Structural & Computational Chemistry Keynote Speakers

Sir Tom Blundell Professor, University of Cambridge Tom Blundell is Sir William Dunn Professor of Biochemistry and Head of Biological Sciences in the University of Cambridge. He researches on structural biology of cell regulation, structural bioinformatics and applications to drug discovery and medicine. He is Member of Academia Europaea, Fellow of the Royal Society and Fellow of Academy of Medical Sciences. He has Honorary Doctorates from fifteen universities. He was a member of ACOST, the advisory group to the PM in the 1980s, founding CEO BBSRC in 1990s and Chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution 1998 to 2005. He co-founded Astex Therapeutics, he was Non-Executive Director of Celltech from 1996 to 2005 and has been science advisor to Pfizer, UCB and SKB.
Holger Gohlke Professor, Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf Holger Gohlke studied chemistry at Technical University Darmstadt and applied computer science at Fernuniversität Hagen. He got his PhD from Philipps-University Marburg in 2000, working in the drug design and protein crystallography group of Prof. Gerhard Klebe. He then postdoced for two years at The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA, working with Prof. David Case on developing and evaluating computational biophysical methods to predict protein-protein interactions. In 2003, Holger Gohlke became assistant professor of molecular bioinformatics at Goethe University Frankfurt; in 2008, he was appointed professor of pharmaceutical and medicinal chemistry at Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel; in 2009, he was appointed professor of pharmaceutical and medicinal chemistry at Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf. He was awarded the “Promotionspreis“ from Philipps-University Marburg (2003), the “Innovationspreis in Medizinischer und Pharmazeutischer Chemie” from the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker and the Deutsche Pharmazeutische Gesellschaft (2005), the Hansch Award of the Cheminformatics and QSAR Society (2009) and a Novartis Chemistry Lectureship (2011). His current research focuses on the understanding, prediction, and modulation of interactions involving biological macromolecules from a theoretical perspective. His group applies and develops techniques grounded in bioinformatics, computational biology, and computational biophysics.
Kenneth Merz Professor, University of Florida Kenneth M. Merz, Jr. is currently a University of Florida Research Foundation Professor and Edmund H. Prominski Professor of Chemistry at the University of Florida and a Member and Co-Director of the Quantum Theory Project. Presently, he has a total of fourteen graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in his research lab and is supported by major grants from the NIH and NSF. His research interest is in the application of theoretical and computational tools to biological problems including drug design, mechanistic enzymology and protein folding. Prior to his current position at the University of Florida he was an Assistant, Associate and Professor of Chemistry at the Pennsylvania State University from 1989-2005. He also has worked in industry (1998-2001) first as the Senior Director of the Center for Informatics and Drug Discovery (CIDD) at Pharmacopeia, Inc. and then as the Senior Director of the ADMET Research and Development Group in the Accelrys software division of Pharmacopeia. Dr. Merz carried out postdoctoral training at The University of California, San Francisco (1987-1989, with Peter Kollman) and at Cornell University (1986-1987, with Roald Hoffmann). He received his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry at The University of Texas at Austin in 1985 (with M. J. S. Dewar) and his B.S. from Washington College, Chestertown, Maryland in 1981. He has received a number of honors including election as a Fellow of the American Chemical Society (2011), the 2010 ACS Award for Computers in Chemical and Pharmaceutical Research, election as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and he has held visiting professorships at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (Barcelona, Spain), École Polytechnique (Paris, France), University of Florence (Florence, Italy), The University of Strasbourg (Strasbourg, France), The University of Oviedo (Oviedo, Spain) and the ETH (Zurich, Switzerland).