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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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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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. 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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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. 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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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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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. 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. 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 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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