Confirmed Speakers

Kurt Wüthrich is the Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Professor of Structural Biology at The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA, USA, and a Professor of Biophysics at the ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland. His research interests are in structural biology and structural genomics. His specialty is nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy with biological macromolecules, where he contributed the NMR method of three-dimensional structure determination of proteins and nucleic acids in solution. Kurt Wüthrich’s achievements have been recognized by the Prix Louis Jeantet de Médecine, the Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and by a number of other awards and honorary degrees.

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Dr Peter Canning is a Scientist in the Biophysics team of the Target Delivery group at LifeArc, UK. He was awarded his PhD from the University of Warwick in structural biology in 2009, before moving to the University of Oxford and completing 2 postdoctoral research positions in structural biology and biophysics, focussing on high-throughput methods and chemical biology. He joined LifeArc in 2007, where he specialises in applying high-throughput methods to fragment-based drug design projects.

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Thomas Clairfeuille has studied at Polytech Marseille (France) and completed M.Sc degrees in biotechnology engineering and structural biology. After a year working for BioMarin pharmaceuticals Inc. in the San Francisco bay area, he moved to Australia to carry out his Ph.D. research on the structural mechanisms of endocytic recycling. He integrated Genentech Inc. (San Francisco) as a postdoctoral scientist in 2016 and has since been focused on developing methods and tools for the rapid purification of challenging membrane protein targets, with a goal to visualize ligand recognition mechanisms using structural biology techniques (X-ray crystallography, cryo-EM, XFEL).

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Dr Irina Cornaciu is a Staff Scientist in the Marquez Team at EMBL Grenoble. She did her PhD in Molecular Biosciences at the University of Graz (Austria), within the DK program, in the laboratory of Dr. Monika Oberer. Since 2013, she joined EMBL as a Postdoctoral Fellow with a Marie Curie Fellowship within the EIPOD program. In the Marquez Team at EMBL Grenoble, she has contributed to the set-up and development of a new generation of integrated and fully automated ligand screening pipelines with crystallography.
From 2017, she is a Staff Scientist in the Marquez Team, where she is coordinating the high-throughput, automated fragment screening pipelines for both academia and industry.

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Matthias is heading the department for Molecular Interaction and Biophysics (MIB) at Merck-Serono since 2008. Integrated into the “Small Molecule Platform”, the group is responsible for molecular interaction studies and protein crystallographic work, to generate insight into the mode of action by combining various biophysical methods. Fragment based lead discovery, thermodynamic signatures, interaction kinetics and protein structure are the current data packages which support the drug discovery process at Merck-Serono with biophysics. Prior to that position, he was responsible for a protein chemistry group working with different biophysical methods combined with the protein purification and analysis for structural studies and high throughput screening campaigns.

Before joining Merck, he was working on protein kinases and their biochemical characterization a post doctoral fellow at the Friedrich Miescher Institute, part of the Novartis Research organisation,. As EMBO fellow he worked on nucleotide exchange factors and adaptor proteins in the p21ras signalling pathway at the CNRS Institute de Pharmacologie Moleculaire et Cellulaire in the technology park of Sophia Antipolis near Nice/ France. He accomplished his doctoral work in the department of Biophysics at the Max Plank Institute in Heidelberg focusing on molecular interaction studies of small p21ras like proteins.

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Dr Andrea Gohlke is Principal Scientific Officer in Biophysics working within the Drug Discovery Programme at the CRUK Beatson Institute in Glasgow (UK) since 2015. At the Beatson Institute she is focussing on fragment based screening and lead characterisation against diverse oncological targets using biophysical methods such as NMR, SPR and ITC. She studied Molecular Life Science and obtained her PhD in Biophysical Chemistry at TU Dortmund in Germany in conjunction with the IMPRS at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Physiology in 2010. Here, she biophysically characterised the interaction of amyloids and small GTPases with model membranes and cells.

After that, she worked as postdoc in the group of Nobel laureate James Rothman at Yale University (USA) as well as at the Ecole Normale Superieure (France) using Biophysics to characterise SNARE-mediated membrane fusion for which she was awarded with a postdoctoral fellowship of the German Research Foundation.

Her general focus is the biophysical characterisation of protein/ligand interactions using a range of spectroscopic and microscopic methods.

