Contributors to the Emerging Investigators issue

Paramjit Arora was born in New Delhi and relocated to Los Angeles in his early teens. He obtained his BS in Chemistry from UC Berkeley and his earliest research experience was in the lab of Professor Richard Mathies. He received his PhD degree in Organic Chemistry under the guidance of Professor James Nowick at UC Irvine and pursued an American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellowship with Professor Peter Dervan at Caltech before joining the faculty of NYU in 2002. He is interested in using the principles of physical organic chemistry to regulate biological phenomenon, in particular to develop synthetic approaches to target protein interfaces. His group’s research efforts have been recognized by the James D. Watson Investigator Award, the Cottrell Scholar Award and the Whitehead Fellowship for Young Faculty in Biomedicine.

Michael Best was born in Augsburg, Germany, and was then raised in Rochester, NY, where his family moved two years later. He received his BS in Chemistry from Boston College, where he first discovered the joys of research pursuing the synthesis of bowl-shaped fullerene derivatives in the lab of Professor Laurence T. Scott. He next obtained his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin working with Professor Eric V. Anslyn on the design, synthesis and study of receptors for analyte detection. Following this, he performed post-doctoral work at the Scripps Research Institute with Professor Chi-Huey Wong, which focused on the development of carbohydrate microarrays and inhibitors of sulfotransferase enzymes. In 2005, he joined the faculty at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. There, his group’s research broadly involves the development of synthetic probes of use for understanding biological processes. A particular focus is to understand recognition processes that occur at cellular membranes through the development and application of lipid probes and approaches to the functionalization and study of membrane surfaces. Robert Stahelin, a co-author on this article, is an assistant professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Indiana University School of Medicine-South Bend. His group’s research interests include the study of protein-lipid binding events and their involvement in biological processes and disease onset.

Danielle Dube is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Bowdoin College. She received her BA in Biology from Cornell University in 2000 and earned her PhD in chemistry in 2005 from the University of California, Berkeley. As a graduate student in Carolyn Bertozzi’s lab, she profiled glycosylation in living animals. She then pursued post-doctoral training with Jennifer Kohler at Stanford University, where she developed a two-hybrid screen for studying glycosylated proteins. In 2007 Danielle joined the faculty at Bowdoin College. The Dube lab is using chemical tools to target, alter, and understand glycosylation.

Caren Freel Meyers completed her PhD in Chemistry from the University of Rochester under the direction of Professor Richard Borch (in absentia at Purdue University). Her graduate research elucidated activation mechanisms of nucleoside phosphoramidate prodrugs. She then pursued a teaching/research postdoctoral position under the guidance of Professors Richard Borch and G. Marc Loudon at Purdue University, where she developed novel phosphorylation methods using phosphoramidate-based chemistry while simultaneously engaging in organic chemistry teaching activities. Caren carried out a second postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School in the laboratory of Professor Christopher Walsh where she studied aminocoumarin antibiotic biosynthesis. She is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Her research laboratory is pursuing the development of new anti-infective agents and anti-infective prodrugs targeting isoprenoid biosynthesis in human pathogens.

Jiyong Hong received his BS and MS degrees from Seoul National University (South Korea). He obtained his PhD degree from The Scripps Research Institute (USA) under the guidance of Professor Dale L. Boger and was a postdoctoral research associate at The Scripps Research Institute (USA) with Professor Peter G. Schultz. He then joined Duke University as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry in 2005. His research interest focuses on using chemical tools to understand the signaling pathways underlying cell and developmental biology.

Ron Johnson received a PhD in biological chemistry at Johns Hopkins University in the lab of Peter Devreotes. In postdoctoral studies with Matthew Scott at Stanford University, Ron studied control of Hedgehog signaling in flies and vertebrates, work that he continued in his own lab at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. In 2001, he joined Human Genome Sciences to learn target discovery and drug development where his lab’s research supported clinical oncology trials. Ron joined the NIH Chemical Genomics Center in 2004 to apply high-throughput technologies and systems approaches to the study of biological processes, especially those related to signal transduction and oncogenesis.

Markus Kaiser studied chemistry in Frankfurt and Tübingen, Germany. He then moved to the group of Professor Luis Moroder at the Max-Planck-Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany, to perform his PhD work on natural product derived proteasome inhibitors. As a postdoctoral Marie Curie fellow at the Collège de France (Paris) in Professor Jean-Marie Lehn’s group, he investigated small molecule recognition of DNA quadruplex and RNA hairpin conformations. Since October 2005, he is an independent group leader at the newly established Chemical Genomics Centre of the Max-Planck-Society in Dortmund, Germany. His research interests are the development of small molecule probes for studying cellular proteolysis. To design such probes, he either resorts to the wealth of nature, using natural products as starting structures for the design of small molecule probes or employs rational drug design approaches.

