Dr. Vered Padler-Karavani received her PhD in biochemistry from Tel Aviv University. She then did her postdoctoral training with Prof. Ajit Varki at The University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and subsequently established The Laboratory for Glycoimmunology at Tel Aviv University The George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences, Department of Cell Research and Immunology, The Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research. Her research combines glycobiology, immunology, bio-nanotechnology, cancer research and xenotransplantation, and involves cutting edge technologies within these disciplines. She received several prestigious grants from the European Commission (Marie Curie, Health Consortium, ERC) to investigate various aspects of immunology of carbohydrates. With TRANSLINK health consortium (6 academic institutes, 5 hospitals and 3 companies from Israel, Italy, France, Spain, UK, Sweden, Canada and USA; https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/603049), she investigated risk factors of animal-derived heart valve implants, in ~5,000 patients. Her research is currently focused on studying mechanisms of glycan immune recognition and responses in animal models and in humans, in vitro and in vivo. Particularly, the immunological basis of anti-carbohydrate antibodies and their implications on cancer and heart diseases, and on developing novel diagnostics and therapeutics for such diseases. 

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Dr. Danny Hsu is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica. During his doctorate study at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, he determined the atomic structure of a lantibiotic, nisin, in complex with Gram-positive bacterial cell wall precursor, Lipid II. He coined the term "pyrophosphate case" to explain how nisin targets Lipid II to achieve its antimicrobial activity, providing a blueprint for future antibiotics developments. During his postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge, UK, Danny demonstrated the proof of concept of using solution-state NMR spectroscopy to investigate the co-translational folding of nascent polypeptide chains on the ribosome. His earlier independent research focused on the folding mechanisms and functional implications of topologically knotted proteins. He currently focuses on developing an integrated biophysics and structural biology platform, including cryo-electron microscopy, mass spectrometry, and molecular modeling, to investigate the structure-activity relationship (SAR) of glycoproteins, and coronavirus spike proteins, in particular, and how mutations impact on the SAR in the context of glycosylation.

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Dr. Hans Bakker is a glycobiologist with expertise in glycosyltransferases. He received his Ph.D. at the VU Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and worked in Zurich, Switzerland, and Wageningen, the Netherlands, afterwards. Since 2001, he has worked at Hannover Medical School in Germany. Over the years, he has identified several new genes encoding glycosyltransferases, including the xylosyltransferases responsible for the glycosylation of Notch EGF repeats and, more recently, the first C-mannosyltransferase, the enzyme responsible for unique glycosylation of tryptophans in proteins. His laboratory has established several specific methods to characterize C-mannosyltransferases and their target proteins from Caenorhabditis elegans and mammals in vitro and cellular systems. After cloning the C-mannosyltransferase in 2013, he could establish that C-mannosylation assists in protein folding in the endoplasmic reticulum and is important for the temperature stability of proteins. Whereas C. elegans has one C- mannosyltransferase, four homologs are present in mammals. His group could show that different mammalian C-mannosyltransferases have distinct fine specificity.

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Professor Ludger Johannes is Research Director (DRE) at INSERM. He is a member of the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes (German organization of the academically gifted), Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds, European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), and German Academy of Science — Leopoldina. At Institut Curie, he has been heading since 2001 the Traffic, Signaling, and Delivery Team, member of the excellence initiative Cell(n)Scale. Since January 2014, he has directed the Cellular and Chemical Biology unit. His research aims at establishing fundamental concepts of endocytosis and intracellular trafficking. The Johannes team has discovered the membrane trafficking interface between early endosomes and the Golgi apparatus, and demonstrated that lectin-induced glycolipid reorganization acts as a driving force in clathrin-independent endocytosis (termed the GlycoLipid-Lectin / GL-Lect hypothesis). The studies of the Johannes team have been published in highly visible international journals, including Cell and Nature. Between 2014-2020, he was the holder of an ERC advanced grant. He also aims at exploiting the discoveries of his team for the development of innovative cancer therapy strategies using the B-subunit of Shiga toxin (STxB) as a "pilot" for the delivery of therapeutic compounds to precise intracellular locations of dendritic cells for immunotherapy, and to tumors for targeted therapy.

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Dr. Mary Jackson is currently a Professor of Bacteriology in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Pathology at Colorado State University. She earned a Bioengineering degree and an MSc. Degree from the National School of Agronomy, Rennes, France, in 1994, and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Cellular and Molecular Biology from the Pasteur Institute, Paris, France, in 1998. 
Her research focuses on the elucidation of critical pathways leading to the biosynthesis and export of (glyco)lipids, fatty acids, and polysaccharides in Mycobacterium tuberculosis and other mycobacterial pathogens of clinical interest to inform novel therapeutic strategies. 
Dr. Jackson has published over 185 peer-reviewed scientific articles and serves on numerous grant review panels for the National Institutes of Health and other Federal, private, and non-profit funding agencies globally. 
 

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Dr. Xing Chen is currently a Changjiang Distinguished Professor and Dean of the College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering at Peking University. He completed his bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 2002 from Tsinghua University and his Ph.D. in chemistry in 2007 from University of California, Berkeley, under Prof. Carolyn Bertozzi and Prof. Alex Zettl. He then joined the laboratory of Prof. Timothy Springer at Harvard Medical School as an LSRF postdoctoral fellow, where his research focused on structural immunology. Dr. Chen started as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Peking University in 2010 and was promoted directly to Full Professor with tenure in 2016. He is also affiliated with Center for Life Science (CLS) and Synthetic and Functional Biomolecule Center (SFBC) of Peking University. Some of his recent awards include ACS Horace S. Isbell Award (2021), Xplore Prize (2010), Tan Kah Kee Young Scientist Award (2020), Okeanos-CAPA Senior Investigator Award at the Chemical and Biology Interface (2019), CCS-RSC Young Chemist Award (2018), ACS David Y. Gin New Investigator Award (2016), IGO Young Glycoscientist Award (2015), and National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars (2014). His current research interest focuses on chemical glycobiology.

 

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Dr. Mulard graduated as an engineer from the ESPCI (Paris, France). She received a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University Paris 6 (UPMC, Paris, France) and was trained in glycochemistry and glycan recognition as a postdoctoral fellow at the NIH (Bethesda, MD, USA). She joined the Organic Chemistry Unit at Institut Pasteur (Paris, France), where she set up a group on the Chemistry of Bacterial Carbohydrates. Her current research interests are in the area of peptide chemistry and carbohydrate chemistry. Her research programs deal with the development of chemical tools and bioactive compounds aimed at interfering with molecular phenomena governing infectious diseases. Interfacing Chemistry, Structural Biology, Immunochemistry, and Vaccinology, the special focus has been on investigating a chemistry-driven multidisciplinary strategy toward developing original conjugate vaccines against diarrheal diseases. Dr. Mulard’s major implication in translational sciences and technology transfer has led to the first-in-human Shigella synthetic carbohydrate-based vaccine candidate. Besides actively pursuing promising routes toward the next-generation glycoconjugate vaccines, she is interested in the development of novel therapeutic agents inspired by peptide and carbohydrate scaffolds. Her contribution was distinguished on various occasions, including the 2016 Thérèse Lebrasseur award from the Fondation de France.

