INVITED SPEAKERS

Dame Margaret Brimble is a Distinguished Professor and Director of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Auckland, New Zealand and a Deputy Director of the Maurice Wilkins Centre for Molecular Biodiscovery. 

Debbie Silvester-Dean OAM is a Professor of Chemistry at the School of Molecular and Life Sciences at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia. Her research focuses on electrochemistry using ionic liquids, with applications including as sensing materials for toxic gases and explosives. She has published >100 papers, 2 patents, 2 book chapters and graduated many PhD and Honours students. She has been awarded multiple prestigious local, national and international prizes/medals for her research. Debbie is an advocate for ECRs and women in STEM. In 2024, she was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for service to Chemistry.

Wei Gao is an Assistant Professor of Medical Engineering and Ronald and JoAnne Willens Scholar at the California Institute of Technology. He is an Associate Editor of Science Advances, Biosensors and Bioelectronics, and Sensors & Diagnostics. 

Steve obtained an MChem degree from the University of Oxford where he began his research career with a Part II project in the group of Sir Prof. Jack Baldwin. He continued his research training with a PhD in natural product synthesis under the supervision of Prof. Tony Barrett before shifting focus to apply his synthetic skills to the realisation of mechanically interlocked non-natural products during post doctoral work with Prof. David Leigh at the University of Edinburgh where in 2007 he was appointed as Fixed Term Lecturer in Organic Chemistry. In 2008 he moved to Queen Mary with the award of a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship and in October 2009 he was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. In October 2014 the group moved to the University of Southampton where Steve took up the position of Associate Professor. In August 2017, Steve was promoted to Professor of Chemistry and in 2019 was awarded a Royal Society Wolfson Research Fellowship. Recently, the group moved from Southampton to the University of Birmingham where Steve is Chair of Supramolecular Chemistry. Research in the Goldup Group focusses on the synthesis of novel mechanically interlocked molecules and their application as sensors, catalysts and materials. Steve has received awards from the Royal Society and Blavatnik Family Foundation, as well as fellowships from the Royal Society and Leverhulme Trust.

Alice Motion (They/She) is Associate Professor and Deputy Head of School at the School of Chemistry, University of Sydney. Alice leads the Science Communication, Outreach, Participation and Education (SCOPE) Research Group.  

Prof. Timothy Schmidt is Head of School, School of Chemistry, UNSW Sydney. Professor Schmidt has been the recipient of a number of awards for his research including the Coblentz Award (2010) for contributions to the science of molecular spectroscopy. He is a Fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute, The Royal Society of Chemistry and the Royal Society of New South Wales.

Binghe Wang - Regents’ Professor of Chemistry, Dr. Frank Hannah Chair in Medicinal Chemistry, and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Drug Discovery, and Director of the Center for Therapeutics and Diagnostics at Georgia State University USA.

Brendon Gill is a Principal Research Scientist at Fonterra based at Waitoa, New Zealand. Brendon is the company’s subject matter expert on micronutrients and their analysis and is responsible for the development of new analytical methods for these analytes in dairy products. He is the author of over 50 scientific publications related to micronutrient analyses.

Brendon is a fellow of AOAC International and the New Zealand Institute of Chemistry and has won many national and international awards for his work, most recently the 2023 Easterfield Medal from the New Zealand Institute of Chemistry. Brendon received a BSc, MSc (hons), and PhD from Waikato University.

Jonathan studied chemistry at the University of Oxford, followed by a PhD in synthetic organic chemistry at University College London with Prof. Karl Hale. He then worked as postdoctoral researcher with Prof. Jack Baldwin and Prof. Rob Adlington at the University of Oxford, before beginning his independent career at the University of Adelaide in 2010. Earlier this year, he moved to the University of Southampton as an Associate Professor of Organic Chemistry. His research is focused on the synthesis, biosynthesis and structure elucidation of complex natural products.

Associate Professor Lars Goerigk obtained his PhD from The University of Münster, Germany, in 2011. After being a postdoc at The University of Sydney, he became an independent group leader at The University Melbourne in 2014. He is a recipient of a 2019 Le Fèvre Medal (Australian Academy of Science), a 2020 Rennie Memorial Medal (Royal Australian Chemical Institute), and the 2022 Pople Medal (Asia-Pacific Association of Theoretical and Computational Chemists). Since 2023 he has also served as an Associate Editor for PCCP.