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Antonio Macchiarulo is Full Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences of the University of Perugia (Italy). He received his PhD in Chemistry and Technology of Drugs in 2004, and was awarded with a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellowship (European Commission Program ‘Quality of Life,’ contract number: QLRI-1999-50595) at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge (UK), where he worked on the specificity of substrate recognition by enzymes. In 2006, Antonio Macchiarulo has been visiting scientist at the King’s College of London (UK) with a grant awarded by the Royal Society of Chemistry (2006/R1), working on a project aimed at charting the chemical space of human metabolome. He is actually member of the Scientific Committee of the European School of Medicinal Chemistry (ESMEC), and Coordinator of the PhD program in Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Perugia.

Antonio Macchiarulo is scientific leader of a research unit in European ERC Ideas Advanced and Proof of Concept Grants for research projects aimed at the development of novel therapeutic agents targeting Indoleamine 2,3-dioxygenase (IDO) in neoplasia and autoimmunity (ERC-2013-AdG 338954-DIDO; ERC-2017-PoC-780807-DIDO-MS). Antonio Macchiarulo has also been member of a Joint Steering Committee for a research project aimed at the development of drugs for the treatment of Type II Diabetes in collaboration with Servier and Intercept Pharmaceuticals. In 2010, Antonio Macchiarulo has co-founded TESpharma Srl, a science-driven drug discovery company, located in Perugia (Italy), focused on the discovery and development of novel small molecule therapeutics in metabolic disease and oncology. Antonio Macchiarulo is author of more than 130 international peer-reviewed scientific articles (including 1 Nature article and 2 Nature Biotechnology articles), 2 patent applications and 2 book chapters.

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Until 2016, Rebecca Ebenhoch studied Biochemistry at the University of Tubingen and University of Konstanz. For her Masters project, she worked on the structural characterization of Ketohexokinase at the structural research department of Boehringer Ingelheim, which was awarded with the Rainer-Rudolph prize. Rebecca Ebenhoch is now a final year industrial PhD student at Boehringer Ingelheim in collaboration with the University and the MPI in Frankfurt. Her PhD is focused on the structural analysis of pharmaceutically relevant drug targets by X-ray crystallography and cryoEM.

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Current title and Position:
Professor of Biochemistry, Gene Center, LMU Munich

Education:
1994 Diploma in Biology, University of Regensburg
1997 PhD in Biochemistry, Max-Planck-Institute of Biochemistry, Martinsried and TU Munich
1998-1999 Postdoctoral research, Max-Planck-Institute of Biochemistry, Martinsried
1999-2001 Postdoctoral research, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla

Professional Experience:
2001-2007 Associate Professor of Biochemistry, Gene Center, LMU Munich
Since 2015 Director, Gene Center Munich

Research field:
We study how cells shape and protect their genomic information. Using cryo-EM, X-ray crystallography and functional approaches, we study the architectures and mechanisms of macromolecular complexes in genome biology with a focus on chromatin remodelers, DNA double-strand break repair enzymes and innate immune nucleic acid sensors.

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Prof. Holger Starck is, since 2015, Max-Planck Director at the Max-Planck-Institute for biophysical chemistry.
Our group is interested in the three-dimensional structure determination of large macromolecular complexes by single particle cryo-EM. For many large macromolecular complexes this is currently the method of choice to determine their structure because of the difficulties in crystallization. The main complexes we are interested in are related to mRNA processing (ribosome, spliceosome, snRNPs). Another major topic is related to cell cycle regulation by determining the structure of the anaphase promoting complex in different functional states. Methodologically we focus on new biochemical strategies for complex isolation and stabilization, improvement in electron microscopic imaging and development of novel software strategies for computational image analysis. The combination of these methods allows us to determine even the structure of dynamic macromolecules and the detailed analysis of structural variability in solution.

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Christian Wiesmann is director and the head of the cryo-EM facility at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research in Basel. He is a structural biologist and interested in the structure and function of macromolecules and the characterization of protein interactions with their receptors, Fab fragments, or small molecule ligands with the goal to better understand the mechanism of molecular machines and to facilitate the discovery of new medicines. Christian studied chemistry at the Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg, Germany and received his Ph.D. for a project in protein crystallography in 1996. He joined Genentech, Inc. in South San Francisco as a post-doctoral fellow where he investigated growth factors and their complexes before moving to Sunesis Pharmaceuticals, a biotech company developing new technologies for fragment based drug discovery (tethering). In 2002, Christian moved back to Genentech as a structural biologist and in 2009 joined Novartis in Basel as the Head of the structural sciences group in the expertise platform proteases before moving to his current position in 2015.

