Contributors to the Emerging Investigators issue

Plate1 Mike Burkart

Mike Burkart was born in Arlington, Texas in 1972. He received a BA in chemistry from Rice University in 1994, his graduate studies were completed at the Scripps Research Institute in 1999 with Professor Chi-Huey Wong, and he was an NIH post-doctoral fellow with Professor Chris Walsh at Harvard Medical School. He initiated his own research group at the University of California, San Diego in 2002, where his research interests include natural product synthesis, biosynthesis, and metabolic engineering. He is the recipient of the Ellison New Scholar Award, the NSF CAREER Award, an American Cancer Society Research Scholarship, and the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship.

Plate2 Kate Carroll

Kate Carroll is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry and a Research Assistant Professor in the Life Sciences Institute at the University of Michigan. She completed her undergraduate degree in Biochemistry from Mills College in 1996 and her PhD in Biochemistry from Stanford in 2003. After completing post-doctoral work at UC Berkeley in the field of chemistry as a Damon Runyon fellow, she joined the Michigan faculty in 2006.

Professor Carroll’s research interests span the disciplines of chemistry and biology with an emphasis on studies of sulfur metabolism pertinent to disease states. Her lab focuses on the development of novel tools to study of post-translational modification of cysteine residues, profiling changes in protein oxidation associated with aging, cancer, and neurodegeneration, and exploiting this information for development of diagnostic and therapeutic approaches. In addition, her group investigates sulfur pathways that are essential for infection and long-term survival of human pathogens such as Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

Plate3 Ben Davis

Ben Davis got his BA (1993) and DPhil (1996) from the University of Oxford. During this time he learned the beauty of carbohydrate chemistry under the supervision of Professor George Fleet. He then spent 2 years as a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Professor Bryan Jones at the University of Toronto, exploring protein chemistry and biocatalysis. In 1998 he returned to the UK to take up a lectureship at the University of Durham. In the autumn of 2001 he moved to the Dyson Perrins Laboratory, University of Oxford and received a fellowship at Pembroke College, Oxford. His group's research centers on chemical biology with an emphasis on carbohydrates and proteins. In particular, the group's interests encompass synthesis and methodology, inhibitor design, protein engineering, drug delivery, molecular modeling, molecular biology, and glycoscience.

Plate4 Alex Deiters

Alex Deiters received his doctoral degree in Chemistry from the University of Münster, Germany, in 2000 for work in Professor Hoppe's group on allyllithium chemistry. In 2001 he joined Professor Martin's lab at the University of Texas as an Alexander von Humboldt Post-doctoral Fellow, where her worked on the total synthesis of indole alkaloids. Supported by the German Research Foundation he began a second postdoctorate in Professor Schultz's lab at The Scripps Research Institute in 2002 where he was engaged in unnatural amino acid mutagenesis. Alex joined the Department of Chemistry at North Carolina State University as an Assistant Professor in 2004, where he developed a multidisciplinary research program in Chemical Biology. He is especially interested in the photochemical regulation of biological processes and the discovery of small molecules to probes biological pathways. Recently, Alex received a Basil O'Connor Starter Scholar Award from the March of Dimes Foundation, a Sigma Xi Research Faculty Award, a Cottrell Scholar Award, and a Beckman Young Investigator Award.

Plate5 Pieter Dorrestein

Pieter Dorrestein was born in Utrecht, Netherlands, in 1974. He completed his undergraduate at Northern Arizona University under the guidance of Professor John MacDonald. Pieter continued on to Cornell University for graduate school in the department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology where he worked on metabolite biosynthetic pathways with Professor Tadhg Begley. During his post-doctoral years, at the University of Illinois, as an NIH-NRSA fellow (co)-sponsored by Professor Neil Kelleher and Professor Christopher Walsh, he exploited high-resolution mass spectrometry to elucidate the biosynthesis of natural products of therapeutic value. In September of 2006, Pieter moved to his current position as Assistant Professor at the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Departments of Pharmacology, Chemistry and Biochemistry at UC-San Diego. In 2007 Pieter also became a member of the Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The Dorrestein lab is a chemical biology laboratory that emphasizes mass spectrometric, including proteomic and MALDI-imaging based approaches to understand the functions of orphan genes from microorganisms responsible for the production of natural products or toxins. In addition, the Dorrestein lab aims to detect and understand the function of post-translational modifications.