Lars’ work focusses on Density Functional Theory (DFT) for electronic ground and excited states, including method development, the treatment of noncovalent interactions, and making the DFT 'zoo' more accessible to method users. His collaborations with experimentalists involve the design of molecular switches, fluorescent sensors and other materials.

Guy was born and grew up in Dundee, Scotland. He received his undergraduate degree from University College, Oxford and his PhD from the Technical University of Vienna. His independent career started in 2006 at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He rose through the ranks of Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor during which time he was awarded the Hill-Tinsley Research Medal by the New Zealand Association of Scientists and elected Fellow of the New Zealand Institute of Chemistry. He moved to the School of Chemistry at the University of Melbourne in 2017.

Jeffrey W. Keillor began his academic career in 1995 in the Chemistry Department at the Université de Montréal. In 2011 he moved to the Department of Chemistry and Biomolecular Sciences of the University of Ottawa, where he held a University Research Chair in Bioorganic Chemistry until 2021. His research program is situated at the interface of chemistry and biochemistry, in the fields of chemical biology and medicinal chemistry. In 2017 he won the Bernard Belleau Award for his work in the field of medicinal chemistry, and in 2020 he was named a Fellow of the Chemical Institute of Canada (FCIC).

Luke is a Professor of Organic and Materials Chemistry, ARC Mid-Career Industry Fellow at the Institute for Frontier Materials, Deakin University,

Luke completed his PhD (Total Synthesis) in 2007 from Griffith University, followed by a postdoc with Prof. Michael Willis at Oxford University, and another at Deakin University with A/Prof Fred Pfeffer. Since 2016 he has focused his research on the manipulation of surface chemistry and interface design, primarily applied to high performance carbon fibre composites. Over this time, they have developed a range of capabilities and improved mechanical and multifunctional performance of materials based on fundamental organic chemical interactions.

Dr Lauren Macreadie is an ARC DECRA fellow and a UNSW Scientia Fellow at the University of New South Wales and investigates how porous materials can be used to solve our key energy questions around hydrogen storage and transport, and chemical separations. Research in these key areas will ultimately contribute to the Net Zero initiative in NSW. Following the completion of her PhD at the CSIRO and Monash University in 2016, she worked at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, on water splitting MOF systems, followed by research with the CSIRO in Melbourne on MOFs as adsorbents for respiratory canisters with the Defense Science and Technology group. Lauren then became a lecturer at Massey University in New Zealand in 2020. In 2021 she began her DECRA fellowship at the University of Sydney and moved to UNSW in 2022.

Professor Lara Malins completed her undergraduate studies at Boston University and her PhD at the University of Sydney with Professor Richard Payne. In 2015, Lara joined The Scripps Research Institute as a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow, working in the laboratory of Professor Phil Baran. She returned to Australia in 2017 to begin her independent career at the Australian National University, where her group focuses on new synthetic methods for drug discovery, natural product synthesis, and chemical biology. In 2024, she was recipient of a generous Snow Fellowship award to support the development of novel peptide-based therapies.

Sid is a chemical biologist and medicinal chemist with experience spanning bioconjugation, organic synthesis, fluorescent probe development, bioorthogonal chemistry, and synthetic methodology development.

As a senior scientist at AstraZeneca, Sid has led pioneering R&D initiatives, particularly focusing on bioconjugation and organic synthesis. As the pre-clinical lead on two of AstraZeneca's portfolio projects, he has fostered extensive collaboration with cross-functional teams and external partners, resulting in impactful advancements. Notably, his contributions to Antibody Drug Conjugate (ADC) chemistry initiatives have yielded significant progress in linker payloads and stable conjugation chemistries, thereby elevating drug delivery mechanisms.

Before joining AstraZeneca, Sid conducted postdoctoral research at the National Cancer Institute, NIH, concentrating on the development of ADCs to address limitations in current cancer therapy. Furthermore, his doctoral research at the University of Otago focused on developing bioorthogonal chemistries for click-to-release based prodrug activation strategies, aiming to mitigate the narrow therapeutic index and off-target side effects of existing chemotherapy.

