Henry M. Sobell completed his studies at Brooklyn Technical High School (1948-1952), Columbia College (1952-1956), and the University of Virginia School of Medicine (1956-1960). Instead of practicing clinical medicine, he then went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to join Professor Alexander Rich in the Department of Biology (1960-1965), where, as a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellow, he learned the technique of single crystal X-ray analysis. He then joined the Chemistry Department at the University of Rochester, having been subsequently jointly appointed to both the Chemistry and Molecular Biophysics departments (the latter at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry), becoming a full tenured Professor in both departments (1965-1993). He is now retired and living in the Adirondacks in New York, USA.

Structural Biology

Yuri L Lyubchenko is the 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 to 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.

single molecule Structural Biology, CryoEM

Dr. Joachim Krebs received his PhD from the University of Tübingen, Germany. He spent 2 years as a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. R.J.P.Williams at the University of Oxford, UK. In 1977 he accepted a position at the Institute of Biochemistry at the ETH in Zurich, Switzerland. In his Lab he focused his research on the structure-function relationship of calcium binding- and transporting proteins He has authored, coauthored, and edited numerous articles in international journals and books in the field of calcium biochemistry and calcium signaling. After his retirement from the ETH he continued his research at the Department of NMR based Structural Biology of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany. Recently, he edited the book “Calcium: A Matter of Life or Death”, published by Elsevier in 2007. He is also on the Editorial Board of BBA Molecular Cell Research and a Section Editor of Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics.

Biophysics, Biochemistry

Michael Hennig studied Physics and Biochemistry and received the Ph.D. in structural biology at EMBL Hamburg, and the Charité, Humboldt University Berlin, Germany. It followed two years postdoc work at the Biozentrum, University of Basel, Switzerland. He is author of more than 75 scientific peer reviewed paper and, since 2011, guest professor in structural biology at the University of Basel. From 1995 he worked 20 years in pharmaceutical industry at Roche, Basel, Switzerland in various positions and finally Global Head and Principle Leader of discovery technologies with responsibility for structure based drug discovery, protein science, assay development and HTS, corporate compound library, stem cell platform analytical methods. In 2015, he co-founded and is now CEO of leadXpro AG, a company dedicated to structure based drug discovery of membrane protein targets.

Structure based drug discovery, membrane protein structural biology, Synchrotron and Free Electron Laser, cryo-Electron Microscopy (EM), computational methods.

Dr. Zhou is a current Professor of Gordon Life Science Institute. He is also an Adjunct Professor of several academics in both USA and CHINA. He received his Ph.D in Biophysics from University of California at Davis, and completed his postdoctoral training at Stanford University and Harvard University, respectively. He has determined the 3D NMR structures of some important biomolecules, and successfully introduced the novel diagram approach to elucidate the mechanisms of the protein-biomolecule interactions, and protein misfolding diseases observed by NMR. His current research is focused on the molecular mechanism of Neural Cell Adhesion Molecule polysialylation using NMR and biophysical approaches. In addition, He has also edited some special issues on the fields of structural biology and medicinal chemistry for several influential scientific journals as an Editorial-Board Member and Guest Editor.

Structural and dynamic studies of biomolecules by NMR, biophysics and bioinformatics approaches

Senyon (Teddy) Choe is currently Director of Mogam Institute, Korea, and Professor of Biology at UCSD. He was a founding faculty member of Structural Biology Laboratory of Salk Institute in 1993 and served till 2015. His major honors include election in 1999 to the Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in recognition for his frontier science in biophysics of K channels and of TGF-beta ligands.

He worked in the laboratory of Dr. Robert Stroud (UCSF) from 1984 to 1987 and received his Ph.D from University of California, Berkeley. His research group focused on molecular mechanisms of cell-cell communication to develop new stem cell therapy and the drug discovery with a particular focus on TGF-beta superfamily ligands. He developed synthetic protein therapeutics against bone disorders and fibrosis. He is a sought-after speaker at public events including his recent TEDx lecture.

Maria Bykhovskaia is an expert in molecular modeling and biophysics of synaptic transmission. Her research is focused on the mechanisms that govern the release of neuronal transmitters from nerve terminals. Her lab aims to understand the dynamics of the priming and activation of synaptic vesicles for the fusion with the plasma membrane and releasing transmitters into the synaptic gap. The lab combines computational and experimental approaches, including molecular dynamics, computational modeling of cellular pathways, elecrophysiology, live confocal imaging, and molecular biology.

Molecular modeling, synaptic transmission, computational methods in neuroscience

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.

Protein Science

R Holland Cheng, Ph D is a Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at University of California. Cheng received a master degree in 1989 and a Ph D degree in 1992 from Purdue University. Cheng has served as a Panel Reviewer for NIH programmed project grant, NIH Microbiology & Infectious Diseases Research Committee, NIH National Center for Research Resources, Wellcome Trust, UK and Earth & Life Sciences Council, Netherlands (2002). Cheng has actively served on the advisory board of the International Microscopy Congress plus regional microscopy societies, American Biographical Institute, and International Virus Assembly Symposium.He is also a regular member of the American Chemical Society,American Society for Microbiology and American Biophysical Society. Cheng has published nearly fifty papers in peer reviewed journals and his research mainly focuses on Proteome imaging of macromolecular systems.

Structural biology and proteome imaging of macromolecular systems.

Jiang obtained his PhD from Yale University and did his postdoctoral training at Rockefeller University. He is currently an Associate Professor in UF and serves as the Faculty Director of Electron Microscopy (EM) at the UF Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechology Research, where EM is used for revealing the structural basis of biological machineries. He has published more than 25 papers in reputed journals. His lab focuses on structural and functional studies of intracellular RNA-binding complexes and ion channels invovled in membrane excitability and regulated secretion, and has been developing new methods for cryoEM imaging of single molecules.

cryo-EM

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.

Biophysics, Molecular modeling and dynamics

Will be updated soon

Will be updated soon