Maria Almira Correia received her B. Pharm from the University of Bombay, her PhD in Pharmacology/Biochemistry from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis and then did her postdoctoral training at UCSF under the supervision of Dr Rudi Schmid. She then joined the UCSF Department of Cellular & Molecular Pharmacology where she progressed through the ranks and is currently Professor of Cellular & Molecular Pharmacology (1975–present), with joint faculty appointments in the UCSF Departments of Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences. Her long-standing research interests include: the assembly, structure–function relationships, mechanism-based inactivation, and heme regulation of hepatic hemoproteins, and the mechanistic characterization of their proteolytic turnover and its clinical relevance.
Pep Amengual-Rigo graduated in Biochemistry from Universitat de les Illes Balears, Spain. In 2017, he received his Master's degree in Bioinformatics from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain. He is currently starting his doctoral research studies in structural biology at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.
Shih-Wei Chuo was born in Taiwan. He received his B.S. (2011) from Kaohsiung Medical University and his M.S. (2015) from Georgia State University, working on the discovery of potent drugs in anticancer therapy by applying in silico virtual screening and the evolution of allosteric communication in 3-ketosteroid receptors. In 2015, he started his PhD career in the department of chemistry at the University of California, Davis (UCD) with Professor David B. Goodin. His current research aims to integrate experiments and computational chemistry to explore the structure–function relationships of cytochrome P450.
Chang Cui received her B. S. in chemistry from Peking University in 2012, before she joined the Yi Lu group at the Department of Chemistry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her graduate research includes the design of a functional model of heme–copper oxidase in a myoglobin scaffold with a catalytic rate comparable to that of the native oxidase, and the tuning of the reduction potential of a bacterial multi-copper oxidase for electrocatalytic oxygen reduction. Her current research interest involves elucidating the diverse roles of metal cofactors in biology.
Victor Davidson received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Texas Tech University in 1982. After postdoctoral training at Purdue University and a research position at the University of California at San Francisco he joined the University of Mississippi Medical Center where he was Professor of Biochemistry until 2011. He then moved to the University of Central Florida where he is currently Professor of Medicine in the Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences. He has published over 230 research papers and review articles. The focus of his research is in the areas of metabolism, enzymology, protein engineering, and oxidative stress.
Dr Malika Godamudunage earned a B.Sc. in Chemistry at the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka and her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Chemistry from New Mexico State University. It was during her graduate studies that Dr Godamudunage began working on the human orphan cytochrome P450 2S1 enzyme as a collaborative side project. Subsequently, as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Emily Scott, Dr Godamudunage's research has focused on understanding the structure and function relationship of several different human cytochrome P450 enzymes, including the major human drug metabolizing enzymes CYP3A7 and CYP3A4.
David P. Goldberg received his B.A. degree from Williams College, and his Ph.D. degree in Inorganic Chemistry with Prof. Stephen J. Lippard in 1995. He was an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow in the group of Prof. Brian Hoffman at Northwestern University, and began his independent career at Johns Hopkins University in the department of Chemistry in 1998, where he is currently a Professor of Chemistry. His research interests include synthetic inorganic chemistry, models of heme and nonheme metalloenzymes, dioxygen and nitric oxide activation, and other fundamental transformations important to synthetic and biological oxidation/reduction catalysis.
David B. Goodin is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Davis. He received his B.S. in Chemistry (1977) at the University of Oklahoma, and his Ph.D. in Chemistry (1983) at the University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of Kenneth Sauer and Melvin Klein. There, he used X-ray spectroscopy to study the manganese cluster in photosystem II. He did postdoctoral work at the University of British Columbia with Michael Smith F.R.S. working on the mutagenesis of heme peroxidases. In 1987, he joined the faculty of The Scripps Research Institute. He moved to the University of California, Davis in 2011, where he has continued to develop his interests in the structure and function of heme enzymes.
Currently an ICREA Professor, Dr Guallar did his PhD studies (1996–2000) between the University Autonomous of Barcelona (Spain) and UC Berkeley (USA). After three years as a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University (New York, USA), he was appointed assistant professor at Washington University School of Medicine (St Louis, USA). In 2006, the group moved to the Barcelona Supercomputing Center where his laboratory has grown considerably, developing important contributions in computational biophysics, such as the protein–ligand modeling software PELE, and biochemistry, including computational algorithms to study long-range electron transfer processes and enzyme engineering.
