology Review Magazine's TR100 Award ("top 100 young innovators", 2003), was selected as a speaker for the National Academy of Engineering's Frontiers of Engineering Symposium (2003), received the E. Lawrence Keyes, Jr./Emerson Electric Company Faculty Advancement Award at Princeton University (2003), his research in synthetic biology was named by MIT's Technology Review Magazine as one of "10 emerging technologies that will change your world" (2004), was chosen as a finalist for the World Technology Network's Biotechnology Award (2004), and was selected as a speaker for the National Academy of Sciences Frontiers of Science Symposium (2005).  During recent years, Weiss has had several major publications in journals such as Nature, Nature Biotechnology, and PNAS.

Dek Woolfson

Dek Woolfson took his first degree in Chemistry at the University of Oxford.  He then did a PhD at the University of Cambridge followed by post-doctoral research at University College London and the University of California, Berkeley.  After 10 years as Lecturer through to Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Sussex, he moved to the University of Bristol in 2005 to take up a joint chair in Chemistry and Biochemistry. 
His research has always been at the interface between chemistry and biology, applying chemical methods and principles to understand biological phenomena.  Specifically, his group is interested in the challenge of rational protein design, and in how this can be applied in synthetic biology and bionanotechnology.