BIO

Anne Conibear is an Assistant Professor at TU Wien (Technical University of Vienna, Austria). She is originally from Zimbabwe and completed her B.Sc.(Hons) and M.Sc. in Chemistry (2010) at Rhodes University, South Africa. She then moved to the University of Queensland, Australia with an International Postgraduate Research Scholarship for her PhD (2014) with Prof. David Craik. During her PhD, she started working with peptides and focused on the synthesis, structure and activities of cyclic disulfide-rich peptides from mammals, the theta-defensins. In 2014, she was awarded an Interdisciplinary Cancer Research (Marie-Curie co-fund) postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Vienna, Austria, and worked with Prof. Christian Becker on targeted immune-stimulating molecules for cancer therapy. She returned to the University of Queensland in 2019 with a UQ Development Fellowship to start her independent research on the synthesis and structure of posttranslationally modified proteins. In 2022, she took up a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in Peptide and Protein Chemistry at TU Wien, Austria. Research in her group focuses on how posttranslational modifications regulate protein structure and biological function of intrinsically disordered proteins and regions.

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Fernando Albericio began his peptide journey almost 50 years ago in his native Barcelona. Since then he has been continuously working on peptides on five continents. Currently, he is a Research Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa) and an Emeritus Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Barcelona (Spain).
His primary research interests cover practically all aspects of peptide synthetic methodology; the synthesis of peptides and small molecules with therapeutic activities (cancer and infectious diseases); and peptide-based drug delivery systems.  Most recently, he has been working on greening solid-phase peptide synthesis processes. He has published over 1000 scientific articles and graduated more than 75 Ph.D. students.
Fernando has received several awards, including the Vincent du Vigneaud and the Murray Goodman from the American Peptide Society, and the Leonidas Zervas from the European Peptide Society.

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Helena Safavi is an Associate Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Dr. Safavi studied biology at the University of Cologne (Germany) and the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences in Townsville (Australia). She obtained her PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Melbourne (Australia) in 2011 where she was trained in the transcriptomics and proteomics identification of bioactive peptides from animal venoms under the supervision of Prof. Anthony Purcell. Following her PhD studies Dr. Safavi received a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship to conduct a joined research project on the large-scale identification and biomedical characterization of peptide toxins and biosynthetic enzymes with Lars Ellgaard at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark) and Toto Olivera at the University of Utah (USA). During this time, she discovered that predatory cone snails use insulin-like toxins to induce dangerously low blood sugar in their fish prey, a discovery that inspired the design of new fast-acting insulin drug leads for the treatment of diabetes. Having had broad training in the characterization of bioactive peptides from animal venoms, her independent research focuses on the identification of hormone-like toxins as drug leads for the treatment of diabetes and pain. Her group’s recent findings on a novel class of somatostatin-like toxins elucidated an ancient origin of the somatostatin signaling system in animals and has led to the design of several stable and selective somatostatin analogs that provide analgesia in mouse models of acute and chronic pain.

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TBD

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Born and raised in New Jersey, Dr. Bowers obtained his BA from the University of Chicago and went on to complete his Ph.D. in organic chemistry in 2007, at the University of Illinois at Chicago, under the guidance of Prof. David Crich. He was an NIH postdoctoral fellow in the labs of Professor Robert M. Williams at Colorado State University and Professor Christopher T. Walsh at Harvard Medical School. Aer spending a year as Assistant Professor at Purdue University, he joined the faculty of Chemical Biology and Medicinal Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2012. His lab engineers biosynthetic pathways and develops chemoenzymatic strategies to generate next-generation therapeutics.

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Ratmir Derda received his undergraduate degree in Physics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 2001 and Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2008, under the supervision of Laura L. Kiessling. From 2008 to 2011, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University working under the supervision of George M. Whitesides and Donald E. Ingber. He joined University of Alberta in 2011 as an Assistant Professor in Chemistry. In 2012, he became a principal investigator at the Alberta Glycomics Centre. Derda lab is focused on development of genetically-encoded chemical libraries, selection and evolution of bioactive ligands with dynamic properties and investigation of fundamental mechanism in cell growth and differentiation.

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The Meienhofer Award was established in 2007 to biennially recognize an individual with a lifetime of achievement in peptide science. The award is named after Johannes Meienhofer, in honor of his transformative discoveries in solid phase peptide synthesis. Notably Meienhofer’s work demonstrated the power of medicinal chemistry in peptide pharmacology and is considered to have laid the foundation of modern synthetic peptide therapeutics.

The Meienhofer Award therefore seeks to recognize individuals who have continued in Meienhofer’s tradition of innovation in synthetic peptide therapeutics

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