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Alice L. Yu, MD, PhD, is an Academician of Academia Sinica, Taiwan. She is a Distinguished Chair Professor & Deputy Director of the Institute of Stem Cell & Translational Cancer Research at Chang Gung Memorial Hospital and Professor Emeritus at the University of California in San Diego.  
As a pioneer in cancer immunotherapy, Dr. Yu has taken an anti-GD2 monoclonal antibody (Dinutuximab) from preclinical to phase III clinical trial, culminating in its FDA approval for the treatment of high-risk neuroblastoma in 2015. This marks the first immunotherapeutic agent to target glycolipids worldwide. She has continued to improve the efficacy of anti-GD2 immunotherapy through international collaboration. Her group has demonstrated the adverse impact of Globo H expression on the outcome of patients with hepatoma, cholangiocarcinoma, and gallbladder cancer. She also uncovered the roles of Globo H in cancer as an immune checkpoint molecule and angiogenic factor, providing rationales for the ongoing development of Globo H-targeted immunotherapeutics. 
She has received many awards, including the Pediatric Oncology Award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) in 2020, Excellence in Technology Transfer Award from Federal Laboratory Consortium (USA) in 2016, The 55th Academic Award from the Ministry of Education (Taiwan), Year 2000 "Key to Life" Award, Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (USA), etc.

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Dr. Lara K. Mahal is the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Glycomics and a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Alberta. Her work focuses on systems-based approaches to understanding glycans, complex sugars that encode information governing human health. She developed lectin microarray technology, a high-throughput method for analyzing glycans that is now widely applied to understand the role of these sugars in a multitude of systems, from clinical cancer research to host-pathogen interactions. She is also known for her ground-breaking work on microRNA regulation, including the discovery of upregulation as a common feature of the miRNA regulatory landscape. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Beckman Foundation Fellowship (2004), NSF CAREER Award (2007), Sloan Foundation Fellowship (2008), NIH Director’s New Innovator Award (2008), the Horace S. Isbell Award (2017) and the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Glycomics (2019). In 2022, she founded the Glycomics Institute of Alberta (GIA) at the University of Alberta.
 

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Dr. Harry Brumer is a Professor in the Michael Smith Laboratories and Department of Chemistry, and an Associate Member of the Department of Botany and the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, at the University of British Columbia.
Dr. Brumer’s research interests include the discovery, functional and structural characterization, and biotechnological applications of carbohydrate-active enzymes and carbohydrate-binding proteins. Through close collaboration with geneticists and structural biologists, research in the Brumer group seeks to bring molecular-level insight into the biological processes underpinning carbon flux in ecosystems ranging from the forest to the human gut.

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Inka Brockhausen received her Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the University of Toronto, Canada. At Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, she studied both structures and biosynthesis of O-and N-glycans and discovered a number of novel enzymes in the O- and N-glycosylation pathways. As an associate professor at the University of Toronto, her research interest focused on structural and enzymatic glycosylation abnormalities in cancer and cystic fibrosis. Further studies on the link between glycosylation changes in arthritis and inflammatory conditions were carried out at Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada. A major interest became the discovery of novel glycosyltransferases in bacteria, in collaboration with synthetic chemists, e.g., Walter Szarek, Ole Hindsgaul, Vladimir Torgov, and others that were instrumental in the synthesis of natural substrate analogs. Glycosylation inhibitors were developed that could alter the biological properties of cells or could be anti-bacterial compounds. Current directions in the Brockhausen lab at the Department of Biomedical and Molecular Sciences aim to understand polysaccharide synthesis in bacteria and fungi and the mechanisms of enzymes involved in carbohydrate metabolism. Brockhausen also has a keen interest in protein aggregation in neurodegeneration and is a member of the Centre for Neuroscience Studies. 

 

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Dr. Hans Bakker is a glycobiologist with expertise in glycosyltransferases. He received his Ph.D. at the VU Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and worked in Zurich, Switzerland, and Wageningen, the Netherlands, afterwards. Since 2001, he has worked at Hannover Medical School in Germany. Over the years, he has identified several new genes encoding glycosyltransferases, including the xylosyltransferases responsible for the glycosylation of Notch EGF repeats and, more recently, the first C-mannosyltransferase, the enzyme responsible for unique glycosylation of tryptophans in proteins. His laboratory has established several specific methods to characterize C-mannosyltransferases and their target proteins from Caenorhabditis elegans and mammals in vitro and cellular systems. After cloning the C-mannosyltransferase in 2013, he could establish that C-mannosylation assists in protein folding in the endoplasmic reticulum and is important for the temperature stability of proteins. Whereas C. elegans has one C- mannosyltransferase, four homologs are present in mammals. His group could show that different mammalian C-mannosyltransferases have distinct fine specificity.

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Dr. Harry Brumer is a Professor in the Michael Smith Laboratories and Department of Chemistry, and an Associate Member of the Department of Botany and the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, at the University of British Columbia.
Dr. Brumer’s research interests include the discovery, functional and structural characterization, and biotechnological applications of carbohydrate-active enzymes and carbohydrate-binding proteins. Through close collaboration with geneticists and structural biologists, research in the Brumer group seeks to bring molecular-level insight into the biological processes underpinning carbon flux in ecosystems ranging from the forest to the human gut.

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Dr. Daniel Bojar is a tenure-track assistant professor at the Wallenberg Centre for Molecular and Translational Medicine & the Department of Chemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, focusing on machine learning and data science in the field of glycobiology. He obtained his Ph.D. in mammalian synthetic biology at ETH Zurich and continued his postdoctoral training in computational biology at MIT & Harvard University. His group develops and applies methods to discover sequence-to-function associations and biological roles of glycans via a broad set of approaches from machine learning, data science, and bioinformatics. Daniel was awarded a Branco Weiss Fellowship - Society in Science, as well as a Foresight Fellowship, and was recognized as a "Rising Star" by the journal Advanced Science. He was also featured on the 2022 Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe list for work in Science & Healthcare.

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Dr. Xing Chen is currently a Changjiang Distinguished Professor and Dean of the College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering at Peking University. He completed his bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 2002 from Tsinghua University and his Ph.D. in chemistry in 2007 from University of California, Berkeley, under Prof. Carolyn Bertozzi and Prof. Alex Zettl. He then joined the laboratory of Prof. Timothy Springer at Harvard Medical School as an LSRF postdoctoral fellow, where his research focused on structural immunology. Dr. Chen started as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Peking University in 2010 and was promoted directly to Full Professor with tenure in 2016. He is also affiliated with Center for Life Science (CLS) and Synthetic and Functional Biomolecule Center (SFBC) of Peking University. Some of his recent awards include ACS Horace S. Isbell Award (2021), Xplore Prize (2010), Tan Kah Kee Young Scientist Award (2020), Okeanos-CAPA Senior Investigator Award at the Chemical and Biology Interface (2019), CCS-RSC Young Chemist Award (2018), ACS David Y. Gin New Investigator Award (2016), IGO Young Glycoscientist Award (2015), and National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars (2014). His current research interest focuses on chemical glycobiology.

