Ensemble-based computational design of efficient artificial enzymes

Roberto Chica received his B.Sc. in biochemistry from Université de Montréal in 2001 and his Ph.D. from the same institution in 2007 under the mentorship of Joelle Pelletier and Jeffrey Keillor. After working at Caltech as postdoctoral fellow with Stephen Mayo, he joined the Department of Chemistry at the University of Ottawa in 2010, where is now an associate professor. Since establishing his independent research program, Dr. Chica has been pushing the boundaries of protein engineering through his pioneering work in the development and experimental validation of multistate approaches to computational protein design. His current research interests include the rational design of protein machines, de novo enzymes, and biosensors.

Harnessing conformational dynamics and computational design to generate novel enzymes

Lynn Kamerlin is a Professor of Structural Biology at Uppsala University. Her research focus is on understanding structure - function - dynamics relationships in bimolecular systems, with a particular interest in the evolution of new enzyme functions. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and a Wallenberg Academy Fellow. Her non-scientific interests include languages, photography, and playing the piano.

How does nature make enzymes efficient?

Romas Kazlauskas studied chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D.) and Harvard University (postdoc with George Whitesides). He worked at General Electric Company (1985-88) and McGill University, Montreal, Canada (1988-2003) and is currently a professor in Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Biophysics at the University of Minnesota. He has been a visiting professor in Germany, Sweden and South Korea. He is an expert in protein engineering of enzymes for biocatalysis. 

Translating transition metal catalysis to biological environments

Professor of Chemistry in the University of Santiago de Compostela and Scientific Director of CIQUS since 2014. He made postdoctoral studies in Stanford University (1989 and 1990) and Harvard University in 1992. He has been visiting scientist in Harvard University (1995), and summer visiting professor in the University of Cambridge (2009) and MIT (2013). He has been the founder and first president of the group of Chemical Biology of the RSEQ (Spanish Royal Society of Chemistry, 2012). Among different awards he has received the Organic Chemistry Janssen Cilag award (2009), Gold medal by the University of Santiago (2013), Gold medal of the  RSEQ (2015), Advanced Grant – ERC (2014-2020) and the Galician Critic Award (2018). His research interests cover from the transition metal catalysis to biosupramolecular chemistry and chemical biology

Designer enzymes featuring abiological catalytic sitesre reactions

Gerard Roelfes obtained his PhD from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, under the guidance of Prof. Ben L. Feringa on a collaborative project with Unilever Research  and Prof. Lawrence Que Jr. (Univ. Minnesota). After his PhD, he went for a post-doc with Prof. Donald Hilvert at the ETH-Zurich (Switzerland). In 2003 he returned to the University of Groningen, where he rose through the academic ranks and since 2015 is full Professor of Biomolecular Chemistry & Catalysis. His research is focussed on catalysis at the interface between chemistry and biology, and current research topics include: enzyme design, bio-orthogonal catalysis and catalysis in the living cell.

Computer simulation of new reaction mechanisms in glycosidases

Carme Rovira is ICREA Research Professor and member of the Institute of Computational Chemistry of the University of Barcelona. She obtained her Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1995 and conducted postdoctoral research at the Max-Planck-Institut (with M. Parrinello) in 1996-1998. She was Ramón y Cajal researcher at the Barcelona Science Park during 2012-2018. Prof. Rovira has received research awards from the Catalonia government, the Barcelona City Council and the European Carbohydrate Organisation (Emil Fischer 2019). Her research interests are on the description of enzymatic processes in metalloproteis and carbohydrate-active enzymes using first-principles simulation approaches.

Qm/mm computational studies of the proteases: towards the design of new covalent inhibitors.

Katarzyna Świderek is a "Juan de la Cierva Incorporation" fellow at Universitat Jaume I (Spain) focused on theoretical studies of biomolecular systems. She finished her PhD in 2011 at the Lodz University of Technology (Poland), involving a stay in the Helmholtz Centre in Leipzig (Germany) founded by AXIOM - Marie Curie Host Fellowships. In 2011 she moved to University of Valencia (Spain) for a postdoctoral position and between 2014-2017 she was contracted in a NIH project (USA) at University Jaume I. In 2017 she spent 6 months in the University of Bath (UK).