ISCNP-32 ICOB-12

Dame Margaret Brimble FRS is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Auckland, New Zealand and Past-President of IUPAC Dvision II Organic and Biomolecular Chemistry. Her research focusses on the synthesis of novel bioactive natural products, antimicrobial and antiviral peptides, antibody-drug conjugates, lipopeptides for vaccines and new biomaterials. Her lab led the medicinal chemistry programme that discovered the drug trofinetide (NNZ2566) that gained FDA approval (marketed as DaybueTM) in March 2023 for the treatment of Rett Syndrome (http://www.neurenpharma.com; https://acadia.com) and NNZ2591 that is currently in phase 2 clinical trials for four neurogenetic disorders. She is an Executive Editor for Organic Letters, has published over 690 papers and named an inventor of 50+ patent families. Selected awards include: 2023 Royal Society London Davy Medal, 2023 ACS Ernest Guenther Award for Natural Products, 2022 RSC Pedler Award for Research & Innovation in Organic Chemistry, 2023 Medicines NZ Award for Excellence in Innovative Medicines Research and the Royal Society NZ Rutherford, Hector and MacDiarmid Medals (2012).

Mônica Pupo is a Full Professor at School of Pharmaceutical Sciences of Ribeirão Preto, University of Sao Paulo (USP), Brazil, where she currently holds the position of deputy director. She is a natural product chemist whose research has focused on understanding the role of specialized metabolites in interspecies interactions in plant and insect microbiomes, and also in the discovery of natural products hits for infectious diseases. She graduated in Pharmacy in 1990 from USP, and earned her PhD in Chemistry from Federal University of São Carlos in 1997. She was a postdoctoral researcher at São Carlos Institute of Physics, USP, for one year and then started her independent career in 1998. She was visiting scholar at Jon Clardy’s group (Harvard Medical School, 2006-2007). She has coordinated several national projects and also international joint grants, including the International Cooperative Biodiversity Group (ICBG) (FAPESP/FIC-NIH) and the U.S.-Brazil Collaborative Biomedical Research Program (CNPq/MS/NIH). She enjoys teaching, researching and going to field trips to collect biological samples for research.

Hiroaki Suga is a Professor of the Department of Chemistry, Graduate School of Science in the University of Tokyo since 2010. He received Ph.D. at MIT in 1994. In 1997-2003, he was at the State University of New York at Buffalo as Assistant and tenured Associate Professor, and in 2003-2010 Professor in the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology in the University of Tokyo. He is the recipient of many national and international awards, including Akabori Memorial Award 2014, Max-Bergmann Medal 2016, Vincent du Vigneaud Award 2019, ETHZ Prelog Medal 2022, Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation 2020, Wolf Prize in Chemistry 2023, and Japan Academy Prize 2024. He is also a founder of PeptiDream and MiraBiologics in Japan.

Bradley Moore is Distinguished Professor of Oceanography and Pharmaceutical Chemistry at UC San Diego and the Director of the Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine & the Center for Oceans and Human Health at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He is a biosynthetic chemist who specializes in reading and writing the genetic code of marine life to develop new ocean-based medicines, biomaterials, and molecular tools to improve human health and better understand our planet. Moore has published over 260 peer-reviewed articles and patents, trained nearly 100 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, serves as the Editor-In-Chief of the Journal of Natural Products, and has been recognized with numerous awards and honors by the National Institutes of Health, the American Chemical Society, the American Academy of Microbiology, the American Society for Pharmacognosy, and the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Professor Lara Malins is an organic and medicinal chemist at the Research School of Chemistry at the Australian National University (ANU), where her group focuses on new synthetic methods for drug discovery, natural product synthesis, and chemical biology. Lara completed a B.A. in chemistry at Boston University in 2009 before relocating to the University of Sydney to undertake her PhD with Professor Richard Payne on the development of peptide ligation strategies. In 2015, Lara joined the laboratory of Professor Phil Baran at Scripps Research as a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral research fellow. She returned to Australia in November 2017 to start her independent academic career at the ANU, where her work has been generously supported by an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (2018), a Westpac Research Fellowship (2021), an ARC Future Fellowship (2024), and a prestigious Snow Medical Research Foundation Fellowship (2025).