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Alessio Ciulli holds the Personal Chair of Chemical and Structural Biology at the School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee. His research interests are in chemical biology, structural biology and drug discovery of protein-protein interactions (PPIs) within the chromatin and ubiquitin-proteasome systems. Of particular interest are the development and application of small molecules approaches for inducing protein degradation, and chemical genetics and fragment based drug design approaches to target protein surfaces and PPIs. Alessio graduated in Chemistry (2002) from his hometown Florence under the late Ivano Bertini and obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge (Chemistry, 2006), studying as a Gates Cambridge Scholar under the supervision of Chris Abell and in collaboration with Astex Pharmaceuticals. Following post-doctoral research on fragment-based drug design with Chris Abell and Tom Blundell, and an HFSP visiting Fellowship at Yale University to begin collaboration with Craig Crews (2009), he was awarded a BBSRC David Phillips Fellowship and returned to Cambridge to start his independent career in 2010. In 2013 Alessio was awarded an ERC Starting Grant and moved his laboratory to the School of Life Sciences at Dundee to take up a Readership and Principal Investigator role within the Division of Biological Chemistry and Drug Discovery. He was promoted to Professor in October 2016. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. Alessio is the recipient of several prizes and awards, including:
- 2014 Talented Young Italian award
- 2015 EFMC Prize for Young Medicinal Chemist in Academia
- 2015 ICBS Young Chemical Biologist Award
- 2016 RSC Capps Green Zomaya Award in medicinal computational chemistry
- 2016 MedChemComm Emerging Investigator Lectureship.

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Prof Stefan Knapp studied Chemistry at the University of Marburg and the University of Illinois. He did his PhD in protein crystallography at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and continued his career at the Karolinska Institute as a postdoctoral scientist (1996-1999). From 1999 to 2004 he worked at Pharmacia Corporation and from 2004-2015 at the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) at Oxford University. From 2008 to 2015 he was a Professor of Structural Biology at Oxford University (UK) and between 2012 and 2015 he was the Director for Chemical Biology at the Target Discovery Institute. He joined Frankfurt University in 2015 as a Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry. Since 2017 he is the CSO of the SGC at the University of Frankfurt.

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Hannah Lithgow is a final year industrial PhD student at GlaxoSmithKline in collaboration with the University of Strathclyde. Her PhD has focussed on developing novel PROTACs for targeted protein degradation. She has drawn on both high throughput chemical techniques and phenotypic screening to enable new E3 ligase discovery. Throughout her PhD she has won her multiple awards, including the prestigious Salter’s Centenary Prize and she has also been recognised for being an exceptional woman in a STEM career. She will continue her career at GSK after her PhD as a senior scientist in medicinal chemistry, in the high throughput chemistry department enabling rapid drug discovery.

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Chiara is a senior research associate at Astex Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge. Chiara completed her studies in synthetic organic chemistry in Italy, to then move to the USA to pursue a PhD at Brown University, centred on studying the biosynthesis of polyketide antibiotics. In 2011, she was awarded a Marie Curie International Incoming fellowship to work at the University of Cambridge with professor Chris Abell on fragment-based drug discovery methods to identify inhibitors of protein-protein interactions. The focus of her research, in academia at first then in industry, has been the development of small molecules to interfere and repair altered biological processes linked to diseases.

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Dr David Zollman is a research scientist at the University of Dundee, whose work focusses on the employment of a range of structural (X-ray crystallography, SAXS, non-denaturing mass spectrometry) and biophysical (SPR, FP, AlphaScreen, ITC) techniques to probe complex biological systems.< br /> David completed his Master’s degree in Medicinal Chemistry at the University of St Andrews before moving to the University of Oxford to conduct his doctorate with Professor Christopher Schofield. Following a post-doctoral placement with Dr Akane Kawamura (also at Oxford) David moved to the University of Dundee to join the group of Professor Alessio Ciulli as a member of an academic-industrial collaboration with Boehringer Ingelheim. David leads the structural biology and biophysics for the Dundee team, aiding the development of novel PROTACs for a range of medically relevant targets.