 

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The research activity of Professor De Castro is in carbohydrate structural chemistry, and her training in this subject started during her bachelor thesis, which focused on plant polysaccharides. Since then, even though Professor De Castro continued her work on carbohydrate structural chemistry, she shifted her interests and dedicated her activity to the analysis of the bacterial membrane carbohydrate components, paying attention, but not limiting the work, to Gram-negative bacteria and lipopolysaccharides (LPSs). This work has resulted in the development of state-of-the-art chemical and spectroscopical approaches that have been later applied with success to different kinds of carbohydrates, such as those from the bacteria of the gut microbiota or those from the giant viruses. This last topic is Professor De Castro's major field of research.
Professor De Castro is the author/co-author of about 130 peer-reviewed publications, an associated Editor for the journal Carbohydrate Polymers, and a member of the editorial board of Carbohydrate Research, Glycobiology, and Polysaccharides. She fruitfully collaborates with different research institutions, such as the Department of Plant Pathology (University of Nebraska Lincoln, NE, USA) and the Structural and Genomics Information Laboratory in Marseille (France).

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Dr. Vojo Deretic is the department chair of the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine and the director of the NIH-funded Autophagy, Inflammation and Metabolism (AIM) Center of Biomedical Research Excellence. The AIM center aims to promote autophagy research nationally and internationally and to develop a cadre of junior faculty along with senior experts in this area to study fundamental mechanisms and how autophagy intersects with a broad spectrum of human disease and health states. He received his undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral education in Belgrade, Paris, and Chicago. Dr. Deretic’s main contributions to science come from studies by his team on the role of autophagy in infection, immunity, and inflammation. Recently, Dr. Deretic’s group developed the concept of a cellular system termed MERIT for coordinated membrane repair, removal, and replacement. This involves recognition of exposed glycoconjugates on damaged membranes, membrane repair, removal of membranes by autophagy, and replacement of membranous organelles through respective biogenesis programs. 

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Dr. Drickamer began working in the field of glycan-binding receptors as a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University. These receptors have been the focus of his subsequent research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, Oxford University, and currently at Imperial College London. His work on identifying a common carbohydrate recognition led to the definition of C-type lectins as one of the major groups of glycan-binding receptors. His ongoing research is a joint project with Dr. Maureen Taylor. The aim is to develop a broad understanding of the biological roles of sugar recognition. They have used a combination of biochemical, biophysical, and molecular biological approaches to understand how carbohydrate-recognition domains provide selective recognition of glycoproteins and cell surfaces. In addition, they seek to determine how such recognition leads to the targeting of biological functions, such as innate immunity to pathogens, clearance of serum glycoproteins, cell adhesion, and cell signaling, and how genetic variation in sugar-binding receptors causes changes in their molecular properties and hence contributes to human disease. Dr. Taylor and Dr. Drickamer co-authored the textbook Introduction to Glycobiology, designed to introduce the field to students and researchers from other disciplines.

 

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Professor Matthew P. DeLisa is the William L. Lewis Professor of Engineering in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University. His research focuses on understanding and controlling the molecular mechanisms underlying protein biogenesis--folding and assembly, membrane translocation, and post-translational modifications--in the complex environment of a living cell. He received a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Connecticut in 1996; a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Maryland in 2001; and postdoctoral work at the University of Texas-Austin, Department of Chemical Engineering. DeLisa joined the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University in 2003. He has also served as a Gastprofessur at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich) in the Institut für Mikrobiologie. He has garnered a number of honors and awards, including most recently the Biotechnology Progress Award for Excellence in Biological Engineering Publication, and was named the to the inaugural “Life Sciences Power 50” by City & State New York. He is an elected fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, the American Academy of Microbiology, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In recent years, he has served on the IDA/DARPA Defense Science Study Group and the National Academies Committee on Innovative Technologies to Advance Pharmaceutical Manufacturing.

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Dr. Feldman obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, under the supervision of Dr. Armando Parodi. After completing his postdoctoral training in Guy Cornelis and Markus Aebi labs in Switzerland, he joined the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada, as an assistant professor. In 2015 he moved to the Department of Microbiology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, USA. The Feldman lab is interested in microbial glycobiology and bacterial pathogenesis. Dr. Feldman has pioneered the field of bacterial glycoengineering, which is a promising approach for the generation of novel bioconjugate vaccines. He has co-founded two companies (VaxAlta and Omniose) in this area. He is a world leader in studying the human pathogen Acinetobacter baumannii and the biogenesis of bacterial extracellular vesicles. Dr. Feldman is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology.

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Dr. Guérardel is a senior researcher for CNRS (Lille University, France) and an Invited Professor at iGCORE (Gifu University, Japan). His research focuses on the structure-to-function relationships of complex carbohydrates, from microorganisms to higher eukaryotes, mostly in the context of host-pathogen interaction. His main objective is to understand how the glycans from both host and pathogen fine-tune the infectious process and how they may be used as diagnosis or therapeutic tools, with a keen interest in mycobacterial, fungus, and viral infections. To reach this goal, Dr. Guérardel integrates a wide range of scientific approaches, including synthetic chemistry, structural analysis using NMR spectroscopy and mass spectrometry, structural biology of proteins, and enzymology.

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Professor Shang-Cheng Hung received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan (1992). He did postdoctoral research with Professor Andrew Streitwieser at the University of California at Berkeley (1994-1995) and Professor Chi-Huey Wong at The Scripps Research Institute (1995-1998). Professor Hung started independent research at the Institute of Chemistry, Academia Sinica, in 1998 and moved to the Department of Chemistry, National Tsing Hua University, in 2005. In 2009, he moved back to Taipei and joined the Genomics Research Center, Academia Sinica, where he was promoted to Distinguished Professor in 2012. His research interests aim to develop new strategies for synthesizing complex carbohydrates such as glycosaminoglycans and sialo-sugars on the cell surface to probe their specific interactions with disease-associated proteins.

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Gunnar C. Hansson, M.D., Ph.D. is a Professor in University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He has been working on mucus, mucins, and mucin glycans his whole career, focusing on the gastrointestinal and respiratory tracts. He has been part of and at the leading edge of developing molecular understanding of mucins over the last 30 years with a focus on their biosynthesis and structure. He and his team discovered that an attached colon mucus layer impenetrable to bacteria separates commensal bacteria from the host and that the chronically diseased lungs are covered with a similar type of mucus. They have studied and discovered that goblet cells making the mucus are more specialized and diverse than previously appreciated. The studied structural variability of glycans on the mucins and their mucin domains are important for commensal bacteria selection and bacterial utilization as a nutritional source. He has founded the Mucin Biology Groups constellation with a total of seven PIs working in the area at the University of Gothenburg (www.medkem.gu.se/mucinbiology).

