Conference Evaluation Committee

Alison Butler is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UC Santa Barbara. Her research program opened the field of bioinorganic chemistry of the marine environment, working on new metalloenzymes and mechanisms marine bacteria use to sequester iron. Her research group is currently focusing on microbial genome mining and biosynthesis of unique siderophores which is used for microbial iron acquisition, chiral iron-siderophore complexes in promotion and disruption of microbial growth, marine haloperoxidases in disruption of microbial quorum sensing, and the design of catechol compounds for wet adhesion as mimics of marine mussel foot proteins. Butler has received the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) Alfred Bader Award in Bioorganic or Bioinorganic Chemistry, an ACS Cope Scholar Award, the Inorganic Reaction Mechanisms Award of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the ACS William H. Nichols Medal given by the NY ACS Section, a Chemical Pioneer Award, the ACS Award for Distinguished Service in the Advancement of Inorganic Chemistry, the Richard C. Tolman Medal from the Southern California Section of the ACS, and the Vanadis award given by the International Vanadium Society. She is a fellow of the AAAS, the ACS, and the Royal Society of Chemistry. Butler is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2019) and the National Academy of Sciences (2022). She earned a BA in Chemistry from Reed College and PhD in Chemistry from UC San Diego. Butler has participated in GRCs since 1986. She chaired the Marine Natural Products GRC in 2022, the Metals in Biology GRC in 2004 and the Environmental Bioinorganic Chemistry GRC in 2006.

Ralph Bock is Director at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology and Professor at the University of Potsdam. He received undergraduate and MSc degrees from the University of Halle, Germany, and a PhD from the University of Freiburg. Prior to accepting his current position, he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Freiburg and a Full Professor and Chair of the Institute for Biochemistry and Plant Biotechnology at the University of Münster, Germany. Research in the Bock lab focuses on the biology of cell organelles (chloroplasts and mitochondria) and their integration into the genetic, metabolic and signaling networks operating in plant cells. The Bock group also develops new technologies for genetic engineering and applies these in biotechnology, synthetic biology and experimental evolution. He has published over 200 peer-reviewed papers and mentored more than 70 PhD students and post-doctoral fellows. He participated in many Gordon Research Conferences (on six different topics) and served as Chair of the Chloroplast Biotechnology GRC in 2017. He is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina) and an elected member of EMBO. He was awarded the Martin Gibbs Medal of the American Society of Plant Biologists in 2017.

Kathryn Cheah is Jimmy & Emily Tang Professor in Molecular Genetics and Chair Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) where she served as Head, Department of Biochemistry (12 years); and as Director of the Centre for Reproduction, Development and Growth (5 years). She graduated from the University of Cambridge, UK, was a postdoctoral fellow in the University of Manchester and Imperial Cancer Research Fund, UK. She was the founding President of the Hong Kong Society for Developmental Biology; Hong Kong representative for Asia-Pacific Developmental Biology Network and the International Society of Developmental Biology; elected past President of the International Society for Matrix Biology; and served as Senior External Fellow of the University of Freiberg Institute Of Advanced Studies. She is currently an elected member of the Board of Directors of the International Society of Differentiation. Her research focuses on functional genomics in skeletal and inner ear development and the implications for disease mechanisms. Notable discoveries are the identification of Sox2 as a hearing gene, a lineage continuum for cartilage and bone cells and a causative link between endoplasmic reticulum stress and skeletal disorders. She is an elected Fellow of the global science academy, The World Academy Sciences (TWAS). She has organized 11 Croucher Foundation Advanced Study Institutes, served on the organizing/program committees of international symposia (e.g. Human Genome Meeting); chaired the HKSDB Symposium “From Embryology to Disease Mechanisms” (2012). She has attended over 30 Gordon Research Conferences (GRC), chaired the GRC on Cartilage Biology and Pathology in 2011. She has the highest regard for the impact of GRCs for the dissemination of frontier knowledge and for facilitating collaborations and career development at all levels.