Plate6 Sylvie Garneau-Tsodikova

Sylvie Garneau-Tsodikova was born in Québec, Canada in 1973. She majored in chemistry at the Université Laval (BSc 1995, MSc 1997), where she worked with Profs. Robert Chênevert and Perséphone Canonne. She received her PhD in chemistry in 2003 at the University of Alberta where she studied new antimicrobial agents acting on bacterial cell walls under the supervision of Professor John C. Vederas. She was a post-doctoral fellow with Professor Christopher T. Walsh at Harvard Medical School where she studied halogenation and pyrrole formation during the biosynthesis of various natural products. In 2006, she joined the University of Michigan as the John G. Searle Assistant Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the College of Pharmacy and the Life Sciences Institute. Her research interests lie in the areas of mechanistic enzymology and in the development of new tools for combinatorial biosynthesis of novel nonribosomal peptides.

Plate7 Yan Geng

Yan Geng received her BS in Chemistry from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 1998, PhD in Organic Chemistry from Rutgers University at New Brunswick in 2003, and pursued post-doctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania in biomolecular engineering from 2003–2006. She joined the University of Georgia as an Assistant Professor in Chemistry in Fall 2006. Her research is focused on synthetic macromolecular self-assemblies, their interactions with biology and biomedical applications.

Plate8 Jason E. Gestwicki

Jason E. Gestwicki was born in 1975 in Dunkirk, New York, USA. He received a BS from SUNY Fredonia and completed a PhD at University of Wisconsin in 1997. After a post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford University, he began his current position as an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan. His group’s work involves using multivalent small molecules to explore protein–protein interactions and their current areas of interest include chaperone biology and neurodegenerative disease.

Plate9 Helen C. Hailes

Helen Hailes received her Ph.D in 1991 under the supervision of Jim Staunton (Cambridge, UK). She then pursued post-doctoral work at Imperial College (London) first with Steve Ley and then David Widdowson. In 1994 she was appointed as a lecturer in Chemistry at University College London, becoming a Senior Lecturer in 2002 and a Reader in Chemical Biology in 2005. Research activity in her group is focused at the chemistry-biology interface and uses organic chemistry to probe and solve challenging biological problems. Current research projects include synthetic vectors for non-viral gene therapy, PKB activators and inhibitors, calixarenes as TB-therapies, novel cytosine-based hydrogen-bonding arrays, and the biocatalytic synthesis of aminodiols using transketolases and transaminases.

Plate10 Alison Hulme

Alison Hulme received her BA in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge (UK) in 1989, and remained there to complete her PhD (1992) under the guidance of Professor Ian Paterson. From 1993–94 she was an SERC-NATO Post-doctoral Fellow in the group of Professor Albert Meyers at Colorado State University (USA). She returned to the UK in 1994, and held the Heartha-Ayrton Research Fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge, before appointment to a Lectureship at the University of Edinburgh in 1995. She was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2004. In 2006 she held a Scottish Executive/Royal Society of Edinburgh Support Research Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests cover wide-ranging aspects of natural products chemistry, from chemical biology applications of tagging (fluorescent, affinity, spin-label) and bioactive natural product libraries, to the development of new asymmetric methodology for complex total syntheses and the use of natural product dyestuffs in historic textiles.

