Dr. Paulo Arratia
University of Pennsylvania
Paulo studies the flow behavior of complex fluids such as polymeric solutions, colloidal suspensions, and human blood. One of the main objectives of his research is to understand the physical and chemical forces controlling the structural scale of complex fluids in order to engineer materials with unique properties. Paulo’s research interests are very interdisciplinary with focus on Soft-Condensed Matter & Fluid Dynamics and include swimming of microorganisms, blood flow in microfluidic devices, and viscoelasticity.
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Dr. Helen Blackwell
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Helen Blackwell is a native of Cleveland, Ohio. She attended Oberlin College for her undergraduate studies, pursued her graduate studies in organic chemistry at Caltech with Bob Grubbs, and did postdoctoral work at Harvard with Stuart Schreiber. She has been a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin–Madison since 2002. Helen leads a research program at the very interface of organic chemistry and bacteriology. Her broad goal is to understand the role chemical signals in host-bacterial interactions and infectious disease. Over the past decade, her research lab has developed a range of synthetic compounds that allow her to intercept a key cell-cell signaling pathway in bacteria called “quorum sensing.” This pathway is essential in bacterial host colonization, and her compounds represent powerful tools both to study quorum sensing at the fundamental level and to develop new therapeutic strategies to treat bacterial infection.
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Dr. Martin Burke
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Marty completed his undergraduate degree in chemistry at Johns Hopkins University in 1998, a Ph.D. in organic synthesis at Harvard University in 2003, and an M.D. at Harvard Medical School in 2005. He is now a Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Marty’s research focuses on small molecules that replicate the functions of missing proteins, thereby operating as prostheses on the molecular scale. To enable such studies, Marty’s group created a machine that builds molecules from pre-fabricated building blocks. This advance helps make the process of complex small molecule synthesis as simple, efficient, and flexible as possible. Utilizing this building block chemistry, his group illuminated the mechanism by which the ion channel forming natural product amphotericin exerts its cytocidal activities. This mechanistic understanding enabled his group to discover the first derivatives of amphotericin that are toxic to yeast but not human cells and test the capacity of this small molecule to replicate the function of missing protein ion channels. Many MIDA boronate building blocks are now commercially available, and Marty recently co-founded a new biotech company, called REVOLUTION Medicines, which is industrializing the MIDA boronate synthesis platform to re-engineer evolution’s products into new medicines for serious human diseases, including developing optimal drug candidates from amphotericin B. Marty is the recipient of a number of honors and awards, including the 2014 Thieme-IUPAC Prize in Synthetic Organic Chemistry, The 2014 Hirata Gold Medal from Japan, the 2013 American Chemical Society Elias J. Corey Award for Outstanding Original Contribution in Organic Synthesis by a Young Investigator, a Howard Hughes Medical Institutes Early Career Scientist Award, the 2013 Kavli Foundation Emerging Leader in Chemistry Award, the American Chemical Society Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award, the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation Young Investigator Award, a Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, an NSF CAREER award, the Dreyfus Foundation New Faculty Award, the Bristol-Myers Squibb Unrestricted Research Grant in Synthetic Organic Chemistry, the Novartis Chemistry Lectureship, the Eli Lilly Grantee Award, the Amgen Young Investigator Award, the AstraZeneca Excellence in Chemistry Award, and he has been named one of the world’s 35 top innovators under age 35 by Technology Review. He has also been recognized many times by the University of Illinois Center for Teaching Excellence.
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Dr. Richard Friesner
Columbia University
The research in my group is focused on the following major areas: Development and application of novel methods for ab initio electronic structure calculations, including mixed quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics (QM/MM) methods; Development of a new generation of molecular mechanics force fields, including explicit incorporation of polarizability; Investigation and improvement of continuum treatments of aqueous solvation; Computational models and algorithms for protein structure prediction; Modeling of protein-active site chemistry using quantum chemical and QM/MM methods; Electron transfer theory; and Quantum chemical modeling of the interactions of small molecules with surfaces and nanostructures. Projects typically include a combination of analytical theory, algorithm and software development, and applications of new methods to biology or materials science.