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Dr Anna Belorusova has developed an extensive expertise in structure and biophysics of nuclear hormone receptors and their complexes during her PhD studies at the Institute for Genetics and Molecular Biology (IGBMC) in Strasbourg, France. In 2015 she obtained her PhD degree in Structural Biology and Biophysics from the University of Strasbourg, as well as two prizes for the best doctoral thesis. In 2016 she joined AstraZeneca (Gothenburg, Sweden) as a postdoc, and there she continues investigating nuclear receptors using biophysical tools, in particular HDX-MS. She integrates HDX-MS, structural and functional data using multivariate statistical approaches to understand how ligand-induced conformational changes correlate with beneficial and adverse effects of nuclear hormone receptor modulators observed in animal models, and how knowledge of protein conformation and dynamics could contribute to developing better drugs.

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Dr. Sarah Cianférani is a research Director at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France. She is currently heading the BioOrganic Mass Spectrometry Laboratory at the Institut Pluridisciplinaire Hubert Curien (IPHC) in Strasbourg, a team of 40 people that has strong expertise in proteomic analyses and structural mass spectrometry.

Her expertise focuses on developments in structural mass spectrometry and applications of advanced native mass spectrometry and native ion-mobility mass spectrometry methodologies for biological noncovalent complex characterization, and especially biopharmaceuticals.

Dr. Sarah Cianférani holds a PhD degree in analytical chemistry from the University of Strasbourg, France. She then performed and post-doctoral fellowship at the Institute for Genetics and Molecular Biology (IGBMC) in Strasbourg to gain competences in structural biology. She then joined the AliX company (ancestor of Novalix) to develop native Mass Spectrometry for protein/ligand screening. She was recruited by the CNRS as researcher in 2004 in the team of Alain Van Dorsselaer (BioOrganic Mass Spectrometry Lab, LSMBO) in Strasbourg. She is now research director at the CNRS and heads the BioOrganic Mass Spectrometry Laboratory (LSMBO). Her group is part of the French National Proteomic Infrastructure. She is co-author of more than 110 scientific papers related to mass spectrometry analysis of proteins.

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Joerg holds a diploma in chemistry from the University of Bonn (Germany) and obtained his PhD in biochemistry in 2001. From 2001 to 2003 he worked as Post-Doc at the University of Bonn and at the Center of Advanced European Studies and Research (caesar).
In 2003 he joined F. Hoffmann-La Roche in Basel, heading the mass spectrometry group of Pharma Technical Dev Biotech Analytics. From 2010-2012 he worked as principal scientist in Formulation Research and since 2013 he is leading the mass spec group for peptides, proteins and oligonucleotides in preclinical CMC.
Since 2007 Joerg is delegate of the Swiss regulatory agency Swissmedic at the European Directorate for the Quality of Medicines & HealthCare (EDQM, Group of Experts 6, Biologics) in Strasbourg. He is assistant lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences, Northwestern Switzerland and co-chairing the Mass spectrometry group of the Swiss pharma association AEA.

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Prof. Dr. Kevin Pagel is currently Associate Professor for Bioorganic Chemistry at the Institute of Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Freie Universität Berlin and guest researcher at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society. He earned a diploma in organic chemistry from the University of Leipzig in 2003 and a PhD from the Freie Universität Berlin in 2007. From 2008-2010 he pursued postdoctoral research with Prof. Dame Carol V. Robinson at the University of Cambridge and later at the University of Oxford. In early 2011 Kevin returned to Germany and started building his independent career, first as a research associate at the Fritz-Haber-Institute (2011-2013) and then as an Assistant (2014-2016) and Associate Professor (2017) at the Freie Universität Berlin. Research in the Pagel group is focused on the structural analysis of biological macromolecules in the gas phase using ion mobility-mass spectrometry and gas-phase IR spectroscopy techniques.

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Prof. Frédéric Allain obtained his doctorate with Dr.G.Varani at the MRC-LMB of Cambridge (1993-1997). Between 1997 and 2000, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA with Prof. J.Feigon, followed by one year as Research associate with Prof.D.Black (HHMI).
In 2001, Frédéric Allain joined the department of Biology of the ETH in Zürich initially as an assistant Professor and since 2010, he is a full Professor. Prof. Allain’s research interest is primarily to determine structures of protein-RNA complexes in order to understand mechanisms of post-transcriptional gene regulation like alternative-splicing, RNA editing and translation regulation.
Prof. Allain was elected EMBO member in 2009.
Prof. Allain is the co-director of the SNF-NCCR RNA and Disease since 2014.