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Dr. Danny Hsu is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica. During his doctorate study at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, he determined the atomic structure of a lantibiotic, nisin, in complex with Gram-positive bacterial cell wall precursor, Lipid II. He coined the term "pyrophosphate case" to explain how nisin targets Lipid II to achieve its antimicrobial activity, providing a blueprint for future antibiotics developments. During his postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge, UK, Danny demonstrated the proof of concept of using solution-state NMR spectroscopy to investigate the co-translational folding of nascent polypeptide chains on the ribosome. His earlier independent research focused on the folding mechanisms and functional implications of topologically knotted proteins. He currently focuses on developing an integrated biophysics and structural biology platform, including cryo-electron microscopy, mass spectrometry, and molecular modeling, to investigate the structure-activity relationship (SAR) of glycoproteins, and coronavirus spike proteins, in particular, and how mutations impact on the SAR in the context of glycosylation.

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Dr. Adnan Halim is a biochemist specializing in mass spectrometry-based glycoproteomics. He obtained his Ph.D. from Gothenburg University, Sweden, in 2012, where he developed methods based on hydrazide chemistry to enrich N- and O-linked glycopeptides from human tissues. This approach led him to discover O-GalNAc linkage to tyrosine residues on amyloid-beta peptides from human cerebrospinal fluid. In 2012, Adnan was recruited to Copenhagen Center for Glycomics (CCG), where he pursued his postdoctoral training and interest in mass spectrometry, protein glycosylations, and precise genome editing. At CCG, Adnan focused on the elusive O-linked mannose modification in eukaryotes. He made major breakthroughs in this field by discovering cadherin/plexin O-mannosylations and the TMTC1-4 glycosyltransferases (GT105). Adnan was promoted to associate professor/group leader at CCG in 2016. Using a combination of techniques, including CRISPR/Cas9 engineering in cell lines and advanced mass spectrometry, his team is currently exploring the functions and regulations of non-classical O-Man glycosylations in mammalian systems.

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Dr. Linda Hsieh-Wilson is a Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology. She was born in New York City and obtained her B.S. degree magna cum laude in chemistry from Yale University in 1990. In 1996, she received her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley, where she was a National Science Foundation predoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Professor Peter Schultz. In 1996, she moved to Rockefeller University to study neurobiology with Professor and Nobel Laureate Paul Greengard as a Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell postdoctoral fellow. Hsieh-Wilson joined the faculty at the California Institute of Technology in 2000, where she became an associate professor of chemistry in 2006 and a full professor in 2010. She was an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute from 2005-2014, and in 2015, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Professor Hsieh-Wilson has pioneered the application of organic chemistry to understand the roles of carbohydrates and protein glycosylation in neurobiology. Her honors include a Beckman Young Investigator Award (2000), Research Corporation Research Innovation Award (2000), Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (2003), Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry (2006), Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award (2008), Gill Young Investigator Award in Neuroscience (2009), and Horace S. Isbell Award in Carbohydrate Chemistry (2014).

 

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Professor Ludger Johannes is Research Director (DRE) at INSERM. He is a member of the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes (German organization of the academically gifted), Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds, European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), and German Academy of Science — Leopoldina. At Institut Curie, he has been heading since 2001 the Traffic, Signaling, and Delivery Team, member of the excellence initiative Cell(n)Scale. Since January 2014, he has directed the Cellular and Chemical Biology unit. His research aims at establishing fundamental concepts of endocytosis and intracellular trafficking. The Johannes team has discovered the membrane trafficking interface between early endosomes and the Golgi apparatus, and demonstrated that lectin-induced glycolipid reorganization acts as a driving force in clathrin-independent endocytosis (termed the GlycoLipid-Lectin / GL-Lect hypothesis). The studies of the Johannes team have been published in highly visible international journals, including Cell and Nature. Between 2014-2020, he was the holder of an ERC advanced grant. He also aims at exploiting the discoveries of his team for the development of innovative cancer therapy strategies using the B-subunit of Shiga toxin (STxB) as a "pilot" for the delivery of therapeutic compounds to precise intracellular locations of dendritic cells for immunotherapy, and to tumors for targeted therapy.

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Dr. Juge has 25-year expertise in the molecular studies of carbohydrate-protein recognition in gut biology and microbiology, and food biotechnology. She is a deputy leader of the Gut Microbes and Health Institute Strategic Programme at the Quadram Institute Bioscience (QIB, Norwich, UK) and an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Biology. Her previous research at Marseille University (France) and Carlsberg Research Institute (Copenhagen, Denmark) focused on the structure-function relationships of plant and microbial carbohydrate-active enzymes and their potential biotechnological application. Since joining QIB in 2007, she has led a Research Group focusing on the Glycobiology of Host-Microbe interactions in the gut. Currently, her group focuses mainly on defining how gut bacteria adapt to the intestinal mucosal environment and the role of mucin glycans in the crosstalk between the gut bacteria and the host. Their work uncovered novel sialic acid metabolism pathways in gut bacteria, contributing to their fitness in the mucus niche and communication with the host. They are also interested in how cell-surface glycosylation of gut symbionts influences the host immune response. Her Lab is involved in initiatives promoting Glycosciences in Europe, such as Sweet Crosstalk or Glytunes multidisciplinary European Training Networks or CarboMet academic-industry network.

 

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Dr. Mary Jackson is currently a Professor of Bacteriology in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Pathology at Colorado State University. She earned a Bioengineering degree and an MSc. Degree from the National School of Agronomy, Rennes, France, in 1994, and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Cellular and Molecular Biology from the Pasteur Institute, Paris, France, in 1998. 
Her research focuses on the elucidation of critical pathways leading to the biosynthesis and export of (glyco)lipids, fatty acids, and polysaccharides in Mycobacterium tuberculosis and other mycobacterial pathogens of clinical interest to inform novel therapeutic strategies. 
Dr. Jackson has published over 185 peer-reviewed scientific articles and serves on numerous grant review panels for the National Institutes of Health and other Federal, private, and non-profit funding agencies globally. 
 

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Dr. Hamed Jafar-Nejad received his M.D. from Tehran University of Medical Sciences and learned molecular biology techniques at a research institute in Iran. After one year at the University of Ottawa, he moved to Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. He received his postdoctoral training in Notch signaling and Drosophila neurogenesis with Dr. Hugo Bellen. In December 2006, he started his research group, first at the University of Texas Health Science Center-Houston and later at Baylor, where they continued their studies on the role of glycosylation and deglycosylation in animal development. In recent years, the Jafar-Nejad laboratory has devoted significant effort to understanding the function of human rare disease genes in animal development. These collaborative studies have led to the identification of Poglut1 as a dominant genetic suppressor of the liver phenotypes in a mouse model for Alagille syndrome, the identification of a new form of muscular dystrophy caused by recessive mutations in POGLUT1, and the discovery of several pathways downstream of the deglycosylation enzyme N-glycanase 1 (NGLY1), mutations in which cause a multi-system developmental disorder. This work will likely provide novel insight into how glycans regulate animal development and might help establish new therapeutic approaches for these diseases.

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Professor Yasuhiro Kajihara received his Ph.D. from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1993. He spent two years at the Life Science Research Laboratory of Japan Tobacco Inc. as a postdoctoral fellow. In 1995 he joined Yokohama City University as an assistant professor and was then promoted to associate professor in 2001 and full professor in 2007. At YCU, he developed synthetic methods for oligosaccharides and glycoproteins. In 2009, he moved to the Department of Chemistry at Osaka University. He studies new synthetic methods of glycoproteins in order to understand how oligosaccharides regulate protein functions.