Jorge E. Galán, D.M.V., Ph.D. is a graduate of National University of La Plata, Argentina where he completed his Veterinary Science degree in 1982. He earned his Ph.D. at Cornell University in Microbiology in 1986 and completed his postdoctoral studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Before joining the Yale Faculty in 1998, he was an Associate Professor at SUNY Stony Brook within the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology. Currently, he is the Lucille B. Markey Professor of Microbiology, Chair of the Department of Microbial Pathogenesis, and Professor of Cell Biology at the Yale University School of Medicine. His research interest focuses on the understanding of the mechanisms of pathogenesis of the enteric pathogens Salmonella spp. and Campylobacter jejuni. He has authored more than 200 publications in the field of bacterial pathogenesis and molecular and cell biology. He is the recipient of numerous honors and awards including the Pew Scholar in Biomedical Sciences in 1990, the Searle Scholar Award in 1991, the National Institutes of Health MERIT awards in 2000 and 2015, the Hans Sigrist Prize in 2002, the Alexander M. Cruickshank Award in 2010, and the Robert Koch Prize in 2011. He is a member of the American Academy of Microbiology, the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, and a member of the USA National Academy of Sciences. He has organized multiple National and International Scientific Conferences and is a member of several Scientific Advisory Boards. He has attended many Gordon Research Conferences and chaired the Gordon Conference on Microbial Adherence and Signal Transduction in 2003.

Paul S. Weiss holds a UC Presidential Chair and is a distinguished professor of chemistry & biochemistry and of materials science & engineering at UCLA. He received his S.B. and S.M. degrees in chemistry from MIT in 1980 and his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley in 1986. He was a postdoctoral member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories from 1986-88 and a visiting scientist at IBM Almaden Research Center from 1988-89. He served as the director of the California NanoSystems Institute and held the Fred Kavli Chair in NanoSystems Sciences at UCLA from 2009-14. Before coming to UCLA, he was a distinguished professor of chemistry and physics at the Pennsylvania State University, where he began his academic career in 1989. His interdisciplinary research group includes chemists, physicists, biologists, materials scientists, mathematicians, electrical and mechanical engineers, computer scientists, clinicians, and physician scientists. They focus on the ultimate limits of miniaturization, exploring the atomic-scale chemical, physical, optical, mechanical, and electronic properties of surfaces, interfaces, and supramolecular assemblies. They develop new techniques to expand the applicability and chemical specificity of scanning probe microscopies. They apply these and other tools to study self- and directed assembly, and molecular and nanoscale devices. They advance nanofabrication down to ever smaller scales and greater chemical specificity to operate and to test functional molecular assemblies, and to connect these to the biological and chemical worlds. Two major themes in his laboratory are cooperativity in functional molecules and single-molecule/assembly biological structural and functional measurements. He has written over 400 publications, holds over 30 patents, and has given over 700 invited, plenary, keynote, and named lectures. He has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Presidential Young Investigator Award (1991-96), the Scanning Microscopy International Presidential Scholarship (1994), the B. F. Goodrich Collegiate Inventors Award (1994), an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship (1995-97), the American Chemical Society (ACS) Nobel Laureate Signature Award for Graduate Education in Chemistry (1996), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1997), a NSF Creativity Award (1997-99), the ACS Award in Colloid and Surface Chemistry (2015), the ACS Southern California Section Tolman Medal (2017), and the ACS Patterson-Crane Award in Chemical Information (2018), among others. He was elected a fellow of: the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2000), the American Physical Society (2002), the American Vacuum Society (2007), the ACS (2010), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2014), the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (2016), the Canadian Academy of Engineering (2017), and an honorary fellow of the Chinese Chemical Society (2010). He was also elected a senior member of the IEEE (2009). He received Penn State’s University Teaching Award from the Schreyer Honors College (2004), was named a nanofabrication fellow at Penn State (2005), and won the Alpha Chi Sigma Outstanding Professor Award (2007). He was a visiting professor at the University of Washington, Department of Molecular Biotechnology (1996-97) and Kyoto University, Electronic Science and Engineering Department and Venture Business Laboratory (1998 and 2000), and a distinguished visiting professor at the Kavli Nanoscience Institute and the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis at Caltech (2015). He is a visiting scholar at the Kavli Institute for Bionano Science & Technology and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University (2015-18). He held the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS) Chaire d'excellence Jacques­Beaulieu at the Centre for Energy, Materials and Telecommunications (2016-17) and was a Fulbright Specialist for the Czech Republic (2017). He was a member of the U.S. National Committee to the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (2000-05). He has been the technical co-chair of the Foundations of Nanoscience Meetings, thematic chair of the Spring 2009 and Fall 2018 ACS National Meetings. He was the senior editor of IEEE Electron Device Letters for molecular and organic electronics (2005-07), and is the founding editor-in-chief of ACS Nano (2007-). At ACS Nano, he won the Association of American Publishers, Professional Scholarly Publishing PROSE Award for 2008, Best New Journal in Science, Technology, and Medicine, and ISI’s Rising Star Award a record ten times.