Andre Levchenko was born in Kishinev, USSR and grew up in Siberia. He received his BS and MS degrees in biological physics from the Moscow Institute for Physics and Technology and his PhD degree in biomedical engineering from Columbia University. While at the graduate school, he also worked at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center on drug resistance in cancer cells. His post-doc at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) was in Divisions of Electrical Engineering and Biology. In 2001 he accepted a faculty position at the Johns Hopkins University, where he has been ever since, doing experimental and theoretical research of biological signal transduction. When he is not busy discovering a cure for cancer and pursuing similarly trivial tasks, he enjoys spending time with his family, reading random articles on Wikipedia, traveling and writing poetry.

Pinghua Liu received his BA from Nankai University (China) in chemistry and MS in natural gas chemical engineering from Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (Chinese Academy of Sciences). In 1996, he joined Professor Hung-wen (Ben) Liu’s lab at University of Minnesota working on fosfomycin biosynthesis. After received his PhD in bioorganic chemistry in 2001, he moved to Professor JoAnne Stubbe’s lab at MIT to work on rubber and polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB) biosynthesis and regulation. He joined the Boston University faculty in 2005. He is the 2008 NSF CAREER award recipient. His group research is focusing on natural product biosynthesis and developing natural product based immune therapies. In addition, his group is also working on protein post-translational modifications.

Kazunori Matsuura obtained his PhD from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1996 under the supervision of Professor Yoshio Okahata. In 1996, he joined the Department of Molecular Design and Engineering, Nagoya University as an Assistant Professor. In 2001, he moved to the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Kyushu University as an Associate Professor. In 2006, he was selected as a researcher of JST PRESTO project “Structure Control and Function”. His research interests include bioconjugate chemistry, nano-assembly of peptides and DNAs, and molecular recognition of carbohydrates. He received The Young Scientists' Prize from the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in 2008.

Ryan Mehl earned his BS in chemistry from Moravian College in 1996 and his PhD in organic chemistry from Cornell University in 2001. His PhD work was under Tadhg Begley studying classical mechanistic enzymology. In 2001, he got cracking on a postdoc with Peter Schlutz at Scripps Research Institute, and currently holds the record for the shortest “productive” postdoc in the Schultz lab. In September 2002, he moved to his current position at Franklin & Marshall College. F&M is a splendid match because it embraces strong academics and research, while still having zealous noon basketball games. His current research interests include incorporating unnatural fluorinated and crosslinking amino acids into enzymes in order to probe the structure-function relationship of protein complexes.

Jordi Mestres was born in Girona, Catalonia (Spain) in 1967. He received a PhD in Computational Chemistry from the University of Girona in 1996. After a post-doctoral stay at Pharmacia&Upjohn (Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA), in 1997 he joined the Molecular Design & Informatics department at N.V. Organon (Oss, The Netherlands) and in 2000 he was appointed as Head of Computational Medicinal Chemistry at Organon Laboratories (Newhouse, Scotland, UK). In 2003, he took on his current position as Head of Chemogenomics at the Municipal Institute of Medical Research (Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain). His research interests focus on the use and development of computational approaches to integrate chemical, biological, and disease spaces.

Shabaz Mohammed received his PhD from UMIST (now University of Manchester, UK) in the field of peptide and protein characterisation, an area that nowadays is referred to as proteomics, under the supervision of Professor Simon Gaskell. He went on to work in the group of Professor Ole Jensen at the University of Southern Denmark (Odense, Denmark). In 2005, he moved to Utrecht University (The Netherlands), where he became a pivotal member of the Netherlands Proteomics Centre, directed by Professor Albert Heck. There, he recently became Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry. He continues to work in the area of mass spectrometric based proteomics and chemical tools development with the specific aim of creating enabling technologies for the biochemical community. In 2008, he received the Young Investigator Award from the Human Proteome Organisation (HUPO) and the Amsterdam Young Scientist Award.

Jan Mollenhauer was born in Kiel, Germany, in 1968, and received his PhD in 1998 from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. In 2003 he received his habilitation in Molecular Medicine from the University Heidelberg, which was mentored by the Nobel laureate in Medicine, Professor Harald zur Hausen. Until 2008 he worked as group leader in the division of Professor Annemarie Poustka at the German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg. In 2008 he joined the University of Southern Denmark, Odense, as Professor for Molecular Oncology. Jan Mollenhauer received the Future Award in Health Sciences 2005 and was listed in the 2007 edition of the Who Is Who of Emerging Leaders. Research focuses on the role of epithelial protection factors in infection, inflammation and cancer and on the development and application of novel functional genomics techniques for cancer drug target discovery.

Bradley Nilsson was born in Alberta, Canada. He received a BS in biochemistry and an MS in chemistry from Brigham Young University. He completed his PhD studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with Professor Ronald T. Raines in 2003. His doctoral research focused on the development of novel peptide ligation methodology. He then conducted postdoctoral research in the area of synthetic organic chemistry with Professor Larry E. Overman at the University of California, Irvine. In 2006, he joined the faculty of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Rochester. The Nilsson group is focused on understanding the non-covalent interactions that drive molecular recognition and self-assembly in amyloid proteins and on exploiting these interactions to develop materials that undergo functional self-assembly.

