The interface of chemistry with biology is continuously evolving, and so is the chemical biology community.
As part of our continuous efforts to reflect and promote this rapid progress, we are proud to present this webinar featuring authors from our Young Investigator Special Issue of ACS Chemical Biology.
The purpose of this event (and accompanying collection of content) is to promote early career scientists who are doing cutting edge research at the interface of chemistry and biology.
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Jeremy M. Baskin was born and raised in Montreal, Canada. He received his undergraduate education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a major in Chemistry and minors in Biology and Music. At MIT, he performed organic chemistry research in Stephen Buchwald’s group and chemical biology research in Alice Ting’s lab. He carried out Ph.D. studies supported by NDSEG and NSF graduate fellowships in Carolyn Bertozzi’s group at the University of California, Berkeley, focusing on development of bioorthogonal chemistries. Jeremy received postdoctoral training in cell biology as a Jane Coffin Childs fellow at Yale University with Pietro De Camilli. Since 2015, he has had a faculty appointment at Cornell University, where he is currently Associate Professor and Nancy and Peter Meinig Family Investigator in the Life Sciences, with appointments in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology. Research in the Baskin laboratory centers on the chemical biology and cell biology of phospholipid signaling, with a focus both on development of tools for visualizing and manipulating phosphatidic acid signaling and elucidation of mechanisms connecting phosphatidic acid and phosphoinositide metabolism to physiological and pathological signaling events. Jeremy is recipient of numerous awards, including Beckman Young Investigator, Sloan Research Fellowship, NSF CAREER, ACS Young Academic Investigator, ASBMB Walter A. Shaw Young Investigator in Lipid Research, and ICBS Young Chemical Biologist Award. Jeremy is also a Topic Editor of ACS Chemical Biology.
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Mia Huang is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Molecular Medicine at Scripps Research. After completing her PhD working on peptidomimetics at New York University, she became a postdoc at UC San Diego, where she earned a K99 Pathway to Independence Award. She started her independent career at Scripps in 2018, where her lab seeks to merge the proteome and glycome using chemical biology tools to precisely define the functional roles of protein glycoconjugates in health and disease.
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Frédéric Friscourt
Junior Chair of Excellence in Chemical Biology
CNRS ATIP-Avenir Group Leader
European Institute of Chemistry and Biology, ISM CNRS UMR5255,
After completing in parallel a M.Sc. in Chemistry and a Chemical Engineering diploma (2004) from the University of Clermont-Ferrand, France, I moved to Scotland to do my PhD in Chemistry on asymmetric organometallic and organic catalysis under the supervision of Prof Pavel Kocovský at the University of Glasgow, UK.
I then transitioned to the field of Chemical Biology during my postdoctoral fellowship (2009-2014) in the laboratory of Prof Geert-Jan Boons at the Complex Carbohydrate Research Center – University of Georgia (GA, USA), where I developed novel chemical probes for imaging the glycome in living cells.
In 2014, I obtained a Junior Chair position in Chemical Biology from the University of Bordeaux, France and a co-affiliated position at the European Institute of Chemistry and Biology in Bordeaux as a group leader. I was recently promoted to Associate Professor in Chemical Biology at the University of Bordeaux, France (2021). My research focuses on using organic chemistry to develop novel tools that can probe the biosynthesis and biological influence of glycans in living systems.
Selected awards: CNRS ATIP-Avenir Award for outstanding young principal investigator (2017)
IdEx Bordeaux Junior Chair of Excellence in Chemical Biology
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Dr. Samira Musah is a stem cell biologist and a medical bioengineer. Her work has focused on the development of novel methods to direct the differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells and engineering of microphysiological systems (organs-on-chips or tissue chips and bioactive materials). She was recruited to Duke University with a joint appointment in the Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Medicine, Division of Nephrology. Research in her laboratory aims to understand the roles of molecular and biophysical cues in human organ development and how these processes can be harnessed to understand disease mechanisms and develop new therapeutic strategies. Her lab develops differentiation methods by the identification and optimization of multiple factors (soluble, insoluble, and mechanical forces) within the stem cell niche to guide organ-specific (kidney and neuronal) lineage specification. To engineer in vitro models of human tissues and organs, her team integrates their stem cell differentiation strategies with microfluidic systems engineering, hydrogel synthesis, biofunctionalization, and three-dimensional (3D) bioprinting technologies. In addition to actively publishing her work, she ensures that the technologies her team develop can be viable options for commercialization. These experiences have been instrumental in understanding how technologies from her lab could ultimately be translated to the market and advance to the clinic.
