Biological Design

Speakers

Organizers

Ronald Koder, PhD

The City College of New York/CUNY

Jin K. Montclare, PhD

Polytechnic Institute of New York University

Jin Ryoun Kim, PhD

Polytechnic Institute of New York University

Vikas Nanda, PhD

Rutgers University

Speakers

Brian Bachmann, PhD

Vanderbilt University

Brian O. Bachmann is the sole Principal Investigator of the Vanderbilt Laboratory for Biosynthetic Studies (VLBS). The research program comprising the VLBS concerns itself with problems in secondary metabolism, both natural and anthropogenic. Research in the laboratory is thematically divided into three subgroups 1) Deconstructive biosynthesis, how life makes secondary metabolites, 2) Constructive biosynthesis, how to coopt the biochemistry of life to synthesize unnatural secondary metabolites and 3)Biosynthesis discovery, the discovery of previously unknown secondary metabolites. Prior to joining the faculty of Vanderbilt Department of Chemistry in Nashville Tennessee, Brian was Director of Chemistry of Ecopia Biosciences, a drug discovery company in Montreal, QC. Brian received his PhD in Chemistry from The Johns Hopkins University.

Scott Banta, PhD

Columbia University

Scott Banta PhD is an Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at Columbia University. He received his BSE degree from the Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and his MS and PhD degrees from the Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering at Rutgers University. He did a postdoctoral fellowship with Professor Martin Yarmush at the Shriners and Massachusetts General Hospitals and Harvard Medical School. He began his faculty career in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Columbia University in 2004 and his research has focused on the engineering of proteins and peptides that exhibit controllable and dynamic conformational behavior and the application of these systems in areas including bioelectrocatalysis, biomaterials, gene and drug delivery, biosensing, and bioenergy.

Irene Chen, MD, PhD

Harvard University

Irene Chen is a Bauer Fellow at the FAS Center for Systems Biology at Harvard University. Her current research focuses on emergence and evolution in biochemical systems. She received an MD-PhD in biophysics from Harvard in 2007, studying simple membrane systems.

Sonya J. Franklin, PhD

Monsanto Company

Sonya Franklin joined Monsanto in January of 2007, after nine years on the faculty of the University of Iowa. She received her PhD degree in Inorganic Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley working on lanthanide MRI contrast agents. Her interests continued to drift more biological, so following graduate school, she took a NIH-funded postdoctoral position at the California Institute of Technology working on metallointercalators in DNA. In 1998, she began her independent career in the Chemistry Department at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, where she received tenure in 2004. Her research at Iowa comprised several interrelated projects in bioinorganic chemistry, with the major focus of the lab on de novo metalloprotein design. When she was approached with the opportunity to do structure, function, and design at Monsanto, she left her academic career to pursue these passions in a different context. In 2009, she became the Protein Technologies Program Director, leading a team focused on protein characterization, design, and optimization of novel protein leads.

Birte Höcker, PhD

Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology

Birte Höcker received her Diplom in biology from Göttingen University (1999), earned her PhD in biochemistry at Köln University (2003), and carried out postdoctoral studies on computational protein design at Duke University Medical Center. Since 2006 she is a group leader at the MPI for Developmental Biology in Tübingen. Her research interests focus on the evolution and the design of protein folds and functions.

Rajesh R. Naik, PhD

Air Force Research Laboratory, Materials and Manufacturing Directorate, Wright-Patterson AFB

Rajesh R. Naik is the Technology Advisor and Research Group Lead at the Nanostructured and Biological Materials Branch (Materials and Manufacturing Directorate) at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) at Wright-Patterson AFB, OH. He received his PhD degree in Molecular and Cellular Biology at Carnegie Mellon University. He has authored over 120 peer-reviewed publications and has several patents and awards. His research interests include engineered biomaterials, biosensors, bioelectronics and bionanotechnology. He is currently an adjunct Professor at Wright State University (Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department) and at Georgia Tech (Department of Materials Science and Engineering). He was recently elected as SPIE Fellow in 2009.

Milan Stojanovic, PhD

Columbia University School of Medicine

Milan Stojanovic studied chemistry in Belgrade (Serbia), Boston (MA), and NYC (NY). His current research interest is best described as research on "not what molecules are doing, but what molecules should be doing".