Emily completed a PhD in bio-organic chemistry with Chris Abell (University of Cambridge). Emily is currently a Professor of Chemical Biology within the Ferrier Research Institute at Victoria University of Wellington.

She received the New Zealand Institute of Chemistry Easterfield medal (2005), the Applied Biosystems Award by the New Zealand Society for Biochemistry (2006) and Molecular Biology (2008), a National Teaching Award for Sustained Excellence in Tertiary Teaching (2010), and the Maurice Wilkins Prize for Chemical Science in 2023.  

Her chemistry and biology research involves various techniques, including natural product biosynthesis, enzyme evolution and engineering. 
 

Michele a natural products chemist, who works on both terrestrial and marine organisms, primarily to isolate bioactive and/or novel compounds with potential use in pharmaceutical, agricultural or horticultural industries. Michele is also interested in chemical ecology or how organisms utilise chemical in their everyday lives.
Michele teaches organic chemistry at second, third year and Masters levels and supervises graduate students.

Cather is an academic entrepreneur who studies how light interacts with matter and uses that understanding to make light work. In addition to her “day jobs”, she serves on the boards of Fisher and Paykel Healthcare, SPIE the International Society for Optics and Photonics, and several startups. A Fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi and New Zealand Institute of Chemistry, she founded U. Auckland’s Photon Factory, a high-tech laser centre. In addition to fundamental and applied research, her work there has resulted (thus far) in three deep-tech spinouts: Engender Technologies (acquired by CRV, Ltd.), Orbis Diagnostics, and Luminoma Diagnostics.

Clare Strachan’s research primarily advances pharmaceutical analysis with vibrational spectroscopy and imaging. She has a particular interest in Raman, coherent Raman and other forms of non-linear optical methods to better understand and optimize drug and dosage form behaviour (e.g. during manufacturing, storage, administration and drug delivery). She is currently the recipient of a Finnish Research Impact Foundation Tandem Industry-Academia  Professorial Fellowship, during which she is based at Orion Corporation, Finland’s largest pharmaceutical company, and investigates multimodal nonlinear optical imaging to enlighten the often complex solid-state behaviour of pharmaceuticals during drug development.

Clare Strachan originates from New Zealand where she completed a PhD in 2005 on the spectroscopic characterisation of solid state drugs at the University of Otago. During this time she was also based at TeraView Ltd and the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK, where she employed terahertz spectroscopy for solid state pharmaceutical analysis. Since then she has oscillated between Finland and New Zealand, and is now Professor of Pharmaceutical Analysis at the University of Helsinki where she leads the Pharmaceutical Spectroscopy and Imaging research group and heads the Formulation and Industrial Pharmacy unit within the Faculty of Pharmacy. She has published approximately 130 articles in international scientific journals as well as several book chapters.

Chris is the Angas Professor of Chemistry at the University of Adelaide where he undertakes research into the synthesis and properties of porous nanomaterials to address energy, environmental and industrial challenges. Prof. Sumby has been awarded various fellowships and awards, including an ARC Future Fellowship (2009), a South Australian Young Tall Poppy Award (2009) and a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science International Invitational Fellowship (2014). Chris is the Deputy Director of the Centre for Advanced Nanomaterials at the University of Adelaide and also directs the Bragg Crystallography Facility, the X-ray diffraction centre serving South Australia.

Dave Warren is a Senior Teaching Fellow in the Chemistry Department of the University of Otago. Since 2009 he has run a highly successful chemistry outreach program, which focuses on both supporting chemistry and science education in schools and the community as well as developing graduate attributes in the student volunteers who work with him. As part of the program he has developed innovative experiments and approaches to deepen students’ appreciation of chemistry. This has led to him winning contestable funding from the “Unlocking Curious Minds” initiative, working with teachers and pupils in schools in Malaysia and a three year involvement with the Madam Curie Chemistry Camp in Taiwan. In 2018 Dave was awarded the Dennis Hogan Education prize by the NZIC for his outreach work and in 2019 won an award for distinguished contribution to chemical education by the Federation of Asian Chemical Societies.