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.

 

---

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.
 

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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. 

 

---

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).

 

---

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.

 

---

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.

---

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.
 

---

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. 

 

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---