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Dr. Jessica Kwok is an Associate Professor in Neuroscience at the University of Leeds. Her lab focuses on elucidating the functions of a pericellular coat called perineuronal net, with the main components being glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) and glycoproteins, in the regulation of neuroplasticity. The role of the GAGs in plasticity and axon regeneration has been the main research topic. In the last ten years, her work has played the key role in establishing the mechanism of PNN formation, the interaction of different PNN molecules, and how the interactions define the PNN structure and exert their effects on plasticity. The work has led to the current widely accepted concept that PNNs are crucial in controlling central nervous system (CNS) plasticity. These concepts allow her to design plasticity enhancement treatment for repairing and recovering deficits in the CNS, with a focus on spinal cord injury and memory enhancement. 

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Dr. Kitagawa received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry in 1991 from Kyoto University. He did his doctoral work in the laboratories of Prof. Ikuo Yamashina and Prof. Toshisuke Kawasaki on the purification and characterization of cancer-associated carbohydrate antigens by using monoclonal antibodies raised against human cancer cells. Dr. Kitagawa went on to do postdoctoral work with Dr. James C. Paulson at Cytel Corporation and Scripps Research Institute. In Dr. Paulson’s laboratory, he worked on the molecular cloning and characterization of several sialyltransferases. In 1994 he obtained an assistant professor position at the Department of Biochemistry, Kobe Pharmaceutical University, where he started to work on the structure and biosynthesis of sulfated glycosaminoglycans. He was promoted to associate professor in 2000 and full professor in 2005. He received the young scientist award of the Japanese Society of Carbohydrate Research in 1999, the PSJ (Pharmaceutical Society of Japan) award for young scientists in 2001, the young investigator award of the Japanese Biochemical Society in 2002, and the PSJ award for Divisional Scientific Promotions in 2013. He has continued to work on the functions and the control of the biosynthesis and degradation of sulfated glycosaminoglycans to clarify the causes of various disorders.
 

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Dr. Ute Krengel studied Chemistry in Göttingen (Germany) and obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg in 1991 (structure and molecular mechanism of p21ras). After positions in Toronto (Canada), Groningen (The Netherlands), and Gothenburg (Sweden), she moved to Oslo (Norway), where she has held a full Professorship since 2006. She is particularly interested in molecular mechanisms of diseases, including infectious diseases and cancer, focusing on receptor interactions and enzymes. She currently serves as the Norwegian Block Allocation Group for Synchrotron Research coordinator and as a Norwegian representative of the International Glycoconjugate Organization. 

 

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Professor Yasuhiko Kizuka has been a researcher at Disease Glycomics Team, RIKEN, led by Dr. Naoyuki Taniguchi (2009-2017). He has joined Gifu University (Japan) as an Associate Professor since 2017, and is currently the Director and Professor of Integrated Glyco-Molecular Science Center, Institute for Glyco-core Research (iGCORE) at Gifu University.
Professor Kizuka’s glyco-related contributions include discovery of novel mode of catalytic action of glycosyltransferases, elucidation of glycosyltransferase structures and development of glycosyltransferase inhibitors. His Research Interests are (1) Regulation of glycosyltransferase activity; (2) Substrate protein selectivity of glycosyltransferases; (3) Physiological functions of N-glycan branches.

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Dr. Kadomatsu started his career in basic medical research after being a physician of pediatric neuroblastoma. During his graduate studies, he discovered the glycan-binding growth factor midkine. He has been researching the involvement of cancer, neurology, and inflammation. For this achievement, he received the Young Investigator Award from the Japanese Biochemical Society in 1997. 
His research with a Chinese graduate student led him to become particularly interested in the relationship between glycans and the nervous system, which has become the focus of his research. He was a representative of "Neuroglycobiology" (2011-2015), the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan (MEXT). He currently represents the "Human Glycome Project," Roadmap 2020, MEXT. 
He served as the President of the Japanese Society of Carbohydrate Research, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Biochemistry, and representative of the Asia/Australia/Africa region of the Advance in Neuroblastoma Research Association. He holds an honorary professorship from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.


 

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Dr. Heinz Läubli received his M.D. and Ph.D. at the Institute of Physiology, University of Zürich (Switzerland). He is now an Assistant Professor and a Research group leader at the University of Basel and an Attending physician in the Division of Oncology, and Head of Glycobiology Research in the  Department of Biomedicine, at the University Hospital Basel.
Dr. Heinz’s research interests are to improve immunotherapy for cancer patients by using translational in vitro and in vivo tumor models, performing correlative analysis of patients treated with immunotherapy, and conducting early clinical interventional trials. His group has been studying the interaction between siaologlycans and their interaction with Siglec receptors on immune cells. It has demonstrated that this pathway can be targeted to augment T-cell stimulation and tumor control. His research goals also include the improvement of cancer immunotherapy by modifying glycans in the tumor microenvironment and glycans of cellular products for adoptive cell therapies, including genetically modified T cells.
 

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Professor Xuechen Li received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2007. After postdoctoral work in the laboratory of Prof. Samuel Danishefsky at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, he joined the Department of Chemistry at the University of Hong Kong as an Assistant Professor in 2009 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2014 and Professor in 2018. He currently serves as the Associate Dean (Research & Graduate Studies) of Faculty of Science. The central theme of Professor Li’s research focuses on the chemical biology of synthetic biomolecules (proteins, carbohydrates, and glycoconjugates) to study fundamental biological questions and develop potential therapeutic applications. 

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Dr. Mulard graduated as an engineer from the ESPCI (Paris, France). She received a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University Paris 6 (UPMC, Paris, France) and was trained in glycochemistry and glycan recognition as a postdoctoral fellow at the NIH (Bethesda, MD, USA). She joined the Organic Chemistry Unit at Institut Pasteur (Paris, France), where she set up a group on the Chemistry of Bacterial Carbohydrates. Her current research interests are in the area of peptide chemistry and carbohydrate chemistry. Her research programs deal with the development of chemical tools and bioactive compounds aimed at interfering with molecular phenomena governing infectious diseases. Interfacing Chemistry, Structural Biology, Immunochemistry, and Vaccinology, the special focus has been on investigating a chemistry-driven multidisciplinary strategy toward developing original conjugate vaccines against diarrheal diseases. Dr. Mulard’s major implication in translational sciences and technology transfer has led to the first-in-human Shigella synthetic carbohydrate-based vaccine candidate. Besides actively pursuing promising routes toward the next-generation glycoconjugate vaccines, she is interested in the development of novel therapeutic agents inspired by peptide and carbohydrate scaffolds. Her contribution was distinguished on various occasions, including the 2016 Thérèse Lebrasseur award from the Fondation de France.