Frances M. Platt is Professor of Biochemistry and Pharmacology and Head of the Department of Pharmacology, University of Oxford, UK. She received her Ph.D. in Animal Physiology from the University of Bath, UK. After completing postdoctoral training at Washington University Medical School, St. Louis, she joined the faculty at the University of Oxford and was the recipient of a five-year Lister Institute Senior Research Fellowship. Her expertise relates to glycosphingolipids (GSL) and in particular glycosphingolipid (GSL) lysosomal storage diseases. She and her colleagues pioneered a novel approach to treat these inherited diseases that has led to the development of an approved drug (miglustat) for type 1 Gaucher disease and Niemann-Pick disease type C disease. She was awarded the Alan Gordon Memorial award from the UK Gaucher Association, the Horst-Bickel Award in recognition of her role in developing substrate reduction therapy for lysosomal disorders and the “Above and Beyond” award from National Tay-Sachs and Allied Diseases USA. She was also awarded the Thudichum medal by the Biochemical Society in 2023 for her contribution to sphingolipid research. She has published extensively in this field and co-edited a book titled Lysosomal Disorders of the Brain. Platt was an Editor for the Journal of Biological Chemistry (2009-2014) and serves on the advisory board of multiple lysosomal storage disease charities and organizations (UK and USA). She was elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2011 and Fellow of the Royal Society in 2021 (one of only approximately 200 women ever elected). She has attended many Gordon Research Conferences and served as Chair of the Lysosomal Diseases GRC in 2013 the Glycolipid and Sphingolipid Biology GRC in 2022. She is an academic co-founder of the company IntraBio and her translational work has continued as the companies lead drug Aqneursa was FDA approved in 2024 for the treatment of Niemann-Pick disease type C.

Holly A. Ingraham is a native of Northern California. She lived briefly in Laurel, Mississippi, as the South underwent federally mandated desegregation and then returned to the Bay Area. Ingraham began her scientific journey exploring the East Bay through her great grandfather’s 1890 Bausch and Lomb microscope. She continued to leverage California’s public school system at UCSD (Revelle College), obtaining BAs in Biology and Experimental Psychology and a PhD in DNA replication and pyrimidine metabolism. Ingraham’s innovative and multi-dimensional work has illuminated basic molecular processes controlling endocrine development and pathways that impact female physiology. During her postdoctoral work in the Rosenfeld lab at UCSD, she was the driving force in identifying one of the first tissue-specific regulators, Pit-1, a founding member of the POU transcription factor family. At UCSF, Ingraham demonstrated that the nuclear receptor SF-1 regulates the peptide hormone AMH thereby establishing gonadal sex differences. Her lab revealed phospholipids as ligands for SF-1 (LRH-1) and the in vivo impact of SUMOylation on receptor activity. Ingraham’s dissection of sex differences in the brain and peripheral tissues has defined molecular pathways that control female physiology and behavior. Her group recently provided a mechanistic understanding of the preovulatory activity spike, underscoring the impact of estrogen in counteracting metabolic decline. This work was featured in the NYT Science Section (10/26/21). Other studies with her collaborator (and spouse), David Julius, have established sex differences in visceral pain responses highly relevant to gut disorders, such as IBS. Ingraham recently received the EB Astwood Outstanding Basic Science Award and the Transatlantic Medal in Endocrinology. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. She directs the UCSF IRACDA Program, an NIH-funded program promoting diversity in our nation’s biomedical research enterprise.

Laura L. Kiessling is the Novartis Professor of Chemistry at MIT and a Member of the Broad Institute. She earned her B.S. in Chemistry from MIT and her Ph.D. from Yale University. After postdoctoral studies at Caltech, she began her independent career as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research group develops and implements chemical biology to investigate cell-surface glycans, including using synthetic chemistry to generate glycoprotein and mucin mimics. Her interest in cell surface carbohydrates extends to their roles in immunity, development, and control of the human microbiome. She also applies insight into protein-glycan interactions to develop new strategies to control microbial infection. Kiessling is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the American Academy of Microbiology, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Academy of Sciences. She is the founding editor-in-chief of the journal ACS Chemical Biology and has experience in conference planning through her previous service on the Keystone Symposia Board. She has served as a mentor for more than 90 coworkers (63 graduate students and 29 post doctorates) and is dedicated to providing young researchers with opportunities to disseminate their results.

