David Giedroc, Chair
Indiana University, USA
ORCID: 0000-0002-2342-1620
David Giedroc earned a B.S. in Biochemistry from the Pennsylvania State University and Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in 1984. Following a postdoctoral stint as an NIH postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of the late Joseph Coleman at Yale University, he joined the faculty in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at Texas A&M University in 1988. He joined the Department of Chemistry at Indiana University in 2007, served as Chair of Department from 2010-1015 and is Lilly Chemistry Alumni Professor. Prof. Giedroc’s research interests fall under a common umbrella coined the biophysical chemistry of infectious disease. He has long-standing interests in transition metal homeostasis (metallostasis) and more recent interests in hydrogen sulfide (H2S) sensing and reactive sulfur species (RSS) in major nosocomial bacterial pathogens. Prof. Giedroc seeks a molecular-level understanding of macromolecular structure, dynamics and regulation, and uses the tools of biophysical chemistry, bioinorganic chemistry, proteomic profiling and NMR structure determination.
Claudia Blindauer
University of Warwick, UK
ORCID: 0000-0001-8396-9332
Claudia Blindauer is an Associate Professor in Chemistry at the University of Warwick, UK. She graduated with a Diplom Chemie form the University of Freiburg Germany, before moving to the University of Basel, Switzerland, where she worked with Prof. Helmut Sigel. For her post-doctoral work, she moved to the University of Edinburgh, Scotland to work with Prof. Peter Sadler.
At Warwick, she held the Royal Society Olga Kennard Fellowship from 2004 to 2009. Her research concerns structure and dynamics of proteins involved in metal (in particular zinc) homeostasis. Recent work has focused on bioinformatics (genome mining and homology modelling), bioanalytical (metallomics and metalloproteomics) and biophysical (NMR spectroscopy and mass spectrometry) studies of protein-metal interactions, from a variety of biological systems including marine cyanobacteria, plants, and animals.
Maria Montes-Bayon
University of Oviedo, Spain
ORCID: 0000-0001-6114-9405
Maria Montes-Bayón holds a permanent position as Associate Professor in the Analytical Chemistry Area of the Department of Physical and Analytical Chemistry at the University of Oviedo since April 2008. She did her Master Thesis at the University de Plymouth (UK) under the ERASMUS program supervised by Dr. Hywel Evans and Prof A. Sanz-Medel (November, 1994). Then, she started her PhD studies in Oviedo and in July 1999 she defended her Doctoral Thesis (supervised by Prof. Sanz Medel and Garcia-Alonso) that was awarded with the Extraordinary Prize in the Area of Analytical Chemistry within the University of Oviedo. In April 2000, she joined the research group of Prof. Joseph A. Caruso in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio (USA) as Postdoctoral Fulbright Fellow until July 2002. In August of the same year she got back to the University of Oviedo as Research Scientist (Ramón y Cajal programme) in the Analytical Spectrometry Group until 2007. In 2008 she obtained the position of Associate Professor (accreditation as Full Professor, 2014). She is co-author of more than 100 original research publications and reviews, as well as several book chapters and in 2013 she got the Bunsen-Kirchhoff Award from the German Society of Chemists (GDCh). She participates in different research projects (national and regional) through which her research in funded.
Katherine Franz
Duke University, USA
ORCID: 0000-0002-9015-0998
Katherine J. Franz is the Alexander F. Hehmeyer Professor of Chemistry at Duke University. She received her BA from Wellesley College in 1995. As an undergraduate she conducted research with Prof. James Loehlin at Wellesley and with Dr. Richard H. Fish at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. She obtained her PhD in inorganic chemistry with Prof. Stephen J. Lippard at MIT, and completed an NIH postdoctoral fellowship with Prof. Barbara Imperiali, also at MIT. Since 2003, Kathy and her research group at Duke focus on elucidating the structural and functional consequences of metal ion coordination in biological systems, both by endogenous species and by synthetic molecules of their own design. They are particularly interested in understanding the coordination chemistry of essential yet toxic species like copper and iron, and using these principles to guide the development of new chemical tools to manipulate the location, speciation, and reactivity of metal ions in complex and dynamic environments like those found in biological systems.
Gilles Gasser
Chemie ParisTech, France
Gilles Gasser was born, raised and educated in Switzerland. After a PhD thesis in supramolecular chemistry with Prof. Helen Stoeckli-Evans (University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland), Gilles performed two post-docs, first with the late Prof. Leone Spiccia (Monash University, Australia) in bioinorganic chemistry and then as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow with Prof. Nils Metzler Nolte (Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany) in bioorganometallic chemistry. Gilles then started his independent scientific career at the University of Zurich in 2010 first as a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Ambizione Fellow and then as a SNSF Assistant Professor in 2011. In 2016, Gilles moved to Chimie ParisTech, University (France), thanks among other to a PSL Chair of Excellence Program Grant. Gilles was the recipient of several fellowships and awards including the Alfred Werner Award from the Swiss Chemical Society, an ERC Consolidator Grant, the Thieme Chemistry Journal Award, the Jucker Award for his contribution to cancer research and recently the EuroBIC medal for his work on bioinorganic chemistry. Gilles’s research group aims at utilizing the specific physico-chemical properties of metal complexes in different areas of medicinal chemistry.
Hugh Harris
University of Adelaide, Australia
Hugh Harris is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Adelaide, Australia. He earned his undergraduate and PhD (2000) degrees from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, before taking up postdoctoral positions at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource and then at the University of Sydney as an Australian Synchrotron Research Program Fellow. His research interest is in the broad field of metals and metalloids (especially selenium) in biology with a focus on human diseases and their treatment. X-ray absorption spectroscopy and X-ray fluorescence imaging are key research tools in this work as they are able to provide information on intact tissue samples.
Kazuya Kikuchi
Osaka University, Japan
Kazuya Kikuchi earned a B.S. and Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the University of Tokyo (Japan) and did his postdoctoral training at UCSD with Prof Roger Y. Tsien (USA) and the Scripps Research Institute with Prof Donald Hilvert (USA). He was appointed as a research associate at the University of Tokyo (Japan) thereafter and promoted to associate professor. He was appointed as a full professor at Osaka University in 2005. His research is directed at the design and synthesis of chemical probes which can be directly used in the living systems. Throughout his career, he has been involved in molecular imaging probes development for both fluorescence imaging and magnetic resonance imaging. He is also focused in in vivo imaging and single molecule cellular imaging.