Takashi Hayashi received a PhD in organometallic chemistry from Kyoto University in 1991. He then began his academic carrier at Kyoto University and moved to Kyushu University as an associate professor in 1997. In addition, he worked with Ivano Bertini at the University of Florence and C.-H. Wong at the Scripps Research Institute as a visiting student (1986) and a visiting scientist (1995–1996), respectively. He was promoted to a full professor at the Department of Applied Chemistry, Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka University in 2005. He received the 1st JPP Young Investigator Award in Porphyrin Chemistry in ICPP-1 (2000), and the Chemical Society of Japan Award for Creative Work (2009). Furthermore, he has been selected to act as a council member of the Society of Biological Inorganic Chemistry (SBIC) from 2015 to 2019. His current research interests are in the area of bioinorganic chemistry, focusing on the modification and functionalization of hemoproteins and nonheme proteins to obtain biohybrid catalysts and biomaterials.
Mr Cheng Hu obtained his B. Sc. degree from the College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Peking University (China) in 2011. He is currently a graduate student under the direction of Prof. Jiangyun Wang at the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, working on the development of artificial metalloenzymes.
Masao Ikeda-Saito received his B.E. (1973), M.E. (1975), and Ph.D. (1978) degrees in Biophysical Engineering from Osaka University. In 1975, he joined the laboratory of Dr T. Yonetani at the University of Pennsylvania. He became a faculty member of the same institution in 1981. In 1989, he moved to Case Western Reserve University where he became Professor of Physiology and Biophysics in 1996 prior to his appointment as a Professor at Tohoku University in 1998. After his retirement from Tohoku in 2015, he has been the Science and Technology Advisor of the Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development.
Ariel Lewis-Ballester obtained his B.S. degree in Chemistry from the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez, in 2002. He then joined a Master's program in Chemistry at the same university, and subsequently moved to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he completed his Ph.D. and postdoctoral training in Professor Syun-Ru Yeh's laboratory in 2012 and 2016, respectively. He is currently a Research Associate in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics. His research interests are focused on using biophysical techniques to understand the structural and functional properties of heme-containing enzymes.
Mingxiang Liao is an Associate Director of Clinical Pharmacology and Drug Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics (DMPK) at Clovis Oncology. Prior to that, she was a Senior Scientist and group leader of DMPK at Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Inc, and then Takeda Pharmaceuticals International Co. She obtained her Ph.D. degree in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry from the Peking Union Medical College, and did her postdoctoral research in Dr Almira Correia's laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). At UCSF, her research focused on the mechanism of the heme-regulated expression of tryptophan 2,3-dioxygenase and the degradation pathway of the P450 proteins.
Shu-hao Liou is a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysical Chemistry. He received his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in physics from the National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan, and his Ph.D. in biophysics from the University of California, Davis, under the supervision of Prof. David B. Goodin. His research interests lie in the use of theoretical physics to model the sensing ability of chemotactic cells, pulsed electron paramagnetic resonance to probe the conformational changes in the P450s, and dynamic nuclear polarization to enhance the sensitivity of nuclear magnetic resonance by optical illumination.
Yi Lu received his B.S. from Peking University, and Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles. After two years of postdoctoral research in the Harry Gray group at Caltech, he started his own independent career in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in 1994. He is now Jay and Ann Schenck Professor of Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry. His research interests are in bioinorganic chemistry. He has received many awards, including the Royal Society of Chemistry Applied Inorganic Chemistry Award (2015), Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2015), and has been named on the Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researchers list from 2015 to 2017.
Thomas Makris was awarded a BA in Biology from the University of Pennsylvania. He received a Ph.D. in Biophysics under the direction of Prof. Stephen Sligar at Illinois, studying heme–enzyme dioxygen activation. In his post-doctoral work with Prof. John Lipscomb at the University of Minnesota, he identified several non-heme dinuclear-iron enzymes involved in the assembly of non-ribosomal peptide antibiotics. He joined the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of South Carolina in 2012 as an Assistant Professor where his research focuses on identifying and leveraging enzymes involved in natural product biosynthesis. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award.
Hirotoshi Matsumura received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology (Tokyo, Japan) under the direction of Nobuhumi Nakamura. After postdoctoral research at The University of Tokyo with Masahiro Samejima & Kiyohiko Igarashi, and at Lund University with Lo Gorton, he joined Pierre Moënne-Loccoz's group at Oregon Health & Science University to investigate the mechanism of nitric oxide reductase and its models. He is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Life Science at Akita University. His current research interests lie in the redox interactions of transmembrane metalloproteins in pathogenic fungus.
Evan Mirts received his B.S. degree in biology with a minor in physics from Truman State University in Kirksville, MO, where he attended from 2008–2012. He is presently a Ph.D. candidate at the Center for Biophysics and Quantitative Biology working in the laboratory of Prof. Yi Lu. Evan's research uses rational and computational approaches to design functional biosynthetic models of enzymes with complex metal centers, such as cubane and binuclear metal clusters, to better understand their electron transport and catalysis. He enjoys early 20th century jazz and has been dancing and teaching Lindy Hop for over ten years.
