Hiroaki Suga, Editorial Board Chair
University of Tokyo, Japan
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-5298-9186
Hiroaki Suga is a Professor of the Department of Chemistry, Graduate School of Science in the University of Tokyo. He was born in Okayama City, Japan in 1963. He received his Bachelor of Engineering (1986) and Master of Engineering (1989) from Okayama University, and Ph. D. in Chemistry (1994) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After three years of post-doctoral work in Massachusetts General Hospital, he was appointed as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry in the State University of New York at Buffalo (1997) and promoted to the tenured Associate Professor (2002). In 2003, he moved to the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology in the University of Tokyo as an Associate Professor, and soon after he was promoted to Full Professor. In 2010, he changed his affiliation to the Department of Chemistry, Graduate School of Science. His research interests are in the field of bioorganic chemistry, chemical biology and biotechnology related to RNA, translation, and peptides. He is also a founder of PeptiDream Inc. Tokyo, a publicly traded company at the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, which has many partnerships with pharmaceutical companies in worldwide. He has received many awards in Japan and Max-Bergmann Medal 2016.
Gonçalo Bernardes
University of Cambridge, UK and IMM, Portugal
After completing his DPhil in 2008 at the University of Oxford, UK, he undertook postdoctoral work at the Max-Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Germany, and the ETH Zürich, Switzerland, and worked as a Group Leader at Alfama Lda in Portugal. He started his independent research career in 2013 at the University of Cambridge as a Royal Society University Research Fellow. In 2018 he was appointed University Lecturer (Tenured) and was promoted to Reader (Associate Professor) in 2019. Gonçalo is the recipient of two European Research Council grants, a starting grant and a proof-of-concept grant, and was awarded the Harrison–Meldola Memorial Prize and the ChemSocRev Emerging Investigator Lectureship in 2016, both from the Royal Society of Chemistry. His research group interests focus on the use of chemistry principles to tackle challenging biological problems for understanding and fighting cancer.
Claudia Höbartner
University of Würzburg, Germany
Claudia Höbartner is a Professor at the Institute of Organic Chemistry at the University of Würzburg. She studied chemistry at the Technical University of Vienna and at ETH Zürich, and earned her PhD from the University of Innsbruck in 2004. After a postdoctoral stay at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, she joined the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen as a research group leader. In 2014, Claudia was appointed as associate professor at the University of Göttingen, and since 2017 she has been a full professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Würzburg. The main research interests in her lab concern the chemistry and chemical biology of functional nucleic acids and nucleic acid modifications, with a focus on structures, mechanisms and applications of ribozymes and aptamers.
Zaneta Nikolovska-Coleska
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA
ORCID: 0000-0001-6688-4206
Dr Zaneta Nikolovska-Coleska is a Professor of Pathology, Director of Molecular & Cellular Pathology Graduate Program, and Associate Director of Program in Biomedical Sciences at the University of Michigan. She also serves as a co-Director of T32 NIGMS Training Program in Translational Research. Dr Nikolovska-Coleska received her BS in Pharmacy (1987) and MS and PhD in Pharmaceutical Chemistry (1993 and 1999 respectively) from University Ss. Cyril and Methodius, Skopje, North Macedonia. She held the position of Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at her alma mater university and completed her postdoctoral training at the University of Michigan, under the guidance of Professor Shaomeng Wang. Dr Nikolovska-Coleska joined the faculty of the Department of Pathology as a tenure-track Assistant Professor (2008), and was promoted to the tenured Associate Professor (2015) and Full Professor (2021). Her research is focused on validating and targeting protein-protein interactions, chemical genomics, and development of small-molecule inhibitors as targeted cancer therapies. Dr Nikolovska-Coleska holds a number of patents and has received numerous awards including, New Investigator Award from Leukemia Research Foundation, Innovator Award from Harrington Discovery Institute and AACR-Bayer Innovation and Discovery Award. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the International Chemical Biology Society (ICBS) and in 2019 was elected President-Elect.
Seung Bum Park
Seoul National University, South Korea
ORCID ID: 0000-0003-1753-1433
Seung Bum Park is Professor of the Chemistry Department and Director of the CRI Center for Chemical Proteomics at Seoul National University. He was born in Seoul in 1970. He received his BS (1993) and MS (1997) in Chemistry from Yonsei University, Korea and his PhD (2001) in Bioorganic Chemistry from Texas A&M University. After three years of post-doctoral training at Harvard University under the guidance of Professor Stuart L. Schreiber, he was appointed as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Chemistry Department of Seoul National University (2004) and promoted to the tenured Associate Professor (2008) and Full Professor (2013). His research interests in the field of chemical biology include molecular diversity, fluorescent bioprobes, phenotypic screening, and target identification for drug discovery targeting protein-protein interaction. Seung Bum serves on grant committees and as a scientific advisory board member for various journals and research organizations. He has won a number of awards and founded bio-venture SPARK Biopharma, Inc. (2016).
