Stanford University

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Dr. Christopher Barnes is an Assistant Professor of Biology and Sarafan ChEM-H Institute Scholar at Stanford University. Before arriving to Stanford, Dr. Barnes earned degrees in chemistry and psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and completed his PhD thesis in molecular pharmacology at the University of Pittsburgh. More recently, he completed his postdoctoral work at Caltech in the lab of Dr. Pamela Bjorkman, where he utilized structural biology techniques to help define human immune responses to HIV and COVID. His significant contributions to our understanding of antibody-antigen interactions has earned him such prestigious recognition as an HHMI Hanna Gray Fellow, Burroughs Wellcome PDEP fellow, Chan Zuckerberg Biohub investigator, Rita Allen Foundation Fellow, and more recently, a Pew Biomedical Scholar Fellow. Now, his laboratory combines structural, engineering, and in vivo approaches to investigate viral-host interactions to guide development of new technologies and therapies to mitigate emerging viruses that have the potential to cause the next pandemic.

The University of Oxford

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HAGAN BAYLEY is the Professor of Chemical Biology at the University of Oxford. A major interest of his laboratory is the development of engineered protein nanopores for stochastic detection, including single-molecule covalent chemistry and ultrarapid biopolymer sequencing. Recently, the Bayley lab has developed techniques for the fabrication of 3D tissues, both living and synthetic. In 2005, Professor Bayley founded Oxford Nanopore, which has manufactured the portable MinION and other DNA/RNA sequencers. In 2011, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Princeton University

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Michael Hecht grew up in New York City. He received a BA in Chemistry from Cornell, where he did research in the laboratory of Harold Scheraga, one of the pioneers of protein chemistry. He then moved to MIT, where he earned a Ph.D. in Biology in the laboratory of Robert Sauer. He did post-doctoral research at Duke in labs of David and Jane Richardson, where he worked on one of the first de novo designed proteins. In 1990, Hecht joined the faculty at Princeton, where is a Professor of Chemistry and teaches courses ranging from Introductory General Chemistry to graduate seminars on Protein Folding and Design.

Research in the Hecht lab spans the interface between Chemistry, Biology, and Engineering. Our work in Synthetic Biology includes projects ranging from the design of novel proteins to the construction of artificial genomes. Through this research, we explore the possibility
of sustaining life using molecular parts (genes & proteins) that did not evolve nature but were designed ‘from scratch.’

In addition to teaching and research, from 2010 through 2018, Hecht was the Master/Head
of Forbes College, one of the undergraduate residential colleges at Princeton.

When not at Princeton, Hecht skis, in-line skates, hikes, and does cross-country road trips. A friend noted that Hecht is a ‘hippie road tripper’ who took time off to get tenure at Princeton.

Princeton University

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​​Jerelle Joseph is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering and the Omenn-Darling Bioengineering Institute at Princeton University.  Her research focuses on understanding and engineering biomolecular condensates for biomedical and sustainability applications through the development of computer simulation approaches. Prior to joining Princeton, she completed postdoctoral research in the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge and held a Junior Research Fellowship in Physical and Chemical Sciences at King's College in Cambridge. Jerelle obtained a PhD in Chemistry from the University of Cambridge and an MPhil in Chemistry from the University of the West Indies, Barbados.

Chinese Academy of Sciences

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Dr. Mo-Fang Liu earned her Ph.D. degree from the Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 2000, under the supervision of Professors Ying-Lai Wang and En-Duo Wang. From 2000 to 2006, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the labs of Drs. Sankar Adhya and Susan Garges at the National Cancer Institute, NIH. In 2006, Dr. Liu joined Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, CAS, and initiated the new frontier of spermatogenesis and male infertility after becoming independent, which is completely distinct from her postdoctoral work on transcriptional control in bacteria. In the past 19 years, her team studied RNA-binding proteins and regulatory noncoding RNAs in male germline and their aberrant regulation in male infertility. They have made a series of discoveries on the roles of germline-specific RNA regulatory complexes in spermatogenesis and male infertility, advancing our understanding of germ cell development program and the pathological causes of male infertility.

The Utrecht University

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Tzviya Zeev-Ben-Mordehai is an Associate Professor at Bijvoet Centre for Biomolecular Research of the Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

An expert in cellular structural biology of mammalian gametes and structural biology of membrane proteins. Zeev-Ben-Mordehai received her PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 2008. In 2015 she established her group in the Division of Structural Biology of Oxford University. Since 2017 her group is part of Bijvoet Centre for Biomolecular Research of the Utrecht University. 

Her group combines biochemistry, biophysics and advanced cryo-electron microscopy to unravel the molecular basis of fertilization. Among the group achievements are the first in-cell structures of mammalian sperm flagella (EMBO J 2021 PMID 33694216), structure of conserved protein arrays that tether mitochondria to the underlying cytoskeleton (PNAS 2021 PMID 34737233). By developing a cryo-electron microscopy single-particle-analysis approach that allows resolving atomic resolution structures of multi-protein complexes without isolating them from the cell, the group resolved the native axonemal doublet microtubules structure from sperm (Cell 2023 PMID 37327785, Nature 2025 PMID 39743588).

Zeev-Ben-Mordehai is a recipient of a Wellcome Trust and The Royal Society Sir Henry Dale Fellowship (2015), NWO START-UP (2018), ERC-consolidator grant (2023) and an NWO-Vici grant (2025). 