Webster Santos received both of his BS and PhD degrees in Chemistry at the University Virginia working with Professor Timothy Macdonald. He was later an NIH-NRSA postdoctoral fellow with Professor Gregory Verdine in the department of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University. In August of 2006, Webster joined the faculty at Virginia Tech as an assistant professor of chemistry. His current research interests include developing new synthetic methods, using synthetic organic chemistry to generate organoboron derivatives as protease inhibitors and developing novel molecules to control gene expression.

Tobias Sjöblom, PhD, is an Associate Professor at the Department of Genetics and Pathology, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden. In 2002, he defended his PhD thesis on applications of platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF) inhibitors in experimental therapies of tumors with activating mutations in the PDGF system. He did a postdoctoral fellowship at the Johns Hopkins University, and was team leader for the first genome-wide mutational analyses of breast and colorectal cancers. His current research interests include the consolidation of novel candidate cancer genes through mutational analyses in large sample cohorts, the role of translocations in the genesis and progression of solid tumors, and scalable methods for functional studies of candidate cancer genes.

Steve Sucheck was born in Monroe, MI in 1970. He received a BA in chemistry from The University of Toledo in 1992, his graduate studies were completed at the University of Virginia in 1998 with Professor Sidney M. Hecht, and he was an NIH post-doctoral fellow with Professor Chi-Huey Wong at The Scripps Research Institute. In 2000 he joined Optimer Pharmaceuticals, Inc. where he was Sr. Scientist and Group Leader. He initiated his own research group at the University of Toledo, Toledo OH in 2005, where his research interests include the synthesis and study of designed and naturally occurring carbohydrate-containing compounds.

Shana J. Sturla leads a research program in the area of Chemical Toxicology. Her group elucidates mechanisms by which biologically reactive chemical species, derived from the diet and environment, initiate carcinogenesis, as well as how natural products and their derivatives induce tumor cell toxicity or block carcinogenesis. Studies in her laboratory combine Organic Chemistry, related to her training at the University of California at Berkeley (BS, 1996) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (PhD, 2001), and Chemical Carcinogenesis and Chemoprevention, related to her postdoctoral research at the University of Minnesota Cancer Center. Shana was born in 1975 in New York and started her independent career in 2004 as an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota. In 2009, she was appointed as an Associate Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland.

Tsuyoshi Takahashi was born in Kanagawa, Japan, in 1972. He received his BS degree in 1996, MS in 1998, and Dr Eng. in 2001 at Tokyo Institute of Technology under the supervision of Professor Hisakazu Mihara. He was awarded a research fellowship of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) for Young Scientist from 2000–2002. At present he has been an Assistant Professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology since 2002. His current research interest is design of proteins and RNAs capable of reducing Aβ toxicity and detecting Aβ aggregates in vivo.

Kouhei Tsumoto received his BS degree in Biological Chemistry from the University of Tokyo in 1991, and obtained PhD degree in Biological Chemistry from the University of Tokyo in 1997. He began an academic career at Tohoku University in Sendai. In 2002, he was promoted to Associate Professor of the Department of Biomolecular Chemistry, Graduate School of Engineering, Tohoku University, and was involved in the antibody engineering project (1995–2005). In 2005, he was promoted to Associate Professor of the Department of Medical Genome Sciences, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, the University of Tokyo. His research interests include dissection and engineering of bio-molecular interactions, and development of liquid system for manipulating bio-molecules. In 2002, he received a Young Investigator Award from the Japanese Biochemical Society.

Lei Wang received his BS from Peking University and PhD in chemistry from UC Berkeley. His graduate work guided by Dr Peter Schultz on expanding the genetic code was awarded the Grand Prize for Young Scientists by Amersham Biosciences and the journal Science. After post-doctoral training with Dr Roger Tsien at UCSD as a Damon Runyon Fellow, he started as an Assistant Professor of Chemical Biology at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in 2005. His research interests include using genetically encoded unnatural amino acids to study signal transduction, stem cell differentiation, and neurobiology. His group is also developing synthetic biological approaches to study the origin and evolution of the genetic code. He is a Searle Scholar, a Beckman Young Investigator, and a recipient of the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award.

Ming Xian received his BS from Nankai University. He did his graduate work with Professor Jin-Pei Cheng (Nankai University) and Professor Peng George Wang (Wayne State University). After obtaining his PhD in 2003, he became a post-doctoral fellow in Professor Amos B. Smith, III’s group at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2006, he started his academic career as an Assistant Professor in Chemistry at the Washington State University. His group is interested in synthetic methodology development, natural product synthesis, and new chemical probes for nitric oxide signaling pathway.

Liming Ying is currently a Lecturer at the National Heart and Lung Institute and Chemical Biology Centre, Imperial College London. He obtained his PhD in physical chemistry from Peking University China in 1998. Prior to this, he spent a year and half at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland USA under the supervision of Sunney Xie in single molecule spectroscopy. After postdoctoral studies with David Klenerman and Shankar Balasubramanian at the Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, he was awarded a BBSRC David Phillips Research Fellowship and continued his research at Cambridge. He moved to Imperial College London in 2006. His research focuses on developing and applying single molecule fluorescence approaches and bionanotechnology to address biological questions.

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