Chemical Biology

Keynote Speaker

Stuart L. Schreiber, PhD

Harvard University
email | web site | publications

Stuart L. Schreiber is an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and is Morris Loeb Professor and chair of the department of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University. He is a founder and director of the Harvard Institute of Chemistry and Cell Biology (ICCB) and of its affiliated, National Cancer Institute-sponsored Initiative for Chemical Genetics, and a member of the faculty of the Broad Institute, a joint initiative of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a member The Rockefeller University Board of Trustees.

Schreiber earned a PhD in organic chemistry at Harvard University before joining the faculty at Yale University in May of 1981. He returned to Harvard in 1988. He is known for having developed systematic ways to explore biology, especially disease biology, using small molecules (precursors to therapeutic drugs that are used as bioprobes) and for his role in the development of the field of chemical biology. Using his chemical approach, he has discovered principles that underlie information transfer and storage in cells.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and is a founder of several successful biotechnology firms, including Vertex Pharmaceuticals, ARIAD Pharmaceuticals, and Infinity Pharmaceuticals. To facilitate sharing of information derived from small molecules, Schreiber and the ICCB launched the online public database ChemBank in 2003.

Speakers

Benjamin F. Cravatt, PhD

The Scripps Research Institute
email | web site | publications

Benjamin F. Cravatt is a professor at the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology and the departments of cell biology and chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute, where he directs a research group that develops and applies an array of biochemical, chemical, and genetic technologies to elucidate the roles of enzymes in physiological and pathological processes, especially as pertains to the nervous system and cancer. Cravatt's research group has obtained fundamental insights into the chemical, biochemical, and physiological workings of several important mammalian serine hydrolases, including enzymes involved in the neurobiology of pain and in proteases associated with tumor progression.

Cravatt received a PhD in macromolecular and cellular structure and chemistry from The Scripps Research Institute in 1996. His honors include a graduate fellowship from the National Science Foundation (1992-1995), a Searle Scholar Award (1998-2001), a Technology Review's TR100 Top 100 Young Innovators Award (2002), the Promega Award for Early Career Life Scientists from the American Society for Cell Biology (2002), the Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry (2004), and a Cope Scholar Award (2005).

Akira Kawamura, PhD

Hunter College, CUNY
email | web site | publications

Akira Kawamura received his BS and MS degrees in organic chemistry under the guidance of Kazuo Tachibana at the University of Tokyo, where he worked on the isolation and biochemical characterization of shark-repelling substances from the Moses sole flat fish. Kawamura received his PhD in chemistry from Columbia University under the direction of Koji Nakanishi and Nina Berova in 1999 for his microscale structural analyses on sphingolipids, brassinosteroids, and endogenous ouabain.

Before joining Hunter College as an assistant professor, Kawamura spent his postdoctoral stint in the group of Peter G. Schultz at the Scripps Research Institute, where he conducted genomic profiling of natural products and various biological systems, including angiogenesis, cellular density arrest, and hypertension from 1999 to 2002.

Judy Lieberman, MD, PhD

CBR Institute for Biomedical Research, Harvard Medical School
email | web site | publications

Judy Lieberman, senior investigator at the Harvard Medical School Center for Blood Research and professor in pediatrics, received her PhD in theoretical physics at Rockefeller University and an MD in the joint Harvard-Massachusetts Institute of Technology Program in Health, Science and Technology. She trained in internal medicine and hematology/oncology at New England Medical Center, and learned about T cell immunology in the laboratory of Herman Eisen in the Center for Cancer Research at MIT.

Lieberman's laboratory studies cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs), key cells in the immune defense against viral infection and cancer, and their role in antiviral immunity. A major focus is studying the molecular pathways used by CTLs to induce cell death. Lieberman and her coworkers have identified a novel caspase-independent apoptotic pathway induced by the CTL protease granzyme A. Other work centers on understanding how CTL function is regulated.

Her laboratory has been characterizing the CTL response to HIV-1, the virus that causes AIDS, and trying to understand why it does not ultimately control the virus. She is also working to develop an oral HIV vaccine using Listeria monocytogenes as a vector. Her interest in HIV led to recent work on harnessing RNA interference (RNAi) to suppress HIV infection. Her laboratory is working on translating RNAi for therapeutic use against HIV and other indications. She was the first to demonstrate in an animal model that RNAi could protect animals from disease.

Carmichael S. Roberts, PhD

Surface Logix, Inc.
email | web site

Carmichael C. Roberts is cofounder and president of Surface Logix, Inc., a drug optimization company focused on combining proprietary small-molecule chemistries with known biologically relevant pharmacophores to create new chemical entities with improved pharmacodynamic and pharmacokinetic properties. Previously, Roberts worked in business development at GelTex Pharmaceuticals, which was acquired by Genzyme, where he designed business development strategies for a preclinical product line for infectious disease and obesity.

Roberts received a PhD in organic chemistry from Duke University and was a National Science Foundation Fellow at Harvard University's department of chemistry and chemical biology under Professor George Whitesides. He holds an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management.

Eloy Rodriguez, PhD

Cornell University
email | web site | publications

Eloy Rodriguez describes himself as "a biological chemist interested in the organic chemistry of natural drugs from plants, insects, and fungi." He is the James A. Perkins Professor of Environmental Studies at Cornell University where he specializes in the chemical properties of tropical and desert plants. He developed and directs both the Punta Cana Cornell Biodiversity Center in the Dominican Republic and the university's EsBaran Amazon Field Station and Laboratory in Peru. Since 2000 he has also been associate director of the Cornell's Weill Medical College Center for Complementary and Integrative medicine, located in New York City.

Rodriguez, with Richard Wrangham of Harvard, is known for establishing the field of and coining the term zoopharmacognosy, the study of animals' observed ability to self-medicate and to protect themselves from disease. He earned a doctorate in phytochemistry and plant biology from the University of Texas at Austin in 1975. His past positions include professor in the School of Medicine and departments of developmental cell biology and ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California at Irvine. He has published more than 155 articles and two books on a wide variety of topics in plant chemistry.

Jose A. Salas, PhD

University of Oviedo
email | web site | publications

Jose A. Salas is a professor of microbiology at the University of Oviedo in Spain, where he obtained his PhD in 1980 by conducting studies of cell differentiation in Streptomyces. His postdoctoral work in the UK at the University of Cambridge and the University of Leicester looked at molecular resistance mechanisms in antibiotic-producing actinomycetes.

Salas heads a group of 20 scientists focused on the isolation and characterization of antibiotic and antitumor biosynthesis gene clusters. The group, which aims to engineer these biosynthetic pathways to generate novel derivatives with potential clinical application, has published more than 120 papers and filed 10 patents based on scientific discoveries.

Adrienne Burke

Adrienne Burke is founder of Genomic Society Consulting, which provides market research and communications services to the life sciences industry. She has been a science and health journalist since 1993. She was the founding editor-in-chief of Genome Technology magazine and editorial director of GenomeWeb.com. She also served as editor-in-chief of BioInform, a weekly newsletter for the bioinformatics industry, and oversaw launches of the newsletters ProteoMonitor and Agricultural Genomics. Earlier, she was a managing editor of a magazine for occupational health professionals.