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Dr. Tim Jamison
Department Head and Professor of Chemistry
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Tim Jamison was born in San Jose, CA and grew up in neighboring Los Gatos, CA. He received his undergraduate education at the University of California, Berkeley. A six-month research assistantship at ICI Americas in Richmond, CA under the mentorship of Dr. William G. Haag was his first experience in chemistry research. Upon returning to Berkeley, he joined the laboratory of Prof. Henry Rapoport and conducted undergraduate research in his group for nearly three years, the majority of which was under the tutelage of William D. Lubell (now at the University of Montreal). A Fulbright Scholarship supported ten months of research in Prof. Steven A. Benner’s laboratories at the ETH in Zürich, Switzerland, and thereafter he undertook his PhD studies at Harvard University with Prof. Stuart L. Schreiber. He then moved to the laboratory of Prof. Eric N. Jacobsen at Harvard University, where he was a Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell postdoctoral fellow. In July 1999, he began his independent career at MIT, where his research program focuses on the development of new methods of organic synthesis and their implementation in the total synthesis of natural products.
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Dr. Ryan Mehl
Oregon State University
Ryan Mehl’s research is focused on developing tools that enable the genetic encoding of modified amino acids and using them to study protein structure and function, to develop new technologies, and to answer questions of biomedical importance. He received his organic synthesis and mechanistic enzymology training under Tadhg Begley and his chemical biology/protein engineering training under Peter Schultz. Then, for 10 years, Professor Mehl led a lab at Franklin and Marshall College. Working with the undergraduate students there, he used genetic code expansion to study the structural and catalytic properties of proteins with various noncanonical amino acids, as well as developing useful spectroscopic probes and bioorthogonal ligations. Over the past decade, he has solved many problems associated with producing proteins containing unnatural amino acids, both in vivo and in vitro, and helped numerous colleagues at other institutions successfully establish the technology in their laboratories. In 2011, Professor Mehl relocated to Oregon State University, where he has expanded his research program on oxidative stress, bioorthogonal ligations and protein materials. At OSU, he also started the “Unnatural Protein Facility” which is dedicated to facilitating the use of unnatural amino acid incorporation methods. While site-specifically incorporating new chemical functionality into proteins is important to advancing many fields of protein research, moving these tools to the application stage to solve meaningful new biochemical problems is essential and the focus of the Facility. The Facility hosts annual workshops to train new users in genetic code expansion and in 2016, will host the first Genetic Code Expansion Conference for the international community.
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Dr. Nora Radu
DuPont
Academic History: B.S., 1990, Ithaca College; Ph.D., 1995, University of California, San Diego with T. Don Tilley; Postdoctoral Associate, 1995-96, Massachusetts Institute of Technology/Los Alamos, with Stephen L. Buchwald and Carol Burns; N. I. H. Postdoctoral Fellow 1996-1998, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with Stephen L. Buchwald. Current Position: Principal Investigator, DuPont Co., Experimental Station, Wilmington, DE.
ACS Activities: Alternate Councilor, Division of Inorganic Chemistry, 2000-2002; ACS National Meeting Symposium Organizer, 2004 and 2015; Alternate Councilor, Delaware Local Section 2007-present; Organizer of the Organometallic Chemistry sessions for the Division of Inorganic Chemistry, 2008-present; Program co-chair for the Division of Inorganic Chemistry, 2010-present; ACS Science Coach (2013-present); Member of the Editorial Advisory Board Member of the journal ACS Central Science (2015- present); 2015 ACS Fellow. Other Significant Professional Activities: Chair, Gordon Research Conference on Organometallic Chemistry, 2007; Initiator of the Gordon-Kenan Research Seminar on Organometallic Chemistry, 2006; Chair, 1stGordon-Kenan Research Seminar on Organometallic Chemistry, 2007. Research Interests: Organometallic, polymer and materials chemistry; organometallic and organic materials for optical applications.
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Dr. Samuel Stupp
Northwestern University
Samuel Stupp is Board of Trustees Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Chemistry, Medicine, and Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern University. He directs at Northwestern the Simpson Querrey Institute for BioNanotechnology and the Energy Frontiers Research Center for Bio-Inspired Energy Science funded by the Department of Energy. Professor Stupp is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Spanish Royal Academy. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the Materials Research Society, and his awards include the Department of Energy Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Materials Chemistry, the Materials Research Society Medal Award, the American Chemical Society Award in Polymer Chemistry, the American Chemical Society Ronald Breslow Award for Achievement in Biomimetic Chemistry, and the International Award from The Society of Polymer Science in Japan. He has received honoris causa doctorates from Eindhoven Technical University in the Netherlands, the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, and the National University of Costa Rica.
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William Morris
Merck
Bill Morris is a Senior Research Scientist at Merck whose work focuses on improving chemical processing methods for high-priority pharmecuticals. Prior to joining Merck, Bill earned his doctorate at Northwestern University working for Professor Karl A. Scheidt on scandium-mediated catalysis. He went on to complete a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University working in the Professor Matthew D. Shair group on the stereoselective synthesis of anomeric organic species.
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