Pierre Moënne-Loccoz received his Ph.D. from Université Pierre & Marie Curie (Paris VI, France) for his work on higher plants' photosystems with Marc Lutz & Bruno Robert (1989). He continued studying photoactive proteins, first with Warner Peticolas at the University of Oregon and then with Mike Evans & Peter Heathcote at University College London, before investigating O2-activating iron proteins with Thomas Loehr & Joann Sanders Loehr at the Oregon Graduate Institute. He joined Oregon Health & Science University in 2001, where he is now an Associate Professor. His research focuses on the O2 and NO reactions of metalloenzymes.
Koji Oohora, born in Osaka, Japan, received his PhD from Osaka University in 2011. During his PhD studies, he worked with Prof. Thomas R. Ward in Switzerland in 2010. In 2011, he joined Osaka University as an assistant professor, working with Prof. Takashi Hayashi. Since 2015, he has been a member of the Frontier Research Base for Global Young Researchers in Osaka University as a tenure-track assistant professor. His interests lie in artificial metalloenzymes and biomaterials in bioinorganic chemistry.
Khoa N. Pham graduated from the Florida International University (FIU), Miami, with a B.S. and Ph.D. degree in Chemistry in 2009 and 2016, respectively. He carried out his thesis work under the supervision of Professor Jaroslava Miksovska on the studies of the conformational dynamics and stability of the potassium channel interacting protein 3 (KCNIP3). He is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Professor Syun-Ru Yeh's laboratory at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. His research interests focus on the structure, function and inhibition mechanisms of indoleamine 2,3-dioxygenase.
Emma Raven was born in Northamptonshire and obtained a BSc in Chemistry from the University of Leicester. Her interest in metalloproteins originated during PhD studies at Newcastle University with the late Geoff Sykes. She subsequently moved to the University of British Columbia (Vancouver) to Grant Mauk's laboratory, where she worked on a number of heme-containing proteins. In 1994, to her everlasting surprise, she was offered a lectureship at the University of Leicester where she worked as Professor of Biological Chemistry before moving to the University of Bristol in 2018.
Julian Reed was born in Scottsdale, Arizona and graduated summa cum laude with a degree in Biochemistry from Arizona State University in 2011. He completed his PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2017 under the guidance of Professor Yi Lu. He investigated the functional role of nonheme metal ion in the heme–copper oxidase superfamily using myoglobin-based models of such enzymes. His research interests include enzyme design, photocatalysis, and biomimicry.
Manfred T. Reetz is a synthetic organic chemist who pioneered the concept of the directed evolution of stereo- and regioselective enzymes as catalysts in organic chemistry and biotechnology. Currently, he is external emeritus group leader of the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung (MPI) and simultaneously Hans-Meerwein-Research-Professor at the University of Marburg/Germany. Homepage: www.kofo.mpg.de/en/research/biocatalysis
Ferran Sancho obtained his Chemistry degree in 2013 followed by a Master's degree in Theoretical Chemistry and Computational Modelling in 2015 at the University of Barcelona (UB). He is currently undertaking a PhD project at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC–CNS) in the Life Science department. His investigation lines include oxidoreductase catalysis, mainly flavoproteins and laccases, and the design of new variants for industrial eco-friendly applications.
Gerard Santiago obtained his Biochemistry degree at the University of Barcelona (UB) in 2013, and a Bioengineering Master's at Institut Químic de Sarrià (IQS) in 2015. He is currently a PhD candidate at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC–CNS). His scientific career revolves around different levels of Green Biotechnology, such as enzyme discovery for industrial applications in extreme environments, the production of high-value compounds on eukaryotic strains in waste materials, and enzyme engineering (focusing on oxidoreductases and esterases) for eco-friendly industry and technological purposes.
Dr Emily Scott first became fascinated with heme proteins during undergraduate field research on brittle stars with hemoglobin. This led to studies of myoglobin structure/function for a Ph.D. from Rice University and cytochrome P450 enzymes as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas Medical Branch. First at the University of Kansas and now at the University of Michigan, the primary focus of Dr Scott's research has been the structure/function relationships of the human cytochrome P450 enzymes. The Scott lab uses structural biology and biochemical techniques to understand drug metabolism and how to target specific P450 enzymes in disease pathways.
