Szymon Gaweł did his Master’s in the Faculty of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Biotechnology at Jagiellonian University, focusing on novel hypoxia-targeting anticancer therapies. He then started his PhD in the subject of protein engineering and artificial protein cages in the Bionanoscience and Biochemistry Laboratory, under the supervision of Prof. Jonathan Heddle. Szymon is mostly interested in protein cage functionalization and usage in drug delivery and novel vaccines.
Masahiro Hashimoto is a doctor’s degree student at the School of Life Science and Technology of Tokyo Institute of Technology, and a Research Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. He obtained his Master of Science in Engineering from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 2021. His current research interests include de novo peptide design and biomolecule condensates.
Gosuke Hayashi obtained his PhD from Osaka University under the direction of Professor Kazuhiko Nakatani in 2009. After postdoctoral research with Professor Hiroaki Suga at the University of Tokyo (2009–2011) and Professor James J. Collins at Boston University (2011–2012), he joined Professor Akimitsu Okamoto’s group at the University of Tokyo as Assistant Professor (2012–2019). Then he moved to Professor Hiroshi Murakami’s group at Nagoya University as Associate Professor. His expertise is chemical synthesis of biomacromolecules particularly focusing on proteins. He is currently interested in synthesis and evaluation of artificial sequence defined polymers including engineered proteins and proteomimetics.
Jonathan Heddle did his PhD at the University of Leicester. He moved to Japan as a postdoctoral researcher, eventually running labs at Tokyo Institute of Technology and RIKEN. He became a group leader at the Malopolska Centre of Biotechnology, Jagiellonian University in Poland in 2015. He heads the newly created Centre for Programmable Biological Matter at Durham University, UK, which began operation in September 2023. He is interested in understanding and designing natural and artificial biological nanomachines.
Euimin Hwang is a PhD student in the Department of Material Science and Engineering at Yonsei University. He graduated from Yonsei University in 2016 with a bachelor’s degree in material science and engineering. His interests include self-assembling peptide materials, peptide–protein conjugates, and functional peptide materials.
Hiroshi Inaba obtained his PhD from Kyoto University in 2015. During his PhD, he worked as a Research Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) for Young Scientists at Kyoto University. In 2015, he joined the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. In 2016, he moved to the Department of Chemistry and Biotechnology at Tottori University as an Assistant Professor and was promoted to an Associate Professor in 2021. In 2021, he was selected as a researcher for the FOREST program of the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST).
Yong-beom Lim is a Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea. He received his BS degree in chemistry from SungKyunKwan University, and MS and PhD degrees in chemistry from Seoul National University. His postdoctoral research was done at the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of California, San Francisco and then he worked at the Center for Supramolecular Nano-Assembly, Yonsei University, as a Research Professor. The focus of his current research is the development of self-assembling biomaterials based on inspiration from nature, while combining the principles of chemistry, biology, physics, medicine, and materials.
Kazunori Matsuura obtained his PhD from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1996 and then joined the Department of Molecular Design and Engineering at Nagoya University as an Assistant Professor. In 2001, he moved to the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Kyushu University, where he served as an Associate Professor. Since 2012, he has been working as a Full Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biotechnology at Tottori University. Professor Matsuura received the JSPS Prize in 2012, The Chemical Society of Japan Award for Creative Work in 2016, and the SPSJ Mitsubishi Chemical Award in 2019.
Hisakazu Mihara is a Professor at the School of Life Science and Technology, Tokyo Institute of Technology. He received his Doctor of Science degree in chemistry from Kyushu University in 1986. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Rockefeller University, New York, from 1986 to 1988. He was appointed Assistant Professor at Kyushu Institute of Technology in 1988 and was promoted to Associate Professor at Nagasaki University in 1993 and at Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1995. He has held professorships at Tokyo Institute of Technology since 2005. Honors: Chemical Society of Japan Award for Creative Work in 2014.
Takayuki Miki received his PhD in 2016 from Kyoto University under the supervision of Professor Itaru Hamachi. He worked for the JSR corporation from 2016 to 2018. In 2018, he moved to the School of Life Science and Technology, Tokyo Institute of Technology, and became an Assistant Professor. In 2023, he was specially appointed as Project Lecturer of the University of Tokyo. His research interests include (1) protein modification, (2) conditional proteomics, and (3) peptide/protein engineering.
Yuya Nakajima received his BS and MS degrees from Nagoya City University under the direction of Professor Hidehiko Nakagawa in 2020 and 2022, respectively. He is now pursuing his doctoral study under the supervision of Professor Hiroshi Murakami and Associate Professor Gosuke Hayashi supported by a Nagoya University Interdisciplinary Frontier Fellowship. His current research is focused on peptide chemistry and protein chemical engineering.
Koki Nakatsu obtained his BS and MS degrees at the University of Tokyo in 2019 and 2021, respectively. Currently, he is pursuing his doctoral study under the supervision of Professor Hiroshi Murakami and Associate Professor Gosuke Hayashi as a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) fellow. His research is focused on synthetic chemistry for chemical protein synthesis with increasing interest in protein-like molecules constructed using unnatural amino acids or with an unusual backbone.
Antonina Naskalska did her PhD in the Institute of Biochemistry and Biophysics (Polish Academy of Sciences). Currently she works as an Assistant Professor at the Malopolska Centre of Biotechnology at Jagiellonian University in Krakow (Poland). Her research focuses on developing protein cages, both natural (such as virus-like particles) and artificial. She is particularly interested in how these protein macrostructures can be functionalized to serve as vaccine platforms or drug delivery tools.
Norbert Osiński graduated from the Warsaw University of Life Sciences. Currently, he is a PhD student in the Bionanoscience and Biochemistry Laboratory at the Malopolska Centre of Biotechnology, Jagiellonian University in Poland. He is interested in protein nanocage design and practical applications of protein nanocages.
Masatoshi Shimizu is a master’s degree student in the Department of Chemistry and Biotechnology, School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo. He graduated from the School of Life Science and Technology of Tokyo Institute of Technology in 2023. His undergraduate research involves reversibly self-assembling peptides.
Sae Suzuki received her BS degree from the Department of Chemistry and Biotechnology at Nagoya University in 2022. She is now pursuing her master’s study under the supervision of Professor Hiroshi Murakami and Associate Professor Gosuke Hayashi. Her research is focused on the development of new strategies for chemical protein synthesis and the analysis of post-translational modifications on synthetic proteins.
Hiroki Takahashi received his Master of Engineering degree in biology from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 2023.
