Confirmed Speakers

MariJean Eggen is a Director and Scientific Lead in RNA Therapeutics at Eli Lilly, Indianapolis. MariJean joined Eli Lilly in Discovery Chemistry as a Medicinal Chemist-Oncology in 2003 after spending 3 years at Pharmacia working in Infectious Disease research. Throughout her career at Lilly she has had numerous scientific and leadership roles in small molecule Discovery Chemistry Research & Technology and now RNA Therapeutics. With the patient in mind, her teams have worked across therapeutic areas and target classes building effective cross disciplinary teams, influencing drug discovery strategies and pushing the envelope with technologies to solve complex problems. Fragment Based Drug Discovery strategies and the increasingly complex targets versus disease has pushed her interest in biophysics, ligand identification and optimization strategies and her growing perspective across modalities.

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Dr. Flocco is Vice President, Global Head of Structural Biology, Biophysics and Fragment-Based Lead Generation at AstraZeneca. Maria has 20 years of pharmaceutical industry and drug discovery experience. Previous to joining AstraZeneca, she held various positions of increasing responsibility in Pfizer and Pharmacia. Prior to her career in the pharmaceutical industry, she was a lecturer at the Centre for Structural Biochemistry of the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm. Maria received a PhD in Physical Chemistry from the City University of New York, and postdoctoral training in X-ray crystallography at the Fox Chase Cancer Centre, Philadelphia, and the Uppsala Biomedical Centre, Sweden.

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Holger Stark is a Professor at the University of Göttingen and a Director at the Max-Planck-Institute for biophysical Chemistry in Goettingen. He studied Biochemistry in Berlin and obtained training in electron microscopy and image processing at the Fritz-Haber-Institute in Berlin. After a postdoc at the Imperial College in London, he moved to Marburg to become a group leader and two years later he moved to Goettingen where he is since. In 2007 he was appointed as a full Professor and 2015 as a Director of the Max-Planck-Institute. The research of Holger Stark is focused on structure determination of large macromolecular complexes such as the ribosome, spliceosome, proteasome and several enzymatic complexes by cryo-EM and X-ray crystallography. The lab develops methods for improved biochemical sample preparation, image-processing software and is involved in the development of new electron microscopical hardware.

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