Vivek Sharma is a Research Fellow of the Academy of Finland. He also holds a Principal Investigator position at the Department of Physics, University of Helsinki (UH), and at the Institute of Biotechnology, UH. Earlier, he completed his doctoral degree in the research group Prof. Mårten Wikström (UH), and postdoctoral fellowship with Prof. Ilpo Vattulainen at the Tampere University of Technology. His research primarily focuses on mitochondrial proteins, which he studies with the help of multi-scale computational approaches.
Yoshitsugu Shiro received his Ph.D. from Kyoto University in 1985. After his work as a researcher and an Associate Chief Scientist at RIKEN, he was promoted to a Chief Scientist and started his independent carrier at RIKEN SPring-8 center in 2000. He moved to the University of Hyogo as a Professor in the Graduate School of Life Science in 2015. His research interests include the mechanism of enzymatic reactions and dynamics of metals in biology.
Zhoutong Sun obtained his Ph.D in microbiology at the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2012, and then he moved to Nanyang Technological University in Singapore as a research fellow. One year later, he moved to the Max-Planck-Institute for Coal Research and Philipps-University Marburg in Germany for a postdoc with Prof. Manfred T. Reetz. Since 2016, he has been a full professor at the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences via the “CAS Pioneer Hundred Talents Program”. His research interests are in the discovery, design and engineering of biocatalysts, as well as cascade reaction design and metabolic engineering.
Takehiko Tosha received his Ph.D. from Kyoto University in 2003. As a postdoctoral researcher, he worked at the Okazaki Institute for Integrative Bioscience, at the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute, USA, and at RIKEN SPring-8 center. He is currently a Senior Research Scientist at the RIKEN SPring-8 center. His research interests include molecular mechanisms of metalloprotein-catalyzed reactions.
Sam de Visser is Reader at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology at the University of Manchester and was appointed there in 2004. His research interests are in inorganic reaction mechanisms and computational modelling. His group uses density functional theory and quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics methods to understand the reactivity and properties of nonheme and heme enzymes, including the cytochromes P450. In addition, work in his group focusses on the understanding of the reactivity of biomimetic model complexes.
Dr Jiangyun Wang studied physical chemistry at the University of Science and Technology of China and graduated with a B. Sc. degree in 1998. In 2003, he finished his PhD studies in metalloprotein chemistry under the supervision of Professor Kenneth Suslick at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Between 2003 and 2007, he worked in the laboratory of Professor Peter Schultz at the Scripps Research Institute as a post-doctoral fellow. In 2008, he started his independent lab at the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Mårten Wikström received his MD, PhD at the University of Helsinki (UH) in 1971. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam with Prof. E. C. Slater, and at the University of Pennsylvania with Prof. Britton Chance. In 1983, he was appointed full professor at UH. From 1998 he was Research Director of the Structural Biology and Biophysics Program of the Institute of Biotechnology (UH), where he retired in 2013, but continues as an Emeritus. He was a recipient of the Anniversary Prize of the Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS) in 1977, the Anders Jahre Prize in 1984 and 1996, and the David Keilin Prize and Medal in 1997, and he gave the Peter Mitchell Medal Lecture in 2000.
Syun-Ru Yeh obtained her Ph.D. degree in chemistry from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1989. She then moved to Harvard medical school as a postdoctoral fellow, and subsequently to Princeton University and AT&T Bell laboratories, before she relocated to the Albert Einstein College of medicine in 1996, where she is currently a Professor of Physiology and Biophysics. She was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2012. Her research interests focus on the structure and function of heme-containing enzymes.
Dr Yang Yu received his B. Sc. degree from Peking University in 2008 and his PhD degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2014 under the direction of Professor Yi Lu. He is an associate professor at the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology, where he is working on metalloprotein design and engineering using unnatural amino acids.
Erik Yukl grew up in Oregon and Idaho, earning a B.S. in Chemistry from Pacific University in 2005. He earned a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Oregon Health and Science University, working with Dr Pierre Moënne-Loccoz on NO sensor proteins. After a postdoc at the University of Minnesota with Carrie Wilmot studying X-ray crystallography and crystal spectroscopy, Erik joined the faculty of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at New Mexico State University in 2013. His current research interests involve structural and mechanistic studies of bacterial zinc acquisition proteins and heme-based sensor proteins.
Jan Paulo T. Zaragoza was born in Manila, Philippines, in 1990 and obtained his B.S. in Biochemistry from the University of the Philippines Manila in 2010, and Ph.D. in Chemistry from the Johns Hopkins University in 2017 under the supervision of Prof. David Goldberg. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, working with Prof. Judith Klinman on investigating the role of protein structure and dynamics on enzyme catalysis. His research interests include the molecular mechanisms of oxygen activation by metalloenzymes and synthetic model complexes.