Plate11 Julian Huppert

Julian Huppert originally trained as an organic chemist, working on asymmetric catalysis. He earned his PhD in biological chemistry, working with Professor Shankar Balasubramanian on G-quadruplex nucleic acids, performing biophysical experiments and computational analyses. For this study he was awarded a Research Fellowship from Trinity College, Cambridge, which he used to work with Dr Manolis Dermitzakis at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, working on population genomics, and was part of the ENCODE project consortium. He then moved to the Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, and is currently a Research Councils UK Academic Fellow in Computational Biology at the Cavendish Laboratory, Department of Physics, University of Cambridge. His group is interested in understanding the thermodynamics of complex nucleic acid structures, and using experimental data to predict their genomic location and functions using a range of bioinformatic and biophysical techniques. Outside pure research, Julian has founded an award-winning biotechnology company and been heavily involved in UK politics.

Plate12 Jennifer Kohler

Jennifer Kohler received her PhD in chemistry at Yale University and was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. She is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Translational Research, Department of Internal Medicine at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. The Kohler research group investigates the biosynthesis of glycans and develops methods to study the biological roles of these molecules.

Plate13 Kazushi Kinbara

Kazushi Kinbara was born in 1967. He received a BS degree in Organic Chemistry from the University of Tokyo in 1991, and obtained a PhD in Organic Chemistry in 1996 under the direction of Professor Kazuhiko Saigo. He then began an academic career at the University of Tokyo, and had been involved until 2001 in the development of optical resolution upon crystallization. In 2001, he was promoted to Lecturer of the Department of Chemistry and Biotechnology, School of Engineering, the University of Tokyo. In 2003, he was selected as a researcher of JST PRESTO project “Light and Control”. In 2006, he was promoted to Associate Professor of the Department of Chemistry and Biotechnology, School of Engineering, the University of Tokyo. His research interests include synthetic and biological molecular machineries, supramolecular chemistry of biomacromolecules, and crystal engineering.

Plate14 Gavin MacBeath

Gavin MacBeath received his PhD in Macromolecular and Cellular Structure and Chemistry from The Scripps Research Institute in 1997, training with Don Hilvert. He then pursued post-doctoral training with Stuart Schreiber at Harvard University, before accepting a position as the first research fellow at the Bauer Center for Genomics Research in 2000. In July of 2002, Gavin began an appointment as Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University, and was promoted to associate professor in 2006. Over the past seven years, Gavin has pioneered the development and use of protein microarrays as a tool for systems biology. His lab uses this and other high-throughput methods to gain insight into protein function on a system-wide level, and to study and model how information flows through signaling networks.

Plate15 Thomas J. Magliery

Thomas J. Magliery received his AB in Chemistry from Kenyon College (Gambier, OH) and his PhD in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, under the direction of Peter G. Schultz. His doctoral work established the library and selection systems which led to the first bacteria with an expanded genetic code. Dr Magliery was an NIH Post-doctoral Fellow in Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry at Yale University with Lynne Regan, where he applied combinatorial methods to the design of a four-helix bundle and characterized the split-GFP screen for protein interactions. He started as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at The Ohio State University in 2005, where he uses combinatorial and statistical approaches to understand protein stability and protein–protein interactions.

Plate16 Lara K. Mahal

Lara K. Mahal’s scientific life began with her introduction, in high school chemistry, to the joys of chemistry. Subsequent nurturing of her scientific inclinations by both Dr Rebecca Braslau at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Professor Carolyn Bertozzi at the University of California at Berkeley led to a BA in Chemistry in 1995 and a PhD in Chemistry in 2000, respectively. In 2003, after post-doctoral research on synaptic vesicle fusion with Dr James Rothman at Sloan-Kettering Research Institute in New York, Dr Mahal took up her current position as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Texas at Austin. There her laboratory is deconvoluting the complex biology of carbohydrates by developing new methods for the systems level analysis of glycans. Dr Mahal is a 2008 Sloan Foundation Fellow, an Arnold and Mabel Beckman Fellow (2004), and an NSF CAREER Awardee (2007).