Andrea Rentmeister
University of Münster, Germany
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-3107-4147
Andrea Rentmeister is a Professor at the Department of Chemistry of the University of Münster. She studied Chemistry at the Technical University of Graz and the University of Bonn, where she earned her PhD in 2007. After a postdoctoral stay at the California Institute of Technology, she started her independent career as a Junior Professor at the University of Hamburg in 2010. In 2013, Andrea was appointed as Associate Professor at the University of Münster, and in 2020 promoted to Full Professor.
Research in her lab focuses on RNA at the interface of chemistry and biochemistry and aims to understand and ultimately control the processes affecting mRNA expression and turnover. Andrea has won a number of awards and serves on several advisory and executive boards.
Roderich Süssmuth
Technical University of Berlin, Germany
ORCID ID: 0000-0001-7027-2069
Roderich Süssmuth is Professor of the Department of Chemistry at the Technical University of Berlin. He received his Diploma in Chemistry (1995) and his PhD in Chemistry (1998) from the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. This was followed by a post-doctoral stay at The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla (2000-2001) and an Assistant Professor position with an Emmy-Noether Fellowship at the University of Tübingen (2002-2004). Roderich was appointed to the position of Associate Professor at TU Berlin in 2004, and Full Professor in 2009. Roderich’s research interests are in the fields of peptide chemistry, peptide drugs, medicinal chemistry and the biosynthesis and mode of action of natural products. Roderich serves on various grant committees and has received various awards and recognitions.
Cai-Guang Yang
Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, China
Cai-Guang Yang was born in Liaoning, China in 1974. He received his BSc in Chemical Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 1997. He earned his PhD in Organic Chemistry on the total synthesis of natural products from Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 2002. He moved to the University of Chicago to begin his post-doctoral training in the Chemistry Department.
After six years of post-doctoral work at the interface of chemistry and biology, Cai-Guang returned to Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, CAS to start his independent research and has been appointed as a professor since 2008. His research interests are in the fields of medicinal chemistry, structure biology, and chemical biology related to RNA methylation, antimicrobial resistance, small-molecule inhibitor/activator, and drug discovery.
Michelle Arkin
University of California, San Francisco, USA
Michelle is a Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco, and an Adjunct Professor at the Buck Institute of Research on Aging. Her lab focuses on chemical biology of protein-protein interaction networks and other challenging targets in diseases such as Alzheimer’s Disease and cancer. Michelle co-directs the UCSF Small Molecule Discovery Center (SMDC), which works with investigators in academics, biotech, and pharma to develop first-in-class probes and drug leads for novel targets across therapeutic areas. Michelle is the President of Board of Directors the Academic Drug Discovery Consortium, a member of the Board of Directors for the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS), and a member of the Editorial Board of the Assay Guidance Manual and other chemical biology journals. She represents UCSF in the National Cancer Institute’s Chemical Biology Consortium and the Accelerating Therapeutics for Opportunities in Medicine (ATOM) consortium. Before UCSF, Michelle was the Associate Director of Cell Biology at Sunesis Pharmaceuticals, where she helped discover inhibitors of protein-protein interactions, including IL-2/IL-2R, and LFA1/ICAM (lifitigrast).
Jennifer Heemstra
Emory University, Atlanta, USA
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-7691-8526
Jennifer Heemstra is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Emory University. She was born in the United States in 1978. She received her BS in Chemistry from University of California, Irvine (2000) and her PhD in Chemistry from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (2005). After a short time in industry, she returned to academia as a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University. She began her independent career at the University of Utah in 2010 and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2016. In 2017, she moved with her lab to Emory University.
Research in her lab is focused on harnessing the molecular recognition and self-assembly properties of nucleic acids for applications in biosensing and bioimaging.
Ali Tavassoli
University of Southampton, UK
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-7420-5063
Ali Tavassoli is Professor of Chemical Biology at the School of Chemistry, University of Southampton. Ali was born in Iran in 1975. He received his BSc from Bristol University (1995), followed by a PhD in Organic Chemistry from Reading University (1999). This was followed by a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in bio-organic chemistry at Sussex University, and a five year postdoctoral fellowship in chemical biology at the Pennsylvania State University. In 2006, Ali was appointed Lecturer in Chemical Biology at the University of Southampton, and promoted to Reader in 2011. Ali was awarded a personal Chair and promoted to Professor of Chemical Biology in 2015. His research interests are in the field of chemical biology related to nucleic acids, peptides and proteins; and cell biology, particularly cellular hypoxia-response. Ali is also founder and CSO of Curve Therapeutics, and current President of the RSC’s Chemical Biology Interface Division. Ali has won a number of awards including the 2017 Medimmune Protein and Peptide Science Award and the 2020 Leonidas Zervas Award from the European Peptide Society.