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Professor Ruth Brenk, Department of Biomedicine, University of Bergen, Norway. The overall research goal of the Brenk lab is to improve methods used for structure-based drug design and to apply these methods to design ligands for proteins and RNas with biological relevance. A key point in our research is the interplay of theoretical and experimental methods.
Education and former professional experience
Academic education
1999-2003: PhD in structure-based drug design, Philipps University Marburg, Germany, 2003, supervisor Prof. G. Klebe
1994-1998: Pharmacy degree, Johannes-Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany

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Margaret is a senior scientist at Biodesy in South San Francisco, CA where she has focused on detecting and characterizing ligand-induced conformational changes on a wide range of therapeutic targets using Biodesy's Delta. Margaret joined Biodesy four years ago before the launch of the Delta instrument to measure protein conformational changes, and she later initiated work to expand the technology for studying RNA conformational changes. Prior to that, Margaret completed her postdoctoral training at Genentech in the Protein Analytical Chemistry department characterizing critical quality attributes for antibody-based drug products. Margaret received a PhD in Biomedical Sciences from the University of California, San Diego where she studied under Dr. Roger Tsien, and she received a Bachelor's degree in Chemistry from the College of Wooster.

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Eric Westhof is Emeritus Professor of Structural Biochemistry at the University of Strasbourg, France. He was Director of the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology of the CNRS in Strasbourg (2005-2016) and Vice-President for Research and Doctoral Studies of the University of Strasbourg (2007-2012). He is now Delegate for teaching and formation at the French Academy of Sciences. His research activities are centered on the relationships between sequences, three-dimensional structures, evolution and functions of RNA molecules. The tools used are X-ray crystallography, bioinformatics, sequence comparisons, three-dimensional modelling and molecular dynamics simulations. The aims are the understanding of RNA evolution and the continued interplay between sequence changes and RNA structure/activity. He is a member of EMBO (1998), Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher LEOPOLDINA (2000), Academia Europaea (2001) and of the French Académie des Sciences (2011).

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Mathias Antoine is Senior Scientist at the Servier Research Institute (Croissy sur Seine, France) where he leads the Molecular Enzymology and Biophysics - Bio-Structural Mass Spectrometry team, responsible for the generation of decisional information-rich mechanistic and structural data.

His research interests are focused on understanding the molecular and cellular enzyme’s structure-dynamics-functions relationships and translating this knowledge into innovative lead-generation strategies and fit-for-purpose assays, using enzyme kinetics, biophysics and mass spectrometry.

Molecular enzymologist by training, Mathias obtained his PhD from the University of Nancy (France) before moving to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (USA) for a postdoc. He returned to France and joined Servier initially as a postdoctoral fellow to apply stopped-flow methods to the study of binding kinetics before taking a permanent position as Protein Science scientist, setting-up a protein mass spectrometry platform. He continued as Structural Biology team leader, contributing to establish in-house protein crystallography capabilities. Before taking his current position, he served as Biophysical Science Lead after being in charge of the Mechanistic Enzymology and Kinetics team.

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Nicolas studied at the University of Compiegne (France) and completed his Engineer in Biotechnology degree. For his master and PhD in Neuroscience from the University Pierre et Marie Curie, he moved to the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where he worked in the group of Dr. Pierre-Jean Corringer and Prof. Jean-Pierre Changeux (Channel receptors group) on the elucidation of the crystal structure of a pentameric ligand gated ion channel in an open conformation. From 2009 to 2013, Nicolas moved to FMI (Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical research) as a post-doctoral fellow in the group of Dr. Nicolas Thomae, where he worked on the mechanisms of Holliday junction dissolution by solving the structure of the human Topoisomerase III in complex with a modulatory protein called RMI1. From 2013 to 2017, he worked at Roche, first as a Roche post doctoral fellow and after as a scientist in the Chemical biology department developing biophysical methods for membrane proteins (GPCRs reconstituted in nanodiscs and studied by SPR) as well as producing, purifying, stabilizing and characterizing GPCRs, transporters and membrane enzymes. Starting February 2017, Nicolas work as Senior Scientist, on biophysical and structural biology programs (Ion Channels, transporters and GPCRs) within LeadXpro AG with strong focus on ligand binding mechanisms studied by Wave-Guide Interferometry and cryo-EM methods.