Plate17 Dustin Maly

Dustin Maly was born in Madison, Wisconsin. He received his BS in Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he worked under the guidance of Professor Laura L. Kiessling. Dustin’s PhD from the University of California, Berkeley was awarded in the spring of 2002 for research performed in the laboratory of Professor Jonathan A. Ellman. He then moved to the laboratory of Professor Kevan M. Shokat at the University of California, San Francisco, where from 2003 to 2006 he was a Pfizer Fellow of the Life Sciences Research Foundation (LSRF). In September of 2006, Dustin joined the faculty of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he is also a member of the Biomolecular Structure and Design (BMSD) graduate program. His research interests focus on the development of new chemical tools for studying signal transduction.

Plate18 Joshua Maurer

Joshua Maurer received his BA and MA in chemistry from Clark University and his PhD from California Institute of Technology. As a graduate student with Professor Dennis Dougherty, he initially worked to develop high spin organic materials and frustrated coordination complexes. However, upon the release of the MscL crystal structure, Josh moved to the biological side of the Dougherty group to look at ion-channel structure-function relationships. As a post-doctoral research associate with Professor Milan Mrksich at the University of Chicago, Josh expanded his interest in Chemical Biology looking at focal adhesion migration using self-assembled monolayers on gold. In 2004, Josh moved to Washington University in St. Louis as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry. The Maurer group develops and uses new tools for Chemical Biology to explore and exploit neurobiology. The group is specifically interested in the development of tools to understand the origin of complex neuronal wiring, bacterial ligand-gated ion channels, and ion channel biosensors.

Plate19 Christian Melander

Christian Melander received a BS in Chemistry from UC Davis in 1994 and a PhD in Organic Chemistry from Columbia University in 1998. From 1998–2001 he was a post-doctoral scholar at Caltech under the direction of Peter Dervan. Christian then directed the organic synthesis department at Xencor, Inc. until September of 2002. He returned to academic research as a Research Associate at TSRI from 2002–2004 in the laboratory of Joel Gottesfeld. In July of 2004, Christian became an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at North Carolina State University, where his research is predominantly focused on applying synthetic organic chemistry to derive small molecules that control bacterial biofilms. Christian is a member of the ACS, a NCSU biotech faculty member, and a co-founder of Agile Sciences, Inc.

Plate20 John Moses

John Moses began his academic career at Bath, graduating with a MChem degree in July 2001. During this period, he spent 1 year at Purdue University, Indiana, conducting research in the laboratories of Professor Ian P. Rothwell. John next moved to the University of Oxford to pursue a DPhil under the supervision of Professor Sir Jack Baldwin, FRS. In 2004, he moved to The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, to work with Professor K. B. Sharpless. John’s independent research career began at The University of London, School of Pharmacy in 2005, where he was appointed as an RCUK-EPSRC academic fellow in chemical biology/cancer medicinal chemistry. In September 2007, he was appointed to his present position at The University of Nottingham as an Associate Professor in organic chemistry. His research interests include biomimetic synthesis, click chemistry, anti-cancer drug discovery and chemical biology. Outside work, John enjoys SCUBA diving, mountain biking, rock music and travelling.

Plate21 Shu-ichi Nakano

Shu-ichi Nakano received his PhD degree from Konan University in Japan in 1999, where he joined the laboratory of Dr Naoki Sugimoto and studied the thermodynamic stability of DNA and RNA structures. He then joined the laboratory of Dr Phillip C. Bevilacqua at the Pennsylvania State University in USA for two years of post-doctoral work, during which he investigated the mechanism of the HDV ribozyme-catalyzed RNA cleavage. He then joined the High Technology Research Center at Konan University, and he is currently an Assistant Professor of Frontier Institute for Biomolecular Engineering Research (FIBER) at Konan University. He continues to study biomolecular reactions involving DNA and RNA from the viewpoints of thermodynamics and kinetics.

Plate22 Herman Sintim

Herman O. Sintim received his BSc from University College London, his DPhil from the University of Oxford and was a post-doctoral fellow at Oxford and Stanford Universities before taking an independent position as Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park in the fall of 2006. His research interests include bacterial biofilm formation and quorum sensing, development of novel technologies to study RNA and DNA processing, total syntheses of complex natural products and development of new synthetic methods.

