2nd Alpine Winter Conference on Medicinal and Synthetic Chemistry

Dirk Trauner was born and raised in Linz, Austria, studied biology and chemistry at the University of Vienna, and received his undergraduate degree in chemistry from the Free University, Berlin. He then pursued graduate studies in chemistry under the direction of Prof. Johann Mulzer, with whom he moved to the University of Frankfurt and then back to Vienna where he obtained his Ph.D. Following a stint in the Austrian Army, he became a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Samuel J. Danishefsky at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. After two great years in New York City, Dr. Trauner joined the Department of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, where he rose through the ranks to become an Associate Professor of chemistry (with tenure) and a member of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In 2008, he moved to the University of Munich as a Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Genetics. In the Spring of 2017 he returned to the United States as the Janice Cutler Chair in Chemistry at New York University (Department of Chemistry). He also holds and appointment at the NYU Langone School of Medicine and is a member of the NYU Neuroscience Institute and of the Perlmutter Cancer Center.

Matthias did his PhD with Prof. Klebe and joined the Computational Chemistry group of Boehringer Ingelheim in Biberach in 2006. In 2010 he became team lead of one of the Computational Chemistry teams with a focus on respiratory diseases. Since 2017 he is “Head of Computational Chemistry“.

Dave Nicewicz completed his Chemistry B.S. (2000) and M.S. (2001) degrees at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. He then moved to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill where he completed his Ph.D. with Prof. Jeffrey S. Johnson in 2006. Nicewicz then was a Ruth L. Kirschstein Postdoctoral Fellow with Prof. David W. C. MacMillan. In 2009, Dave began his independent career at the UNC Chapel Hill, where his laboratory has focused on organic photoredox catalysis for the development of novel chemical reactivity. He has received awards from UNC (Ruth Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement), industry (Boehringer Ingelheim; Amgen; Eli Lilly), private foundations (Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering; Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award) and international recognition (The 13th Hirata Award, Nagoya University). In 2015, he was promoted to Associate Professor, and then Full Professor in 2018.

Tobias Ritter received his undergraduate education in Braunschweig, Germany, Bordeaux, France, Lausanne, Switzerland, and Stanford, US. He has performed undergraduate research with Prof. Barry M. Trost at Stanford, obtained his PhD working with Prof. Erick M. Carreira at ETH Zurich in 2004, and was a postdoc with Prof. Robert H. Grubbs at Caltech. In 2006, Tobias was appointed as Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard, promoted to Associate Professor in 2010, and to Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in 2012. Since 2015 he is director at the Max-Planck-Institut fuer Kohlenforschung in Germany, since 2018 as the Managing Director, and holds additional faculty appointments at RWTH Aachen and Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston. The Ritter lab focuses on late-stage functionalization chemistry, with a focus on fluorination methods and their application to molecular imaging. In 2011, Tobias founded SciFluor LifeScience, a clinical pharmaceutical company in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Richmond Sarpong is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of California Berkeley where he and his group specialize in synthetic organic chemistry. Richmond completed his undergraduate studies at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN and his graduate work was carried out with Prof. Martin Semmelhack at Princeton. He conducted postdoctoral studies at Caltech with Prof. Brian Stoltz. At Berkeley, Richmond’s laboratory focuses on the synthesis of bioactive complex organic molecules, with a particular focus on secondary metabolites that come from marine or terrestrial flora and fauna. Of all his professional accomplishments, Richmond is most proud of the students with whom he has worked.

Chris Vanderwal was born in Germany (to Canadian parents). At the age of nearly five, young Chris moved with his parents to Ottawa, Canada, where he attended school, up to and including university (BSc in Biochemistry, MSc in Chemistry from the University of Ottawa). Chris moved to sunny San Diego, where he earned his PhD under the supervision of Erik Sorensen at Scripps in 2003. Chris then moved back to the cold as a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University in the lab of Eric Jacobsen. Chris enthusiastically joined the Chemistry Department faculty at UC Irvine in 2005. In 2011, Chris was promoted to Associate Professor of Chemistry with tenure, and was named a UCI Chancellor’s Faculty Fellow. In 2013, Chris was promoted to Professor.

Martin Hayes is currently Biocatalysis Leader in Hit Discovery, part of Discovery Sciences at AstraZeneca in Gothenburg, Sweden. He has over 25 years of industrial experience in drug discovery and development in large pharma and biotech with research interests in biocatalysis, biotransformation, natural products chemistry, analytical chemistry, structure elucidation and drug design. MH has held roles as a Team Leader, Design Leader and Project Leader at AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline and Xenova. He led preclinical biotransformation studies on the P2Y12 blockbuster Brilinta/Brilique and DMPK design efforts for the FLAP inhibitor AZD5718 for atherosclerosis, currently in Phase 2. He is Industrial Lead for small molecule development and member of the Prosperity Partnership Management Board for the EPSRC/BBRSC PP Grant to establish a new Centre for Biocatalytic Manufacture of New Modalities (CBNM) at Manchester University (2018-2023). He was PI on the Marie Curie FP7 funded P4FIFTY project (2013-2017). He has published over 35 papers in peer-reviewed journals, holds 14 patents and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2000. Martin worked with Prof Tom Simpson FRS at the University of Bristol on mechanistic aspects of fungal polyketide chain assembly, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship with Prof Bryan Jones at University of Toronto.

Danette received her B.A. from Columbia University, Ph.D. in Biophysics from Yale University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University School of Medicine studying the biophysical and biochemical mechanisms of the Wnt signaling pathway. She has been at Promega Corporation for 14 years and is currently an R&D Group Leader of Functional Proteomics. She leads a team developing technologies and performing research to understand dynamic intracellular interactions within the focus areas of targeted protein degradation, epigenetics, and drug discovery.

Larry Hamann is currently Corporate Vice President and Global Head of Chemistry at Celgene, with responsibility for Medicinal and Computational Chemistry, Biochemistry, Structural and Chemical Biology and Screening. In > 27 years in drug discovery he has led teams responsible for more than 17 clinical stage compounds, including the FDA approved DPP4 inhibitor saxagliptin (Onglyza™) for type 2 diabetes, and first-in-class HCV NS5A inhibitor daclatasvir (Daklinza™) for hepatitis C. Prior to Celgene, Larry was Executive Director, Global Discovery Chemistry at Novartis, overseeing programs in oncology, neuroscience, respiratory, cardiovascular, and rare genetic disease. Previously, Larry was at Bristol-Myers Squibb and Ligand Pharmaceuticals. Larry holds a BS in Chemistry from the University of Detroit and a PhD in Organic Chemistry from the University of Michigan.

The Duerr group at the Structural Genomics Consortium Oxford uses structural methods (X-ray crystallography and single-particle cryo-Electron microscopy) to determine the molecular architecture of human ion channels, transporters, enzymes and other integral membrane proteins relevant to various disease conditions and human therapies. This structural work provides valuable insights into the molecular interactions of these proteins with their native substrates, small molecule drugs or therapeutic antibodies and provides a framework to develop mechanistic models for their functional activity, which are then further tested in functional experiments. Prior to joining the SGC in 2016, Katharina has been a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Eric Gouaux at OHSU (Portland, OR), studying the structure and function of ionotropic glutamate receptors.

Brian Safina, Ph.D., serves as vice president for Bolt Biotherapeutics, where he leads chemistry and bioconjugation toward developing novel immuno-oncology therapeutics. He joined Bolt in 2018 with over a decade of medicinal chemistry experience at Genentech. Dr. Safina has made significant contributions to the discovery of multiple clinical candidates in the areas of oncology, immunology and neuroscience. Dr. Safina holds a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of California, San Diego, where he worked in the laboratories of K.C. Nicolaou.