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Patrick England obtained his PhD in biochemistry and enzymology in 1992 from Paris 6 University. After several years as a post-doc and researcher in antibody engineering, directed evolution and structure/function analysis, he created in 2002 the Centre for Biophysics of Macromolecules and their Interactions in Institut Pasteur (Paris, France), which has become a European reference in molecular-scale biophysics.
The laboratory was first recognised as a French national research infrastructure in 2008, before launching in 2014 the initiative of a panEuropean molecular-scale biophysics network (ARBRE-MOBIEU, currently a COST Action: www.arbre-mobieu.eu), that brings together more than 100 expert labs and core facilities from 26 European countries.

All in all, his scientific and technological activities have led to more than 100 peer-reviewed publications. His main specialty is the real-time characterization of molecular interactions by a variety of biosensing methods.

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Eric Ennifar received in 1999 a Master degree in Biological Crystallography and NMR from University of Strasbourg. He obtained a Ph.D. in Structural Biology in 2001 from the University of Strasbourg working with Dr. P. Dumas. He then moved to the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg for a postdoc with Dr. D. Suck. In 2003, he joined the CNRS unit “Architecture et Réactivité de l’ARN” in Strasbourg as a CNRS Research Scientist. He is now CNRS Research Director, group leader of the team “Structure and Dynamics of Biomolecular Machines”. He is also president of the French Biophysical Society and chief scientific officer of the IBMC Biophysical Platform since 2017. His current research is focused on the ribosome translational machinery, the HIV-1 Reverse Transcription complex and structure-based drug design of HIV-1 RNA ligands using structural and biophysical approaches. He was awarded the CNRS 2014 bronze medal.

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Stefan Geschwindner, Associate Director, Head of Biophysics

AstraZeneca R&D Gothenburg; Discovery Sciences; Structure, Biophysics and FBLG

Dr. Stefan Geschwindner has during his Ph.D. at the University of Frankfurt worked with label-free technologies, predominantly with NMR to elucidate protein structures. After his Ph.D. he immediately joined the Astra Structural Chemistry Laboratory as a Senior Research Scientist in 1998 with focus on protein production and characterization, thereby applying a variety of different biophysical methods. Before moving into his current role as Head of Biophysics in 2018, he had different roles as Team leader in Protein Engineering, Delivery leader for Neuroscience as well as Principal Scientist in Biophysics. During the last decade, Stefan has frequently applied affinity-based methods to facilitate the mechanistic understanding of protein-ligand interactions and to enable fragment-based lead generation approaches. He has an excellent track record for developing, implementing and utilizing new affinity-based techniques to aid early lead finding activities and to understand the molecular mode of action of drugs. In the last 5 years he authored over 30 peer-reviewed papers resulting in an h-index of 17 and > 700 citations.

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Sylwia Huber has studied chemistry within the framework of interdisciplinary mathematic-natural sciences study at Jagiellonian University (Cracow, Poland) and obtained diploma in Chemistry/Biological Chemistry. She obtained PhD in 2007 from Bielefeld University (Bielefeld, Germany) working on the integrins’ interaction with chemically modified peptides in the group of Prof. Norbert Sewald (bioorganic chemistry).
In 2007 she has joined Boehringer Ingelheim (Biberach an der Riss, Germany) as a postdoctoral fellow to implement surface plasmon resonance (SPR) technology into drug discovery in the group of Dr. Herbert Nar (Lead Structure Identification Department). In 2009 she moved to Switzerland to join the optical spectroscopy group of Dr. Walter Huber at F. Hoffmann – La Roche (Basel) where she was working on the membrane protein characterization by SPR. Since 2014 she has overtaken heading of SPR laboratory. Since 2016 she heads Biophysics team within Biomolecular Interactions group of Dr. Armin Ruf (Lead Discovery Department).

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Christel Menet is CSO at Confo Therapeutics.
Confo Therapeutics is a drug discovery company building a unique pipeline of GPCR targeted therapeutics addressing unmet medical need.

Education and former professional experience
MPhil. in 1999 and a Ph.D. in 2002 both in organic chemistry at the Manchester University, UK.
Evotec, Faust Pharmaceuticals and then Galapagos for 11 years where I finished head of Chemistry.

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