Plate23 Silke Sperling

Silke Sperling, MD, graduated from the Free University of Berlin and did a doctoral degree in Cardiac Physiology. During her medical education she went from Berlin to New York, San Diego, Chicago and Rochester. She was trained in Pediatric Cardiology at the German Heart Center of Berlin. Dr Sperling was a post-doctoral fellow in the department of Professor Dr Lehrach at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, where she became head of the research group “Cardiovascular Genetics” in 2001. Her research focuses on the analysis of molecular mechanisms underlying cardiac development and function in a systems biology approach. With her interdisciplinary team spanning biology, medicine and bioinformatics, she is particularly interested in transcription networks. As a workpackage coordinator Dr Sperling is one of the initial scientists of the European Community’s Project “Heart Repair” (2005–2009).

Plate24 David Spring

David Spring is currently an EPSRC Advanced Fellow at the University of Cambridge Chemistry Department and a Fellow of Trinity College. Previous to this appointment he spent two and a half years as a Wellcome Trust Post-doctoral Fellow and Fulbright Scholar at Harvard University with Professor Stuart Schreiber. He gained his DPhil for work on the proposed biosynthesis of the manzamine alkaloids at Oxford University under the supervision of Professor Sir Jack Baldwin. David’s research programme is focused on diversity-oriented synthesis, synthetic methodology and chemical genetics.

Plate25 Greg Tochtrop

Greg Tochtrop received his BS in biochemistry from the University of Missouri, and completed his PhD in bioorganic chemistry working under Douglas Covey and David Cistola at Washington University School of Medicine. Post-doctoral studies led him to Harvard and the Institute of Chemistry and Cell Biology where he worked with Randall King and Stuart Schreiber. In July 2006, Greg began a tenure-track position at Case Western Reserve University, with appointments in the Chemistry and Pharmacology Departments. Greg's research program is focused on understanding protein–ligand recognition processes, and using chemical tools to help dissect complex physiologic processes.

Plate26 Coran M. H. Watanabe

Coran M. H. Watanabe was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii and received a BS degree in Chemistry from the University of Hawaii, Manoa. She obtained her PhD degree in Bio-Organic Chemistry from The Johns Hopkins University with Professor Craig A. Townsend and followed with post-doctoral research as a Howard Hughes Fellow of the Life Sciences Foundation with Professor Peter G. Schultz initially at the University of California, Berkeley and subsequently at The Scripps Research Institute. In 2002 she joined the ranks at Texas A&M University as an Assistant Professor of chemistry. In 2003 she received a Research Innovation Award from Research Corporation and was recently named an American Cancer Society Scholar (2007).

Plate27 Paul Wiseman

Paul Wiseman obtained his PhD in Chemistry from the University of Western Ontario. He was later a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Tokyo, Nagoya University, and at the University of California, San Diego. In 2001, Paul started as an Assistant Professor jointly appointed in the Departments of Chemistry and Physics at McGill University, and was promoted to associate professor in 2007. His research involves combining nonlinear optical microscopy with correlation spectroscopy for studying transport dynamics of macromolecules and their interactions in living cells and neurons. He was awarded the Young Fluorescence Investigator award in 2005 by the Biophysical Society and later the Yaffe Teaching Award and the Principal’s Prize for Teaching by McGill. When not teaching or in the lab, Paul is a pre-eminent power-forward in McGill’s D-league intramural hockey program.

Plate28 Jin Zhang

Jin Zhang received her BS degree in chemistry from Tsinghua University, and her PhD in chemistry from the University of Chicago. After finishing her post-doctoral training with Dr Roger Tsien and Dr Susan Taylor at the University of California, San Diego, she joined the Department of Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Pharmacology, Neuroscience and Oncology. Current research in her lab focuses on development of new methodologies for tracking signaling activities in living systems, and investigation of spatiotemporal regulation or dysregulation of signaling molecules in cell migration, energy metabolism and cancer development.

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