Dr. Guérardel is a senior researcher for CNRS (Lille University, France) and an Invited Professor at iGCORE (Gifu University, Japan). His research focuses on the structure-to-function relationships of complex carbohydrates, from microorganisms to higher eukaryotes, mostly in the context of host-pathogen interaction. His main objective is to understand how the glycans from both host and pathogen fine-tune the infectious process and how they may be used as diagnosis or therapeutic tools, with a keen interest in mycobacterial, fungus, and viral infections. To reach this goal, Dr. Guérardel integrates a wide range of scientific approaches, including synthetic chemistry, structural analysis using NMR spectroscopy and mass spectrometry, structural biology of proteins, and enzymology.

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Gunnar C. Hansson, M.D., Ph.D. is a Professor in University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He has been working on mucus, mucins, and mucin glycans his whole career, focusing on the gastrointestinal and respiratory tracts. He has been part of and at the leading edge of developing molecular understanding of mucins over the last 30 years with a focus on their biosynthesis and structure. He and his team discovered that an attached colon mucus layer impenetrable to bacteria separates commensal bacteria from the host and that the chronically diseased lungs are covered with a similar type of mucus. They have studied and discovered that goblet cells making the mucus are more specialized and diverse than previously appreciated. The studied structural variability of glycans on the mucins and their mucin domains are important for commensal bacteria selection and bacterial utilization as a nutritional source. He has founded the Mucin Biology Groups constellation with a total of seven PIs working in the area at the University of Gothenburg (www.medkem.gu.se/mucinbiology).

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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 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. Daniel Bojar is a tenure-track assistant professor at the Wallenberg Centre for Molecular and Translational Medicine & the Department of Chemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, focusing on machine learning and data science in the field of glycobiology. He obtained his Ph.D. in mammalian synthetic biology at ETH Zurich and continued his postdoctoral training in computational biology at MIT & Harvard University. His group develops and applies methods to discover sequence-to-function associations and biological roles of glycans via a broad set of approaches from machine learning, data science, and bioinformatics. Daniel was awarded a Branco Weiss Fellowship - Society in Science, as well as a Foresight Fellowship, and was recognized as a "Rising Star" by the journal Advanced Science. He was also featured on the 2022 Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe list for work in Science & Healthcare.

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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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Professor Won Ho Yang received his Ph.D. from Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea, in 2007. After postdoctoral work in the laboratory of Professor Jamey Marth at the UC Santa Barbara, he joined the Department of Systems Biology, Glycosylation Network Research Center, at Yonsei University as an Assistant Professor in 2019. His research interest is understanding the function of protein glycosylation in normal physiology and the pathogenesis of the disease.

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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 Manfred Wuhrer studied Biochemistry at Regensburg University and obtained his Ph.D. in 1999 at Giessen University, Germany. Subsequently, he joined the Leiden University Medical Center, where he was appointed assistant professor in 2005 and associate professor in 2008. In 2013, he was appointed full professor of Analytics for Biomolecular Interactions at VU University Amsterdam. In 2015 he continued his career as Head of the Center for Proteomics and Metabolomics at LUMC, Leiden. He focuses on the development of mass spectrometric methods for glycomics and glycoproteomics and their application in clinical research and biotechnology. Clinical applications cover the fields of rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, colorectal cancer, prostate cancer, longevity, as well as various infectious diseases. 

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Dr. Drickamer began working in the field of glycan-binding receptors as a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University. These receptors have been the focus of his subsequent research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, Oxford University, and currently at Imperial College London. His work on identifying a common carbohydrate recognition led to the definition of C-type lectins as one of the major groups of glycan-binding receptors. His ongoing research is a joint project with Dr. Maureen Taylor. The aim is to develop a broad understanding of the biological roles of sugar recognition. They have used a combination of biochemical, biophysical, and molecular biological approaches to understand how carbohydrate-recognition domains provide selective recognition of glycoproteins and cell surfaces. In addition, they seek to determine how such recognition leads to the targeting of biological functions, such as innate immunity to pathogens, clearance of serum glycoproteins, cell adhesion, and cell signaling, and how genetic variation in sugar-binding receptors causes changes in their molecular properties and hence contributes to human disease. Dr. Taylor and Dr. Drickamer co-authored the textbook Introduction to Glycobiology, designed to introduce the field to students and researchers from other disciplines.

 

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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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