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Dr. Debra Mohnen is a Distinguished Research Professor at the Complex Carbohydrate Research Center and Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Georgia. She studies pectin synthesis, structure, and function with an emphasis on the role of pectin in wall architecture and plant cell growth. She was awarded the Bruce Stone Award in 2008 for pectin synthesis and elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2013. Her research on synthesizing pectin glycan backbones, homogalacturonan, and rhamnogalacturonan, led to the discovery of the GAUT and RGGAT families of glycosyltransferases and the finding that pectin is a family of glycan domains in both cell wall heteroglycans and glycoconjugates. Since 2007 part of her research has been directed at improving plant biomass yield, sustainability, and composition for producing biofuel and biomaterials. As Focus Area Lead of Plant Biomass Formation and Modification in the BioEnergy Science Center, she directed a team of researchers aimed at overcoming biomass recalcitrance to deconstruction, and since 2017 she has served as Research Domain Lead for Integrative Analysis and Understanding in the Center for Bioenergy Innovation. Her current focus is understanding the roles of pectin in cell expansion and wall structure.

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Dr. Anja Münster-Kühnel studied Biology and Chemistry in a Teacher Education Programme at the University of Hannover in Germany. After the First State Examination in Biology and Chemistry, she received her Ph.D. at Hannover Medical School (MHH) in the Department of Microbiology by cloning the murine enzyme CMP-sialic acid synthase, an essential enzyme in the biosynthesis of sialoglycoconjugates. As a group leader at the Institute of Clinical Biochemistry, MHH, she continued the molecular characterization of this enzyme and the investigation of its nuclear localization. Further, sialylation-deficient constitutive and conditional mouse models have been generated to unravel the biological function of sialoglycoconjugates in the development and immune system, especially for kidney development and operation. Recently she started to investigate novel functions of polysialic acid beyond the nervous system.

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Dr. Lara K. Mahal is the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Glycomics and a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Alberta. Her work focuses on systems-based approaches to understanding glycans, complex sugars that encode information governing human health. She developed lectin microarray technology, a high-throughput method for analyzing glycans that is now widely applied to understand the role of these sugars in a multitude of systems, from clinical cancer research to host-pathogen interactions. She is also known for her ground-breaking work on microRNA regulation, including the discovery of upregulation as a common feature of the miRNA regulatory landscape. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Beckman Foundation Fellowship (2004), NSF CAREER Award (2007), Sloan Foundation Fellowship (2008), NIH Director’s New Innovator Award (2008), the Horace S. Isbell Award (2017) and the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Glycomics (2019). In 2022, she founded the Glycomics Institute of Alberta (GIA) at the University of Alberta.
 

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The primary focus of Dr. Matthew Macauley’s laboratory is the immunomodulatory sialic acid-binding Siglec family of receptors. His group develops innovative approaches to probe Siglec-glycan interactions on cells and tissues and use new insights about the biological ligands of Siglecs to test hypotheses about the roles of Siglecs in controlling immune cell function.

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Dr. Mariño received her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Buenos Aires. She continued her training as a postdoc at the University of Dundee (Scotland, UK) and later, at the National Institute for Bioprocessing, Research, and Training (Dublin, Ireland), integrating her chemical vision of carbohydrates into the biochemistry of glycans and the structural analysis of glycoconjugates in physiological and pathological contexts. After relocating to Argentina, she established the Functional and Molecular Glycomics Lab (Institute of Biology and Experimental Medicine). As an Independent Researcher at CONICET, she focuses on how inflammatory conditions could alter the glycome in inflammatory bowel diseases and colorectal cancer and whether these changes can promote the establishment of altered lectin-glycan interactions and, in doing so, influence the immune response. Her goal is to capitalize on glycoimmunological mechanisms that could potentially re-wire immune circuits in these pathologies, providing novel opportunities for translational medicine.
Based on her glycoanalytical experience, she also offers consultancies on glycosylation analysis to the Latin American Life Sciences Industry. She received several prizes for her work, including the "Carlos B. Udaondo" award from the National Academy of Medicine (2019). She is the current National Representative for Argentina at the International Glycoconjugate Organization.

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Professor Nadimpalli is a Senior Professor in Biochemistry at University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India. He did his postdoctoral training at DAAD, Wuerzburg and Goettingen, Germany, and has been a faculty at University of Hyderabad since 1986. 
His glyco-related contributions include development of novel affinity methods to purify mannose 6-phosphate receptors, discovery of LERP from Drosophila and lysosomal enzymes and their receptors in Hydra. He also identified and purified several plant and animal glycosidases, contributed towards understanding the physiological significance of Cucurbitaceae seed lectins and glycosidases.
His Research Interests are (1) Evolution of lysosomal biogenesis; (2) Legume and non-legume lectins-structure-function relationships; (3) Physiological functions of Plant lectins and glycosidases from legumes and non-legumes.

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Dr. Sriram Neelamegham is a UB Distinguished Professor of Chemical & Biological Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and Medicine at the State University of New York-Buffalo. His laboratory works at the interface of engineering and medicine, with applications in studies of human disease mechanics. Such work falls under the umbrella of "Systems Glycobiology," where high-throughput experimentation and mathematical modeling are coupled to describe the interplay between the competing glycoEnzymes that regulate cellular glycosylation patterns. Prof. Neelamegham has published over 140 research articles, book chapters, and patents. He receives the NIH Independent Scientist award, the 2015 State University of New York Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities, and the 2018 Schoellkopf medal from the Western New York American Chemical Society. He is an Elected Fellow of the American Institute of Biological and Medical Engineering (AIMBE) and Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES). He has served on NIH advisory panels and editorial boards of various journals. He is currently the Discussion Leader developing the Symbol Nomenclature for Glycans (SNFG) at the NCBI-glycans resource. Before moving to Buffalo. Prof. Neelamegham received his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering/Bioengineering from the Rice University and completed his post-doctoral training at the Baylor College of Medicine. 

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Dr. Narimatsu is an Associate Professor at Copenhagen Center for Glycomics, Ph.D. (2008, Tsukuba University, Japan). His study focuses on the structure, biosynthesis, and genetic regulation of complex carbohydrates. He received training for eight years at the glycobiology lab, Research Center for Medical Glycoscience (RCMG) in Japan. Joined a Center of Excellence in Glycomics funded by the Danish National Research Foundation at the University of Copenhagen in 2012 and contributed to developing a comprehensive and high-throughput platform for CRISPR/Cas9 gene targeting of the human glycome (GlycoCRISPR), a large library of glycoengineered cells (GlycoDisplay), a cell-based platform for the display and production of human Mucin tandem repeat (MucinDisplay). His research interests include a basic understanding of genetic regulation and biosynthesis of protein glycosylation, consequences of deficiencies in glycosylation in diseases, and biomedical applications. 

His group has taken a global "glycogenome" engineering approach to protein glycosylation and proposed a Cell-Based glycan array platform to display the human glycome–i.e., display of all human glycans on proteins, proteoglycans, and lipids. This self-renewable array is useful for discovering biological interactions involving glycans, and screening of true high-affinity interactions with glycans requires the natural biological context of specific proteins and cell surfaces.