She is currently a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Innovations in Peptide and Protein Science (CIPPS) and has been nationally and internationally recognised for outstanding research contributions, including as a recipient of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (RACI) Rennie Medal (2022), the American Peptide Society Early Career Lectureship Award (2023), and the inaugural RACI Mary Garson Medal (2024). Lara’s dedication to science communication and research supervision have also been recognised through an Australian Institute of Policy & Science (AIPS) Young Tall Poppy Award (2019) and as recipient of the Dean’s Commendation for Excellence in Research Supervision (2022, 2024).

Michelle is the A. Barton Hepburn professor in the Department of Chemistry at Princeton University. She received her Ph.D. from MIT, and her postdoctoral training at UC Berkeley. She started her independent career in 2007 at UC Berkeley and moved to Princeton University this summer.

Dr. D. Srinivasa Reddy is the Director of the CSIR–Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT), Hyderabad. With over 24 years of research experience, his expertise lies in the total synthesis of natural products, medicinal chemistry, and drug discovery. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Hyderabad under the mentorship of Prof. Goverdhan Mehta, followed by postdoctoral research with Prof. Sergey A. Kozmin at the University of Chicago and Prof. Jeffrey Aubé at the University of Kansas.

Dr. Reddy has held leadership roles across several CSIR institutions, including CSIR-IIIM and CSIR-CDRI. His industrial tenure spans over seven years with Dr. Reddy’s and TATA Advinus, where his team contributed to the development of Licogliflozin, now in phase II clinical trials. At CSIR-NCL, technologies developed under his guidance have been successfully out-licensed.

He has authored around 145 research publications and holds approximately 35 patents. Among his numerous accolades are the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, J.C. Bose National Fellowship, and fellowships of all major Indian science academies. He is also a recipient of several prestigious awards in pharmaceutical sciences and drug discovery and serves on the scientific body of the Indian Pharmacopoeia Commission.

Prof. Xiaoguang Lei obtained BS in chemistry from Peking University in 2001 and a Ph.D. in organic synthesis from Boston University under the supervision of Prof. John Porco in 2006. Then he conducted postdoc work in bioorganic chemistry with Prof. Samuel Danishefsky at Columbia University from 2006 to 2008. In early 2009, he returned to China. He started his independent career as a Principal Investigator and Director of the Chemistry Center at the National Institute of Biological Sciences (NIBS) in Beijing. In early 2014, he received a tenured full professorship from Peking University and moved to the College of Chemistry at Peking University. Now he is the Boya Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and a senior PI of the Peking-Tsinghua Center for Life Sciences. His primary research areas are chemical biology, natural product synthesis, biocatalysis/synthetic biology, and drug discovery. He has published more than 180 original research papers, including Science (4), Cell (2), Nature (1), etc., and obtained 20 granted patents for new drug discovery. He has developed four “first-in-class” drug candidates, one of which has started Phase II clinical trials in the USA and China since 2022. He has received many prestigious awards, including the 2023 Sackler Chair Visiting Scholar Award in Israel, the 2022 Molecules Tu Youyou Award, the 2022 Xplore Prize, the 2021 Boehringer-Ingelheim Senior Investigator Award, the 2020 Bayer Investigator Award, the 2018 David Ginsburg Award in Israel, the 2017 Tetrahedron Young Investigator Award, the 2017 Swiss Chemical Society Distinguished Lectureship Award, the 2015 Chemical Society of Japan Distinguished Lectureship Award, the 2014 Roche Young Investigator Award, the 2013 International Chemical Biology Society (ICBS) Young Chemical Biologist Award, the 2013 Servier Young Investigator Award in Medicinal Chemistry, and the 2010 IUPAC Young Chemist Award, etc. Since 2017 he has served as an editor for Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry.