Dr. Katharina Paschinger gained her doctorate in 2008 and has been a self-financed FWF Fellow at the Universität für Bodenkultur Wien since 2009. She has led three projects related to glycan diversity in different species, ranging from model and parasitic nematodes to marine species, such as molluscs and echinoderms. Over the years, she has developed and optimized glycomic workflows based on off-line HPLC-MALDI-TOF MS, suitable for discovering a wide range of glycan epitopes, including unusual fucosylated, glucuronylated, sulphated, and zwitterionic modifications of N-glycans, with roles in self/non-self-recognition. She is the author of some 50 original papers, including publications in Molecular & Cellular Proteomics and Nature Communications, as well as various review articles and book chapters. Privately, she is a mother of three children and a passionate gardener and opera lover.

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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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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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Professor Yasuhiko Kizuka has been a researcher at Disease Glycomics Team, RIKEN, led by Dr. Naoyuki Taniguchi (2009-2017). He has joined Gifu University (Japan) as an Associate Professor since 2017, and is currently the Director and Professor of Integrated Glyco-Molecular Science Center, Institute for Glyco-core Research (iGCORE) at Gifu University.
Professor Kizuka’s glyco-related contributions include discovery of novel mode of catalytic action of glycosyltransferases, elucidation of glycosyltransferase structures and development of glycosyltransferase inhibitors. His Research Interests are (1) Regulation of glycosyltransferase activity; (2) Substrate protein selectivity of glycosyltransferases; (3) Physiological functions of N-glycan branches.

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Professor Ribbeck obtained her Bachelor’s degree and her Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. She continued her postdoctoral research at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany, and the Department of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School. Professor Ribbeck established her independent research group as a Bauer Fellow at the FAS Center for Systems Biology, Harvard University, in 2007 and joined the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT as an Assistant Professor in 2010.
Her laboratory studies the basic mechanisms of biological hydrogels by which mucus barriers exclude, or allow passage of different molecules and pathogens, and the mechanisms pathogens have evolved to penetrate mucus barriers. It hopes to provide the foundation for a theoretical framework that captures general principles governing selectivity in mucus, and likely other biological hydrogels such as the extracellular matrix, and bacterial biofilms. Her Lab’s work may also be the basis for the reconstitution of synthetic gels that mimic the basic selective properties of biological gels.

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Dr. Linda Hsieh-Wilson is a Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology. She was born in New York City and obtained her B.S. degree magna cum laude in chemistry from Yale University in 1990. In 1996, she received her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley, where she was a National Science Foundation predoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Professor Peter Schultz. In 1996, she moved to Rockefeller University to study neurobiology with Professor and Nobel Laureate Paul Greengard as a Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell postdoctoral fellow. Hsieh-Wilson joined the faculty at the California Institute of Technology in 2000, where she became an associate professor of chemistry in 2006 and a full professor in 2010. She was an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute from 2005-2014, and in 2015, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Professor Hsieh-Wilson has pioneered the application of organic chemistry to understand the roles of carbohydrates and protein glycosylation in neurobiology. Her honors include a Beckman Young Investigator Award (2000), Research Corporation Research Innovation Award (2000), Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (2003), Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry (2006), Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award (2008), Gill Young Investigator Award in Neuroscience (2009), and Horace S. Isbell Award in Carbohydrate Chemistry (2014).

 

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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. 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. 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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Dr. Kadomatsu started his career in basic medical research after being a physician of pediatric neuroblastoma. During his graduate studies, he discovered the glycan-binding growth factor midkine. He has been researching the involvement of cancer, neurology, and inflammation. For this achievement, he received the Young Investigator Award from the Japanese Biochemical Society in 1997. 
His research with a Chinese graduate student led him to become particularly interested in the relationship between glycans and the nervous system, which has become the focus of his research. He was a representative of "Neuroglycobiology" (2011-2015), the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan (MEXT). He currently represents the "Human Glycome Project," Roadmap 2020, MEXT. 
He served as the President of the Japanese Society of Carbohydrate Research, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Biochemistry, and representative of the Asia/Australia/Africa region of the Advance in Neuroblastoma Research Association. He holds an honorary professorship from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.


 

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Professor Matthew Pratt received a B.S. in Biochemistry and Mathematics from the University of Arizona in 1999, where he worked for Robin Polt on glycosylation reactions and the synthesis of glycosylated analogs of enkephalin peptides. He then moved to Carolyn Bertozzi' s lab at the University of California Berkeley and focused on the synthesis of complex carbohydrates and the development of chemical tools to analyze glycosylation, receiving a Ph.D. in Chemistry in 2004. He was then an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow in Tom Muir' s lab at Rockefeller University, where he developed technologies to control proteins in living cells and for the incorporation of modifications into semi-synthetic proteins. He joined the faculty at the Department of Chemistry and Biological Sciences at USC in 2009. His research focuses on the development of bioorthogonal chemical reporters and synthetic proteins to investigate the role of posttranslational modifications, with a particular interest in O-GlcNAc modification.

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James C. Paulson obtained his Ph.D. (Biochemistry) in 1974 from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and did post-doctoral work at Duke University Medical Centre in Durham, North Carolina, from 1974-78. From 1978-1990 he rose from Assistant Professor to full Professor and vice-chair in the Department of Biological Chemistry at the UCLA School of Medicine, where he developed an interest in analyzing receptor specificity of influenza viruses from different host species. From 1990-1999 he served as Vice President and Member Board of Directors of Cytel Corporation, La Jolla, CA. From 1999-present, he has been Professor, in the Departments of Cell and Molecular Biology, Chemical Physiology, and Immunology and Microbial Sciences at The Scripps Research Institute, in La Jolla, California. He served as acting President & CEO from 2014-2015 and is currently Cecil and Ida Green Professor and Chair of Molecular Medicine. His current research interests include the roles of glycan-binding proteins in the modulation of immune cell signaling and the receptor specificity of mammalian and animal influenza viruses.

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Dr. Avery Posey is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. He received Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (2011) and his postdoctoral training at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a classically trained molecular and developmental geneticist and an expert in the development and pre-clinical characterization of chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) and other engineered T cell strategies for cancer immunotherapy. His current research is focused on the redirection of T cells to target cancer-specific epitopes, especially glycan haptens and O-glycopeptide epitopes formed through altered glycosylation in cancer cells, investigation of optimal CAR-T signaling for effective anti-tumor responses and durable persistence in solid tumors, and CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene-editing strategies for improved engineered T cells (knockout of checkpoint molecules - PD-1, CTLA-4, etc.; HDR knock-in of combination therapies). The major objective of his research is to increase the efficacy of engineered T cells in solid tumors.

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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. Katharina Paschinger gained her doctorate in 2008 and has been a self-financed FWF Fellow at the Universität für Bodenkultur Wien since 2009. She has led three projects related to glycan diversity in different species, ranging from model and parasitic nematodes to marine species, such as molluscs and echinoderms. Over the years, she has developed and optimized glycomic workflows based on off-line HPLC-MALDI-TOF MS, suitable for discovering a wide range of glycan epitopes, including unusual fucosylated, glucuronylated, sulphated, and zwitterionic modifications of N-glycans, with roles in self/non-self-recognition. She is the author of some 50 original papers, including publications in Molecular & Cellular Proteomics and Nature Communications, as well as various review articles and book chapters. Privately, she is a mother of three children and a passionate gardener and opera lover.

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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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