 

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Professor Matthew Pratt received a B.S. in Biochemistry and Mathematics from the University of Arizona in 1999, where he worked for Robin Polt on glycosylation reactions and the synthesis of glycosylated analogs of enkephalin peptides. He then moved to Carolyn Bertozzi' s lab at the University of California Berkeley and focused on the synthesis of complex carbohydrates and the development of chemical tools to analyze glycosylation, receiving a Ph.D. in Chemistry in 2004. He was then an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow in Tom Muir' s lab at Rockefeller University, where he developed technologies to control proteins in living cells and for the incorporation of modifications into semi-synthetic proteins. He joined the faculty at the Department of Chemistry and Biological Sciences at USC in 2009. His research focuses on the development of bioorthogonal chemical reporters and synthetic proteins to investigate the role of posttranslational modifications, with a particular interest in O-GlcNAc modification.

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James C. Paulson obtained his Ph.D. (Biochemistry) in 1974 from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and did post-doctoral work at Duke University Medical Centre in Durham, North Carolina, from 1974-78. From 1978-1990 he rose from Assistant Professor to full Professor and vice-chair in the Department of Biological Chemistry at the UCLA School of Medicine, where he developed an interest in analyzing receptor specificity of influenza viruses from different host species. From 1990-1999 he served as Vice President and Member Board of Directors of Cytel Corporation, La Jolla, CA. From 1999-present, he has been Professor, in the Departments of Cell and Molecular Biology, Chemical Physiology, and Immunology and Microbial Sciences at The Scripps Research Institute, in La Jolla, California. He served as acting President & CEO from 2014-2015 and is currently Cecil and Ida Green Professor and Chair of Molecular Medicine. His current research interests include the roles of glycan-binding proteins in the modulation of immune cell signaling and the receptor specificity of mammalian and animal influenza viruses.

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Dr. Avery Posey is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. He received Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (2011) and his postdoctoral training at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a classically trained molecular and developmental geneticist and an expert in the development and pre-clinical characterization of chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) and other engineered T cell strategies for cancer immunotherapy. His current research is focused on the redirection of T cells to target cancer-specific epitopes, especially glycan haptens and O-glycopeptide epitopes formed through altered glycosylation in cancer cells, investigation of optimal CAR-T signaling for effective anti-tumor responses and durable persistence in solid tumors, and CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene-editing strategies for improved engineered T cells (knockout of checkpoint molecules - PD-1, CTLA-4, etc.; HDR knock-in of combination therapies). The major objective of his research is to increase the efficacy of engineered T cells in solid tumors.

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Salomé Pinho is the coordinator of the research group "Immunology, Cancer & GlycoMedicine" at the Institute for Research and Innovation in Health (i3S) at the University of Porto, Portugal, and affiliated Professor at the Medical Faculty of the University of Porto, Portugal. She developed her Ph.D. research at the Institute of Molecular Pathology and Immunology of the University of Porto (IPATIMUP) and Boston University Medical School, MA, USA. She performed her postdoctoral work at IPATIMUP-University of Porto in the cancer glycobiology field. Early in her career, Dr. Pinho established a research line focusing on glycoimmunology in Inflammatory Bowel Disease. Her group focuses on understanding the role of post-translational modifications by glycosylation in the regulation of key proteins´ functions involved in cancer and chronic inflammatory conditions, envisioning potential clinical applications. 
She is the Principal Investigator of several national/international grants in cancer glycobiology and inflammatory diseases. She received the Young Investigator Award from the European Association for Cancer Research and was recently distinguished by the Society for Glycobiology with the 2020 Glycobiology Significant Achievement Award.

 

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Dr. Katharina Paschinger gained her doctorate in 2008 and has been a self-financed FWF Fellow at the Universität für Bodenkultur Wien since 2009. She has led three projects related to glycan diversity in different species, ranging from model and parasitic nematodes to marine species, such as molluscs and echinoderms. Over the years, she has developed and optimized glycomic workflows based on off-line HPLC-MALDI-TOF MS, suitable for discovering a wide range of glycan epitopes, including unusual fucosylated, glucuronylated, sulphated, and zwitterionic modifications of N-glycans, with roles in self/non-self-recognition. She is the author of some 50 original papers, including publications in Molecular & Cellular Proteomics and Nature Communications, as well as various review articles and book chapters. Privately, she is a mother of three children and a passionate gardener and opera lover.

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Dr. Vered Padler-Karavani received her PhD in biochemistry from Tel Aviv University. She then did her postdoctoral training with Prof. Ajit Varki at The University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and subsequently established The Laboratory for Glycoimmunology at Tel Aviv University The George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences, Department of Cell Research and Immunology, The Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research. Her research combines glycobiology, immunology, bio-nanotechnology, cancer research and xenotransplantation, and involves cutting edge technologies within these disciplines. She received several prestigious grants from the European Commission (Marie Curie, Health Consortium, ERC) to investigate various aspects of immunology of carbohydrates. With TRANSLINK health consortium (6 academic institutes, 5 hospitals and 3 companies from Israel, Italy, France, Spain, UK, Sweden, Canada and USA; https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/603049), she investigated risk factors of animal-derived heart valve implants, in ~5,000 patients. Her research is currently focused on studying mechanisms of glycan immune recognition and responses in animal models and in humans, in vitro and in vivo. Particularly, the immunological basis of anti-carbohydrate antibodies and their implications on cancer and heart diseases, and on developing novel diagnostics and therapeutics for such diseases. 

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Celso A Reis is the Head of the Glycobiology in Cancer group at i3S-Institute for Research and Innovation in Health, University of Porto, Portugal. He serves as a member of the Board of Directors of i3S and on the Board of IGO. He is a Professor at the Institute of Biomedical Sciences, University of Porto, and an invited Professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto. Celso A Reis has published 227 peer-reviewed papers with over 15400 citations and with an H-index of 56 (Scopus). He is the author of several book chapters and patents. Currently, he leads an international multidisciplinary team working on glycobiology in human diseases focusing on cancer. His lab investigates the molecular mechanisms controlling glycosylation in cancer and the role of glycans during carcinogenesis and tumor progression. He has made several contributions to the development of novel strategies to improve cancer diagnosis, prognosis, and patient stratification. These include the studies on the role of glycosyltransferases regulating the biosynthesis of several glycans involved in cancer, such as those controlling critical steps on mucin-type O-glycosylation and N-glycosylation, with impact in cancer invasion and metastasis, as well as the tumor microenvironment.

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Professor Ribbeck obtained her Bachelor’s degree and her Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. She continued her postdoctoral research at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany, and the Department of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School. Professor Ribbeck established her independent research group as a Bauer Fellow at the FAS Center for Systems Biology, Harvard University, in 2007 and joined the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT as an Assistant Professor in 2010.
Her laboratory studies the basic mechanisms of biological hydrogels by which mucus barriers exclude, or allow passage of different molecules and pathogens, and the mechanisms pathogens have evolved to penetrate mucus barriers. It hopes to provide the foundation for a theoretical framework that captures general principles governing selectivity in mucus, and likely other biological hydrogels such as the extracellular matrix, and bacterial biofilms. Her Lab’s work may also be the basis for the reconstitution of synthetic gels that mimic the basic selective properties of biological gels.

