Organizing Committee
Biography
Vesa P Hytonen is a head of the Protein Dynamics research group at the University of Tampere. After graduating as a PhD from the University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland at 2005, he conducted postdoctoral training at ETH Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland 2005-2007. He then continued as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tampere and established independent research group at 2010. His research interests are mechanobiology, protein engineering and vaccine research, and he has authored more than 90 scientific articles.
Research Interest
Mechanobiology, Protein Engineering and Vaccine Research
Biography
Yuri L. Lyubchenko is Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, NE, USA. His research focuses on understanding fundamental mechanisms underlying health and disease, which are key to developing new and more effective diagnostics and medications. This primarily basic research allows him not only identify new drug targets for small molecule drugs, it also leads to development of the nanotools and methods to discover novel approaches for diagnostic, treatment and disease prevention and to more rapidly determine their efficacy at the molecular level
Research Interest
Drug discovery, single molecule biophysics and structural biology
Biography
The Buck laboratory studies two receptor families responsible for cell guidance and positional maintenance (Plexins and Ephrins), both with key involvement in cardiovascular and neuronal development and disease, esp. cancer. We use a wide range of structural biology (solution NMR / x-ray crystallography) and protein biophysical tools (CD, fluorescence spectroscopy, ITC and SPR) in a problem oriented approach. Part of the laboratory also pursues computational modeling and molecular dynamics to provide additional perspective on the problems, provide new insights into the experimental data and to suggest further studies. Small GTPases and their interaction with the plexin receptor cytoplasmic domains has been a major focus of the laboratory and recently we have become very interested in protein-membrane interactions; both the transmembrane regions of the receptors as well as the transient interactions of receptor and GTPase domains with membranes
Research Interest
Biophysics, Molecular modeling and dynamics
Biography
Murray Junop received B.Sc. from Ryerson University in 1991, and Ph.D. from Western University in 1997. In 1997, he joined the LMB/NIDDK, at the National Institutes of Health as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Wei Yang (National Academy of Science Member, 2013). Currently, he is an Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Structural Biology at Western University. He has received several awards for outstanding teaching at the Undergraduate Level. He has pioneered structural studies of mammalian DNA double strand break repair proteins involved in the non-homologous end-joining pathway, solving and characterizing structures and complexes of XRCC4, XLF and DNA LigaseIV. His current research interests are in understanding the molecular mechanisms that govern repair of several DNA lesions; in particular, DNA intrastrand-crosslinks and both single and double strand breaks. Additional work is focused on developing new anticancer agents that target DNA repair pathways. His research has been funded by federal agencies, including CIHR, CFI, CCS and NSERC
Research Interest
Biochemistry and Structural Biology
Biography
Shuanghong Huo received her Ph.D. in Computational Chemistry from Boston University. She had postdoctoral training at UC-San Francisco. She is a Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Clark University, Worcester, USA. Her research interest is protein folding, misfolding, and aggregation. Recently her group is developing dimensionality reduction methods and graph representations of protein free energy landscapes.
Research Interest
Protein folding, misfolding, and aggregation
Biography
Tzu-Ching has completed his PhD from University of Nebraska Medical Center in 1999 and postdoctoral studies from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 2003. Since then, he has been working at Academia Sinica, the premier government-funded institution in Taiwan. He is now a Research Fellow with professorship jointly appointed by National Taiwan University. He has published more than 40 papers in reputed journals and has been serving as an advisory board member of competitive journals.
Research Interest
Protein Science
Biography
Tran Tien-Dzung is the Head of the Department of Software Engineering, Faculty of Information Technology, Hanoi University of Industry. He has done his Masters and PhD in Information Technology.
Research Interest
Systems Biology & Complex Network, Soft computing, Software Engineering