about

Dr. Bourne is a Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California San Diego, Associate Director of the RCSB Protein Data Bank and an Adjunct Professor at the Sanford Burnham Institute. He is a Past President of the International Society for Computational Biology and the co-founder and inaugural and current Editor-in-Chief of the open access journal PLoS Computational Biology. Dr. Bourne trained at the Flinders University of South Australia as a physical chemist and later as a postdoctoral fellow in protein crystallography at the University of Sheffield, UK and Columbia University, New York. For the past 18 years his interests have focused on structural bioinformatics, developing algorithms and contributing to aspects of evolution, cell signaling, immunology and early stage drug discovery. According to his Google Scholar profile he has published over 280 papers which has accrued close to 20,000 citations. He has co-founded four companies, the most recent being scivee.tv.

Dr. Daniel J. Drucker is currently a Professor of Medicine, a member of the Endocrinology Division at the University of Toronto and Director of the Banting and Best Diabetes Centre at the University of Toronto. He is a foremost expert on the subject of enteric hormones. He received training in Internal Medicine and Endocrinology from Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and Toronto General Hospital, University of Toronto. Following completion of a research fellowship in Molecular Endocrinology at Massachusetts General Hospital, he established his own laboratory research program in 1987 in Toronto. His laboratory studies the molecular biology, physiology and mechanism(s) of action of peptide hormones, and their G protein coupled receptors. Dr. Drucker is an Editor of the journal Endocrinology, and the recipient of Outstanding Investigator Awards from the Canadian Diabetes Association, the Endocrine Society, and the Canadian Society for Clinical Investigation. He also has been elected to membership in the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians. Dr. Drucker received his M.D. degree from the University of Toronto in 1980 and received his FRCPC in Internal Medicine from the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada in 1984.

Dr. Roberts is a Professor of translational chemistry and medicine at The Scripps Research Institute. Prior to his work at Scripps, he served as senior vice president for F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd. in Basel, Switzerland, where he was head of Discovery Chemistry. While there, he was responsible for drug discovery chemistry done in all the therapeutic areas represented at the corporate headquarters, which included diseases of the central nervous system as well as the vascular and metabolic therapeutic areas. Dr. Roberts previously served as a Director of AstraZeneca Research and Development in Montreal, Canada, and at the Parke-Davis /Warner Lambert Neuroscience Research Centre at Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge, England. Dr. Roberts is co-author/co-inventor of over 100 peer reviewed articles and patent applications.. He received a B.S. with honors in Biochemistry from the University of Sussex, and a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

Dr. Rosen is a Professor in the Departments of Chemical Physiology & Immunology at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California where he focuses on pursuing his primary interests in lymphocyte trafficking and barrier regulation by signaling lipids, and contributing towards the development of translational infrastructure at TSRI. He chaired the Molecular Libraries Screening Network Steering Group, a part of the NIH Roadmap, and is PI of the Scripps Research Institute Molecular Screening Center, which recently was awarded an $88M grant from the National Institutes of Health. For more than a decade he served in various capacities at Merck Research Laboratories including Executive Director and Therapeutic Area head, and chair of Merck's Anti-bacterial and anti-fungal Worldwide Business Strategy Team. Since 2002 he has been a professor at the Scripps Research Institute, He is Associate Editor of Molecular Pharmacology and on the Editorial board of Journal of Biological Chemistry. Dr Rosen is active in supporting medical research charities, having served on the Scientific Board of the Scleroderma Foundation from1992-2000, and currently serves on the Scientific Board of the Myeloproliferative Diseases Foundation. He was elected to the Association of American Physicians in 2008 and to the Fellowship of the American Academy of Microbiology in 2011. He received his MB.ChB. (M.D.) with distinction and honors from the University of Cape Town. He attended the University of Oxford as a Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 Scholar, and received his D.Phil. in Physiological Sciences at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology.

Kevan Shokat is a pioneer in the development of chemical methods for investigating cellular signal transduction pathways—with a particular focus on protein kinases and lipid kinases. Dr. Shokat uses a combination of chemical synthesis and protein engineering to create uniquely traceable and regulatable kinases, allowing the function of over 100 different kinases to be uncovered across all disease areas including oncology, metabolism, and infectious disease.

Kevan is currently an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Chair of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at the University of California at San Francisco. He also has an appointment as Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley.

After receiving his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry at UC Berkeley with Professor Peter Schultz, and post-doctoral work in immunology at Stanford University with Professor Chris Goodnow, Kevan began his independent research career at Princeton University where he was promoted from Assistant to Associate Professor in four years. He has received numerous awards including being named a Fellow of several prestigious research foundations including the Pew Foundation, Searle Foundation, Sloan Foundation, Glaxo-Wellcome Foundation, and the Cotrell Foundation. He has also received the Eli Lilly Award, given to the most promising biological chemist in the country under the age of 37. He was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences (2010), the Institute of Medicine (2011), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2011).