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Professor Atit Silsirivanit received his Ph.D. in Medical Biochemistry from Khon Kaen University in 2011. During 2014-2016, he was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) to pursue postdoctoral training at the Department of Tumor Genetics and Biology, Kumamoto University, Japan. His current position is as an Associate Professor of Biochemistry at the Department of Biochemistry, Faculty of Medicine, Khon Kaen University, Thailand. His research focuses on the involvement of glycans and glycosylation in the development and progression of cancers, including cholangiocarcinoma, glioblastoma, meningioma, and melanoma. We are currently working on 1) The role of glycans and glycosylation in cancer, 2) Identification of glycobiomarkers for cancer diagnosis, monitoring, and prognostic prediction, and 3) Application of lectins for detection of glycobiomarkers.
 

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Professor Tadashi Suzuki received his Ph.D. (1997) from Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at University of Tokyo, Japan. He demonstrated the activity and characterized the enzymatic properties of the cytoplasmic peptide:N-glycanase (PNGase/Ngly1) mammalian cells and proposed that this enzyme may be involved in the quality control of newly synthesized glycoproteins. Dr. Suzuki was a postdoctoral fellow at Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, State University of New York at Stony Brook (1997-2000). He was an Assistant Professor at University of Tokyo (2002-2004) and a Visiting Associate Professor at Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine (2004-2007). During this period, he identified two cytoplasmic glycosidases, endo-beta-N-acetylglucosaminidase (ENGase) and alpha-mannosidase (Man2C1), involved in the catabolism of free glycans released by the cytoplasmic PNGase. He was a Team Leader at Glycometabolome Team, Systems Glycobiology Research Group, RIKEN. He currently serves as a Chief Scientist at Glycometabolic Biochemistry Laboratory, RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research.
His current research interests are (1) clarification of the novel catabolic pathway for glycans on glycoproteins; (2) characterization of biological functions of cytoplasmic peptide:N-glycanase (Ngly1) for the non-lysosomal catabolic pathway of N-glycans; (3) development of new analytical methods for glycans; and (4) development of therapeutics for NGLY1-deficiency. 

 

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Associate Professor Morten Thaysen-Andersen heads the Analytical Glycoimmunology at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Additionally, he was recently recruited as Visiting Professor at Nagoya University, Japan, to set up a Glycoproteomics lab at the prestigious Institute for Glyco-core Research (iGCORE). Across the two laboratories, his glycobiology-focused research program aims to advance our understanding of the human innate immune system and immune-related diseases, including microbial infections, inflammation, and cancer. His team develops and applies novel glycomics and glycoproteomics technologies using advanced mass spectrometry while drawing on analytical tools in protein and carbohydrate chemistry and methods in immunology, structural biology, microbiology, and molecular and cell biology to unravel fundamental glycobiological processes within the innate immune system.
 

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Professor Wong received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from National Taiwan University, and Ph.D. (1982) in Chemistry from MIT. He then worked at Harvard University as a postdoctoral fellow, became an assistant professor at Texas A&M University in 1983, and became a professor in 1987. He was Professor and Ernest W. Hahn Chair in Chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute (1989–2006), Director of Genomics Research Center (2003–2006), and President of Academia Sinica (2006-2016). He is currently the Scripps Family Chair Professor of Chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute with a joint appointment at Genomics Research Center, Academia Sinica.  
Professor Wong receives numerous awards, including the U.S. Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award, the ACS Claude Hudson Award in Carbohydrate Chemistry, Creative Work in Synthetic Organic Chemistry, and the Cope Medal, the Wolf Prize in Chemistry. He is a member of Academia Sinica, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
His research interests are in the field of chemical biology and synthetic chemistry, including the synthesis of complex carbohydrates and glycoproteins associated with disease progression. He is the author of over 700 publications (H-index 144) and 100 patents.

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Professor Manfred Wuhrer studied Biochemistry at Regensburg University and obtained his Ph.D. in 1999 at Giessen University, Germany. Subsequently, he joined the Leiden University Medical Center, where he was appointed assistant professor in 2005 and associate professor in 2008. In 2013, he was appointed full professor of Analytics for Biomolecular Interactions at VU University Amsterdam. In 2015 he continued his career as Head of the Center for Proteomics and Metabolomics at LUMC, Leiden. He focuses on the development of mass spectrometric methods for glycomics and glycoproteomics and their application in clinical research and biotechnology. Clinical applications cover the fields of rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, colorectal cancer, prostate cancer, longevity, as well as various infectious diseases. 

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Dr. Ryan Weiss began his diverse scientific training by earning his B.S. in Chemistry in 2008 at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, CA, USA. He then received his Ph.D. in Chemistry in 2015 at the University of California, San Diego, under the supervision of Prof. Yitzhak Tor, where he studied the design, synthesis, and application of small molecule antagonists of heparin- and heparan sulfate-protein interactions. As an NIH K12 postdoctoral fellow in Prof. Jeffrey Esko’s group at the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of California, San Diego, his research focused on utilizing whole-genome screening methods to investigate the regulation of heparan sulfate biosynthesis. Dr. Weiss began his independent career as an assistant professor at the Complex Carbohydrate Research Center at the University of Georgia in January 2021. Research in the Weiss Laboratory focuses on studying the structure, function, and regulation of complex carbohydrates in human biology and disease. In addition, his lab is dedicated to developing pharmacological and cell-based tools to aid in the discovery of novel targets and approaches for modulating glycan assembly in relevant human disorders.

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Alice L. Yu, MD, PhD, is an Academician of Academia Sinica, Taiwan. She is a Distinguished Chair Professor & Deputy Director of the Institute of Stem Cell & Translational Cancer Research at Chang Gung Memorial Hospital and Professor Emeritus at the University of California in San Diego.  
As a pioneer in cancer immunotherapy, Dr. Yu has taken an anti-GD2 monoclonal antibody (Dinutuximab) from preclinical to phase III clinical trial, culminating in its FDA approval for the treatment of high-risk neuroblastoma in 2015. This marks the first immunotherapeutic agent to target glycolipids worldwide. She has continued to improve the efficacy of anti-GD2 immunotherapy through international collaboration. Her group has demonstrated the adverse impact of Globo H expression on the outcome of patients with hepatoma, cholangiocarcinoma, and gallbladder cancer. She also uncovered the roles of Globo H in cancer as an immune checkpoint molecule and angiogenic factor, providing rationales for the ongoing development of Globo H-targeted immunotherapeutics. 
She has received many awards, including the Pediatric Oncology Award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) in 2020, Excellence in Technology Transfer Award from Federal Laboratory Consortium (USA) in 2016, The 55th Academic Award from the Ministry of Education (Taiwan), Year 2000 "Key to Life" Award, Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (USA), etc.

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Professor Won Ho Yang received his Ph.D. from Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea, in 2007. After postdoctoral work in the laboratory of Professor Jamey Marth at the UC Santa Barbara, he joined the Department of Systems Biology, Glycosylation Network Research Center, at Yonsei University as an Assistant Professor in 2019. His research interest is understanding the function of protein glycosylation in normal physiology and the pathogenesis of the disease.

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