SPEAKERS
SHAWN WALKER
Vice President of Development Operations
Johnson Matthey
Shawn D. Walker is currently Vice President of Development Operations at Johnson Matthey. This role within the Health Sector includes oversight of the global Chemical Development, Analytical Development and Solid State Sciences organizations. Previously, Shawn served as Director of Process Development at Amgen, leading a group responsible for the development manufacturing processes for small molecule, peptide, siRNA, and hybrid modalities. Shawn has served on a number of professional committees including the Board of Directors of the Enabling Technologies Consortium and the Steering Committee for the Machine Learning for Pharmaceutical Discovery & Synthesis Consortium. Shawn obtained a B.Sc. in Chemistry from McGill University, a Ph.D.in Organic Chemistry from the University of British Columbia and completed post-doctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
BILL MORANDI
Associate Professor
ETH Zurich
Bill Morandi studied at the ETH Zurich from 2003–2012, earning a B.Sc. in Biology, a M.Sc. in Chemical Biology and a PhD in Organic Chemistry working with Prof. Erick M. Carreira. After a postdoc with Prof. Robert H. Grubbs at CalTech, he led an independent Max Planck Research Group from 2014–2018 at the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung in Germany. Since July 2018, he is a tenured Associate Professor at the ETH Zurich where he holds a chair in synthetic organic chemistry. His independent research program targets the development of new concepts in catalysis, with a particular emphasis on employing inexpensive and sustainable catalysts to transform broadly available feedstocks, such as polyols and hydrocarbons, into valuable building blocks for applications in medicine and materials science.
BO LI
Associate Professor
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Bo Li is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She earned her B.S. in biological sciences from Beijing University and her Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As a graduate student, she trained with Prof. Wilfred van der Donk in chemical biology and enzyme chemistry. She conducted postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Prof. Christopher T. Walsh at Harvard Medical School as a Jane Coffin Childs Fellow. Li’s group integrates chemistry and genomics to identify novel natural products and unravels the mechanisms by which these molecules act against living organisms.
PAUL WENDER
Francis W. Bergstrom Professor of Chemistry
Stanford University
Paul Wender served on the faculty at Harvard University before assuming his current position at Stanford University. He was a cofounder of CellGate, a drug delivery company, and contributed to the founding of or served as an advisor to other biotech companies based on his research. He currently leads an ambitious group of talented coworkers dedicated to the design, synthesis, biological and clinical evaluation of drug leads and delivery systems addressing a cure for HIV/AIDS, a platform for enhance CAR T and NK cell therapies, treatments for Alzheimer’s and neurological disorders, overcoming resistant cancer, new approaches to resistant infections, a universal flu vaccine, therapeutic vaccinations, and other clinical goals.