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. 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 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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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. 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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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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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. 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. 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. 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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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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