Chief Investigator Elaine Holmes is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow at Murdoch University, where she runs the Centre for Computational and Systems Medicine in the Health Futures Institute. She obtained her PhD from the University of London in renal toxicology inn 1992 and became a lecturer at Imperial College London in 1998 where she became Head of the Division of Computational Systems Medicine. Other significant administrative and managerial responsibilities included being theme lead for gut health as part of the Biomedical Research Centre for the National Institute for Health Research at Imperial College (2017-2019) and the theme lead for microbiome research in the MRC Dementia Research Initiative. She was awarded the RSC Interdisciplinary Prize for work at interface of medicine and chemistry in 2015 and was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2018. She has >500 publications with an H index of 104 (WOS) with 72574 total citations (google scholar).

Holmes is one of the pioneers in the development and implementation of metabolic phenotyping in translational clinical paradigms. The analytical framework conceptualised for metabolic phenotyping and biomarker discovery has been applied across several disease areas including mortality prediction in decompensated cirrhosis and in defining biomarkers of hepatocellular carcinoma. She also co-developed the Metabolome-Wide Association Study concept and has shown that the microbial component of the metabolic profile is associated with a wide range of conditions including obesity, inflammatory bowel disease, allergies and certain cancers. Currently she is involved in European (PROLIFICA) and Aboriginal (Menzies University) studies and consortia aiming to identify biomarkers of liver disease, including liver cancers. Her work is internationally recognised as demonstrated by her membership of advisory bodies, editorial boards and research panels, extensive keynote and plenary lectures and visiting/adjunct professorial positions.

Dragana Spasic received her MSc (2004) and PhD degree (2009) in Medical Sciences (KU Leuven, Belgium). Since 2015, she holds a position of a Research Manager in the Biosensors group (KU Leuven). Her research interests are in the field of bionanotechnology, more specifically focusing on development of bioassays (various surface chemistries, immunoassays, DNA nanotechnology, CRISPR-Cas technology) for their implementation on diverse life science research tools and diagnostic platforms, including SPR and microfluidics.

Website: www.biosensors.be

William Jorgensen is a graduate of Princeton and Harvard, spent 15 years on the faculty at Purdue, and in 1990 moved to Yale, where he is a Sterling Professor. Bill's research covers both computation and experiment. He has combined quantum, statistical, and molecular mechanics to model chemistry in solution. He has been a leader in computational studies of organic and enzymatic reactions in solution, molecular recognition, protein-ligand binding, and molecular properties. His OPLS force fields and TIPnP water models are widely used. Bill’s research group is also actively engaged in de novo drug design, synthesis, and protein crystallography, particularly for anti-infective, anti-proliferative, and anti-inflammatory agents. Free-energy perturbation calculations are at the heart of the group’s abilities for efficient lead optimization.

Among honors, Bill has received an ACS Cope Scholar Award, the ACS Award for Computers in Chemical and Pharmaceutical Research, the ACS Hildebrand Award, AAAS and ACS Fellowships, the ISQBP Award in Computational Biology, the Sato International Award from the Pharmaceutical Society of Japan, and the 2015 Tetrahedron Prize. He has been elected to membership in the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and US National Academy of Sciences. He was the Editor of the ACS Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling during 2004-2013 and the Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation from its founding in 2005 through 2021.

Website: http://zarbi.chem.yale.edu/

Google Scholar: William L. Jorgensen

Twitter: @JorgensenWL

Karen Anderson is currently a Professor of Pharmacology and Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry at Yale University School of Medicine.  She is recognized for her work in mechanistic enzymology and structure-based drug design. 

