Plenary Lectures
Prof. D. Hilvert
ETH Zurich
Design and evolution of artificial metalloenzymes
Donald Hilvert obtained his Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1983 from Columbia University. Following postdoctoral work at Rockefeller University, he joined the faculty of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California in 1986 as an Assistant Professor. He was subsequently promoted to associate Professor in 1989 and full Professor in 1994. In 1995, he was named the Janet and W. Keith Kellogg II Professor of Chemistry and an affiliate of the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology at Scripps. Since October 1997, he has been Professor in the Laboratory of Organic Chemistry at the ETH Zurich (Zurich, Switzerland). Professor Hilvert’s research program focuses on understanding how enzymes work and evolve and on mimicking the properties of these remarkable catalysts in the laboratory. These efforts have been recognized by a number of awards, including the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award from the American Chemical Society, the Pfizer Award in Enzyme Chemistry, and the Protein Society Emil Thomas Kaiser Award. He received an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Prof. S. Flitsch
Manchester Institute of Biotechnology
Design and implementation of de novo biosynthetic cascades
Sabine Flitsch graduated with a Diplom in Chemistry from the University of Münster (Germany) and obtained her DPhil in 1985 from the University of Oxford. She spent three years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA as a Research Fellow (with H. G. Khorana) before returning to the UK to hold academic positions at the Universities of Exeter, Oxford, Edinburgh and Manchester. She is currently Professor of Biological Chemistry at the University of Manchester with her research group housed at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology (MIB).
Prof. M. J. Ramos
University of Porto
Studies on enzyme-catalysed reactions.
Maria Ramos is a Full Professor and the Head of the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Research Group at the University of Porto, Portugal. Her main research interests lie in Computational Enzymatic Catalysis and Drug Design.
She did her first degree in Chemistry at the University of Porto, Portugal, a PhD at the University of Glasgow, UK, and the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and later a Post-Doc at the University of Oxford, UK, where she remained for several years an Associate Director of the NFCR Computational Centre for Drug Discovery. She has been a Vice-Rector for R&D and a Director of the Science and Technology Park, both at the University of Porto.
She received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Stockholm, in Sweden, in 2014, and the Medinabeitia Prize awarded by the Spanish Royal Society of Chemistry in 2019.
Prof. R. Sterner
University of Regensburg
Artificial light-control of Enzyme activity and allostery
Reinhard Sterner obtained his PhD in Biology from the University of Munich in 1991. He then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Biocentre of the University of Basel where he received his Habilitation in Biochemistry in 1996. Following a position as a junior group leader at the University of Göttingen from 1997 to 1999, he operated as an Associate Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Cologne until 2003. Since 2004 he is a Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Regensburg. Professor Sterner’s research program focuses on the structure-function relationship of enzymes, the evolution and engineering of enzymes, and the analysis of allosteric interactions in multi-enzyme complexes.
Prof. T. Ward
University of Basel
Artificial metalloenzymes for in vivo catalysis: challenges and opportunities
Tom Ward was educated as organometallic chemist at the ETHZ. After a short stint in theoretical chemistry with Roald Hoffmann at Cornell University, he returned to Switzerland to initiate his independent career. He selected biomimetic catalysis as research focus, combining abiotic organometallic cofactors with host proteins. He has been active at the University of Berne, then the University of Neuchatel and since 2008 at the University of Basel.