University of Oxford

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Simon Newstead completed his undergraduate studies in Biochemistry at the University of Bath before moving to the University of St Andrews in Scotland to pursue his PhD in protein crystallography under Professor Garry Taylor. From 2004 to 2009, Simon worked with Professor So Iwata at Imperial College London, focusing on determining the structures of proton-coupled peptide transporters. While at Imperial College, Simon developed the MemGold family of membrane protein crystallography screens. In 2009, Simon moved to the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford to establish his independent research group, which focuses on the mechanisms underpinning drug and nutrient transport in the human body. In 2022, Simon was promoted to the David Phillips Professorship of Molecular Biophysics and the Theme Head for Structural Biology and Molecular Biophysics. He is also a member of the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience Discovery and a Professorial Fellow at Corpus Christi College.  

National Institutes of Health

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Dr. Lauren Porter is an Earl Stadtman Tenure-Track Investigator and Distinguished Scholar at the U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health.  Her research focuses on computational identification and experimental characterization of fold-switching proteins, which challenge the one-sequence-one-structure paradigm by remodeling their secondary and tertiary structures and changing their functions in response to cellular stimuli.  Before starting her lab at NIH, Dr. Porter did postdoctoral work at HHMI, Janelia and the University of Maryland and did her Ph.D. work with George Rose at Johns Hopkins university.  Dr. Porter lives in the Washington D.C. suburbs with her husband and two children.

The University of Oxford

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Carol Robinson is the Dr Lee’s Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford and is the Founder Director of Oxford’s Kavli Institute for Nanoscience Discovery.  She is recognised for establishing mass spectrometry as a viable technology to study the structure and function of proteins.  Carol graduated from the Royal Society of Chemistry in 1979 and completed her PhD at Cambridge University.  After a career break of eight years to focus on her family, she became Professor of Mass Spectrometry at Cambridge, returning to Oxford in 2009 to take up her current position.  In 2016, she co-founded OMass Therapeutics (Omass.com) with a number of postdoctoral research associates from her laboratory.

Her work has attracted numerous awards including the 2022 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry, the 2022 Louis Jeantet Prize for Medicine, and most recently the 2023 ASMS John B. Fenn Award for a Distinguished Contribution in Mass Spectrometry, and election to the American Philosophical Society.  Carol is the former President of the Royal Society of Chemistry, a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences USA and an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  She was appointed DBE in 2013 for services to science and industry. 

Weizmann Institute of Science

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Prof. Rina Rosenzweig received her BSc in Chemistry and PhD in Biochemistry from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, followed by postdoctoral training at the University of Toronto with prof. Lewis E Kay. She joined the Weizmann Institute of Science in 2016, where her group investigates molecular chaperones and protein homeostasis using advanced NMR spectroscopy. Her research focuses on how chaperone networks recognize, remodel, and prevent the aggregation of misfolded proteins, with particular emphasis on mechanisms underlying neurodegenerative diseases.

Prof. Rosenzweig is the vice president of the Israeli Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and has been awarded a number of academic honors, including the Hestrin Prize for Excellence in Biochemical Research (2021), The ERC starting and consolidator grants (2018 and 2024) the Russell Varian Young Investigator Award in Magnetic Resonance (2022), the ICMRBS Founders’ Medal (2024), and the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists in Chemistry (2023), honoring her discoveries on the regulatory mechanisms by which chaperones combat protein aggregation.

Jawaharlal Nehru University

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Dr. Arun Shukla obtained M.Sc. in Biotechnology from the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and pursued his Ph.D. in the Department of Molecular Membrane Biology at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt, Germany. Dr. Shukla subsequently joined Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, USA for his post-doctoral research. He is currently a Professor and Sonu Agrawal Memorial Chair in the Department of Biological Sciences and Bioengineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India. The overarching theme in his laboratory is to understand the structural basis of activation and signaling of G protein-coupled receptors and leverage this information to design novel therapeutics with minimized side-effects. 

The University of British Columbia

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Dr. Elitza Tocheva is an Associate Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Her research focuses on elucidating fundamental microbial processes, including the evolution of the bacterial cell envelope and the mechanisms underlying host-pathogen interactions that drive disease. Her lab employs a multidisciplinary approach which integrates advanced structural techniques, such as correlative light and electron microscopy, super-resolution light microscopy, and cryo-electron tomography, with detailed molecular, biochemical, and bioinformatic analyses.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Max Wilkinson studied for a BSc(hons) in biochemistry at the University of Otago where he worked with Profs Peter Fineran and Kurt Krause on the structural biology of CRISPR-Cas systems. He then obtained a PhD from the University of Cambridge working at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology with Dr Kiyoshi Nagai, where he solved several cryo-EM structures of the spliceosome performing the pre-mRNA splicing reactions. During postdoctoral work in the lab of Prof Feng Zhang at the Broad Institute he has been working on diverse roles of reverse transcriptases, including in transposon mobility and for phage defence.

Tsinghua University

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YAN Nieng received her Bachelor’s Degree from the Department of Biological Science and Technology at Tsinghua University in 2000 and Ph.D. from the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University in 2004, where she continued her postdoctoral research. She joined School of Medicine, Tsinghua University as a professor in 2007. Ten years later, in 2017, she was recruited back by Princeton University and became the inaugural Shirley M. Tilghman Professor of Molecular Biology. In 2022, Yan Nieng served as the Founding President of Shenzhen Medical Academy of Research & Translation (SMART). In 2023, she served as the Director of Shenzhen Bay Laboratory (SZBL).

Dr. Yan’s primary research interest has been in the structural and mechanistic investigation of membrane transport proteins that are of tremendous physiological, pathophysiological, and pharmaceutical significance. She reported the first structures of the human glucose transporters GLUT1 and GLUG3, the eukaryotic voltage-gated sodium and calcium channels, and a number of proteins involved in sterol metabolism. Her present research program focuses on structure-guided mechanistic understanding and drug discovery for pain relief. Her achievements have won her numerous accolades.