Anna K. Mapp is the Edwin Vedejs Collegiate Professor of Chemistry and a Research Professor of the Life Sciences Institute at the University of Michigan. She is also the Associate Dean of Biological & Health Sciences at Rackham Graduate School, University of Michigan. She received an A.B. in Chemistry from Bryn Mawr College and the Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from University of California-Berkeley. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Caltech, she began her independent career at the University of Michigan.  Mapp’s research interests center around the conformationally dynamic protein complexes that are central to gene activation. More specifically, her group uses multidisciplinary strategies to define the molecular recognition framework of transcriptional coactivator-transcription factor complexes and to use the framework to target the complexes for therapeutic purposes. She notes her attendance at the Bioorganic Gordon Conference as a postdoc was instrumental in her career path, due to the creative scientific discussions and the commitment to mentoring junior scientist by the luminaries at the conference. She has further seen the outstanding impact the growth of the GRS has had on the career development of her own students and postdoctoral fellows.

E.W. “Bert” Meijer is Distinguished University Professor and Professor of Organic Chemistry at the Institute for Complex Molecular Systems (ICMS) of the Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands. After receiving his PhD degree in Organic Chemistry at the University of Groningen in 1982, he worked for 10 years in industry (Philips and DSM) on materials. In 1991 he was appointed in Eindhoven, while he has part-time positions in Nijmegen, Santa Barbara, and at the Max Planck Institute in Mainz. His main scientific achievements are in the discovery and development of supramolecular polymers and materials to create functional and adaptive molecular systems. He published over 600 peer-reviewed papers and trained more than 90 graduate students. Over 60 of the graduate students and postdoctoral fellows have academic positions all over the world, while over 100 of them are active in an industrial setting. Bert Meijer founded the Institute for Complex Molecular Systems in Eindhoven and co-founded two companies. At present he is serving at the Board of Trustees of Leiden University, while being active in several evaluation committees worldwide. He is member of many editorial advisory boards, including the Journal of the American Chemical Society, and received a number of awards, including the Spinoza Award in 2001, the ACS Award for Polymer Chemistry in 2006, the ACS Cope Scholar Award in 2012, the Prelog medal in 2014, the Nagoya Gold medal and the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award in 2017, and the Chirality medal in 2018. He is awarded with two honorary doctoral degrees of Mons and Berlin. He is a member of many academies and societies, including the Royal Netherlands Academy of Science, where he is appointed to Academy Professor in 2014. In 2020 he was knighted by the King to become a Commander in the order of the Netherlands Lion.

David Julius, a native of New York City, received his undergraduate degree from MIT, where he worked with Alexander Rich studying mechanisms of tRNA aminoacylation. He then moved to the UC Berkeley for graduate studies with Jeremy Thorner and Randy Schekman, elucidating mechanisms of peptide hormone processing and secretion in yeast, followed by postdoctoral studies with Richard Axel at Columbia University, where he identified genes encoding members of the serotonin receptor family. David then joined the faculty at the University of California, San Francisco, where he is currently Chair of the Department of Physiology. His research is focused on understanding molecular mechanisms of pain and sensory adaptation. The Julius group has exploited the properties of natural products to discover a family of thermo- and chemo-sensitive ion channels that enable sensory nerve fibers to detect hot or cold temperatures and other noxious stimuli. With the aid of genetic, electrophysiological, and behavioral methods, they have determined how these ion channels contribute to pain sensation, and how channel activity is modulated in response to tumor growth, infection, or other forms of injury that produce inflammation and pain hypersensitivity. David has served as a member of the NINDS / NIH Advisory Council (2014 – 2017), the HHMI Board of Trustees (2021- present), and as Editor of the Annual Review of Physiology (2007-2018). Among other awards, David has received the Shaw Prize in Life Sciences and Medicine (2010), the Canada Gairdner International Award (2017), the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2020), and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (2021).

Professor Dame Molly Stevens FREng FRS is John Black Professor of Bionanoscience at the University of Oxford and part-time Professor at Imperial College London and the Karolinska Institute. She earned a B.Pharm  at the University of Bath and a PhD in biophysics at the University of Nottingham, before moving to MIT for her postdoc in Professor Robert Langer’s group. Professor Stevens’ multidisciplinary research balances the investigation of fundamental science with the development of technologies and designer biomaterials to address some of the major healthcare challenges across diagnostics, advanced therapeutics and regenerative medicine. Her research influences scientists around the world (over 430 publications, h-index 109, over 50k citations). The impact of her work is recognized by numerous accolades, including the 2023 Novonordisk Prize and damehood in 2024. Professor Stevens is Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering, among others. She has also been inducted as International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and as a Foreign Member of US National Academy of Engineering. She is a scientist trustee for the National Gallery.  Professor Stevens' work has a strong translational drive, focused on translating scientific innovation into practical solutions to benefit patients and society. She is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of four spin-off companies in the diagnostics, advanced therapeutics, and regenerative medicine space. She has been recently appointed as Oxford University Champion for Women and Diversity in Entrepreneurship.