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Dr. Shixian Lin received his Ph.D. in chemical biology in Peking University, and joined Life Sciences Institute of Zhejiang University as a principal investigator after conducting postdoctoral research at University of California Berkeley. He is interested in probing protein modifications and protein life cycle with chemical biology tools.
Post-translational modification (PTM) of proteins is a key mechanism for regulating protein physiological function, interaction, and intracellular localization. The Lin lab focuses on developing new chemical reactions, molecular probes, and tools to precisely manipulate protein PTM in living cells at the molecular level and applying these innovative chemical biology methods to biological discoveries. The focal point of his talk is using the genetic code expansion strategy to site-specifically incorporate protein PTMs into signaling transduction proteins and understanding the biological function of protein PTMs in the signaling pathway.
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Prof. Kabirul Islam received his doctoral training in organic synthesis under the guidance of Prof. Goverdhan Mehta at the Indian Institute of Science. Subsequently, he was trained in chemical biology in the laboratories of Prof. Tarun Kapoor at Rockefeller University and Prof. Minkui Luo at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center before joining the Faculty of the University of Pittsburgh in the Department of Chemistry. His current research explores chemical approaches towards understanding chromatin modifications and transcription biology.
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Prof. Ellen Sletten received her BS in Chemistry from Stonehill College in 2006. Ellen pursued her PhD in Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley with Prof. Carolyn Bertozzi where she received an ACS Division of Organic Chemistry Fellowship. Her thesis work involved the optimization and development of bioorthogonal chemistries and their subsequent applications in labeling living systems. Upon graduation in 2011, Ellen joined the laboratory of Prof. Tim Swager at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow where she worked with soft fluorous materials for use in fluorescent sensors. Ellen joined the faculty in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA as an Assistant Professor and John McTague Career Development Chair in 2015 and promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2021. The Sletten Group focuses on the development of enhanced therapeutics and diagnostics by leveraging “fluoro,” with “fluoro” referring to fluorine or fluorescence. Ellen’s early career awards include an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, NIH New Innovator Award, Mercator Fellow, ICBS Young Chemical Biologist, and Hellman Fellow.
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Xiao Wang is a core institute member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry at MIT. She started her lab in 2019 to develop and apply new chemical, biophysical, and genomic tools to better understand brain function and dysfunction at the molecular level.
Wang joined the MIT and Broad after conducting postdoctoral research at Stanford University with Professor Karl Deisseroth, where she was a fellow of the Life Sciences Research Foundation. At Stanford, she developed comprehensive methods for analyzing RNA in intact tissues that merge sequencing with imaging, in order to reveal the locations of various cell types in the brain.
Wang received her B.S. in chemistry and molecular engineering from Peking University in 2010, where she studied with Professor Jian Pei and helped develop fluorescent organic materials. She received her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Chicago in 2015, where she elucidated the cellular functions of RNA modifications with Professor Chuan He.
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Ifthiha Mohideen is a postdoctoral fellow who joined the Mahal Lab at the University of Alberta, Edmonton in the fall of 2021. She completed her PhD in Biology at Concordia University, Montreal in the summer of 2021. During her PhD, she worked in the lab of Dr. David Kwan, where she focused on researching and harnessing the substrate flexibility of enzymes involved in natural product glycosylation towards better therapeutics. Before joining Concordia, she obtained her BSc (Honors) in Plant Biotechnology from the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. She is currently working on identifying the host glycomic response to influenza H1N1 as a function of obesity using lectin microarray technology.
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Sloan Devlin received her A.B. degree in chemistry from Harvard College in 2006, where she conducted research in the laboratory of Andrew Myers. She earned her Ph.D. in 2012 from Stanford University under the direction of Professor Justin Du Bois. Her graduate work focused on the total synthesis of the potent voltage-gated sodium ion channel agonist batrachotoxin as well as the development of novel rhodium-catalyzed C–H insertion methodology. In 2012, Sloan joined the lab of Professor Michael Fischbach at the University of California, San Francisco as a postdoctoral fellow. Her research in the Fischbach lab involved elucidating biosynthetic pathways and biological activities for small molecules produced by human-associated bacteria. Sloan joined the Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2016. Sloan’s current work focuses on leveraging expertise in organic chemistry, analytical chemistry, biochemistry, microbiology, cell biology, and gnotobiotic in vivo experiments to understand how human gut bacteria contribute to health and disease. She is the recipient of a 2021 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in chemistry and a 2018 NIH Maximizing Investigators' Research Award (MIRA).