Karen received her Ph.D. from Ohio State University in Organic Medicinal Chemistry. Upon graduation, she took a less conventional path of going directly into pharmaceutical industry and working for Monsanto/Searle in St. Louis. There she was part of a biorational inhibitor design group that elucidated the molecular mechanism and crystal structure for one of the company’s billion dollar products. During this time, her work was recognized by several research achievement awards.  After several years there, she decided to move into academia and she joined the Pharmacology Dept. at Yale where she started as an Assistant Professor.  Among honors, Karen has received the Hull Cancer Award, the Dean’s Young Faculty, YMCA Women’s Leadership Award, Gates Foundation Challenge Award, OSU Distinguished Alumni, Dreyfus Lectureship, and member Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering. Her lab research is at the interface between chemistry and biology with a focus on elucidating molecular mechanisms of enzyme drug targets for anticancer, antiparasitic, antiviral therapies as well as other therapeutic targets including Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. Dr. Anderson has been very active in collaborative, multi-disciplinary research for drug discovery. She is currently a Co-Director for the Developmental Therapeutics Program in the Yale Cancer Center and Co-track director for the Biochemistry, Quantitative Biology, Biophysics,  and Structural Biology Graduate Program.

Karen’s earlier work delineated the mechanism for HIV reverse transcriptase and allosteric modulation by  non-nucleoside inhibitors of this enzyme. Building on these observations, more recently her lab in collaboration with Bill Jorgensen’s lab at Yale have developed a potent new class of inhibitors using computational and structure-based drug design. With the global CoVID pandemic and the urgent need to treat SARS-CoV-2 infections, they have recently been focusing on SARS-CoV-2 main protease as a potential therapeutic target.

Richard van Breemen is Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences in the College of Pharmacy and member of the faculty in the Linus Pauling Institute and Global Hemp Innovation Center at Oregon State University. Richard received his B.A. in Chemistry from Oberlin College and Ph.D. in Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. After postdoctoral research in biomedical mass spectrometry at Johns Hopkins, he taught chemistry at North Carolina State University and medicinal chemistry and pharmacognosy at the University of Illinois College of Pharmacy, Richard joined Oregon State University in 2018.

Prof. van Breemen’s research concerns the discovery of pharmacologically active natural products using affinity selection-mass spectrometry, the discovery and development of natural products that prevent cancer and neurological degenerative diseases, and the investigation of the safety and efficacy of botanical dietary supplements. Richard has published nearly 400 research papers and book chapters concerning natural products, botanical dietary supplements and the use of mass spectrometry for drug discovery and development from natural product sources, and he has mentored over 80 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.

Guowei Wei earned his Ph. D. degree from the University of British Columbia in 1996.  He was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the NSERC of Canada to pursue his postdoctoral work at the University of Houston. In 1998, he joined the faculty of the National University of Singapore and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2001. In 2002, he relocated to Michigan State University, where he is an MSU Foundation Professor of Mathematics, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. His current research interests include mathematical biosciences, deep learning, drug discovery, and computational geometry, topology, and graph. He has advised over a hundred of students, postdocs, and visiting scientists. Dr. Wei has served extensively in a wide variety of national and international panels, committees, and journal editorships.

Anthony K. L. Leung is an expert in the area of gene regulation—specifically RNA, ADP-ribosylation and proteomics. Dr. Leung completed his undergraduate at the University of Oxford, earned his Ph.D. from the University of Dundee under the mentorship of Dr. Angus I. Lamond, and mentored by Nobel Laureate Dr. Phillip A. Sharp and Dr. Paul Chang at MIT for postdoctoral training.  Dr. Leung started his lab at Johns Hopkins University in 2011 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2017. His research specializes in the field of RNA biology and stress, leading to his discovery of ADP-ribosylation in the cytoplasm as well as the role of the drug target—macrodomain—in viral replication and virulence. Dr. Leung has been recognized with Top 5 Agilent Early Career Professor (2013), the Inaugural Johns Hopkins Catalyst Award (2015), Research Scholar Award from the American Cancer Society (2016), Top 10 Finalist for the American Society of Cell Biology–Gibco Emerging Leader Prize (2016), and the Shikani/El-Hibri Prize for Discovery & Innovation (2019).

twitter: @LeungLab

Website: www.leunglab.org

Binquan Luan is a research staff member in IBM T J Watson Research. He received PH. D. in physics from Johns Hopkins University. After the postdoctoral training in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he joined IBM in 2008. His current research interests are in biophysics,  soft matter theory and simulation.