In 1982 Gjumrakch Aliev graduated summa cum laude from the Azerbaijan Medical Institute in Baku, Azerbaijan receiving a M.D. degree in the fields of general medicine and health sciences. In 1989, he received his PhD (Summa Cum Laude) in the field of Cardiovascular Biology and Pathology, from the Ivanovo Medical Institute, Department of Electron Microscopy and Cell Pathology of the Institute of Human Morphology, Moscow State University, and Russian Cardiology Research Center, Moscow, Russia. The excellence of Dr. Aliev\'s professional service deserves special attention. He serves as an editor or an editorial board member for many prestigious journals. He has served and is currently serving as a grant review board member and reviewer for international granting agencies and foundations. In addition, Dr. Aliev possesses prodigious administrative skills, including logical decision-making, high efficiency, and his excellent rapport with colleagues, friends, employers and subordinates. Dr. Aliev is an outstanding scientist and administrator with a unique and distinguished ability in cell and molecular biology, neurodegeneration and ultrastructural pathology as well as neurology and cardiology.

Drug development strategies.

Dr. Mire Zloh was awarded a BSc and an MSc in Physical Chemistry by University of Belgrade and was awarded a PhD in Chemistry by University of London in 1998. He is working as a Professor of Medicinal Chemistry and a Head of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of Hertfordshire. His research interests include computer aided drug design, structural chemistry and chemometrics. Currently, he is working on rational design of bioactive dendrimers, modeling of PEGylated proteins and developing strategies to utilize small molecule-small molecule interactions for enhancing activities of therapeutics.

Computer-aided drug design, structural chemistry and chemometrics

Patrick M. Woster received a B.S. in Pharmacy from the University of Nebraska Medical Center in 1978, and a Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry from the University of Nebraska - Lincoln in 1986. Following postdoctoral work in chemistry at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1986), and in medicinal chemistry at the University of Michigan (1987), he joined the Wayne State University Faculty of Pharmacy in 1988. In 2011, he was appointed as Professor and SmartStateâ„¢ Endowed Chair in Drug Discovery at the Medical University of South Carolina. He also serves as Director of the MUSC Drug Design and Synthesis Core. Ongoing research projects in the Woster laboratories include the synthesis of alkylpolyamines as antitumor or antiparasitic agents, design and synthesis of mechanism-based enzyme inhibitors, synthesis of inhibitors of chromatin-remodeling enzymes such as histone deacetylases and histone demethylases, and studies aimed at elucidating the cellular mechanisms of epigenetic modulators.

Design, synthesis and biological evaluation of epigenetic modulators, antitumor and antiparasitic agents

Dr. Xie is an expert in Medicinal Chemistry, Computational Chemistry/Biology and Biophysics with research focuses on GPCR chemical genomics, in-silico design/cheminformatics virtual screening method development, medicinal chemistry synthesis and recombinant GPCR membrane protein NMR structural biology. Xie received his Pharmacy B. S. degree in 1982 from the Second Military Medical University in Shanghai, China, his Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry from the School of Pharmacy, University of Connecticut, 1993, and followed by a Biophysics Post-doctoral training at MIT Francis Bitter National Magnet Laboratory. In addition, he received an Executive MBA degree in 2003. Currently, He is currently a tenured Professor at the Dept of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Drug Discovery Institute (UP-DDI). He is the Principal Investigator of an integrated research laboratory, consisting of CompuGroup, BioGroup and ChemGroup (www.CBLigand.org/XieLab) and also a Founding Director of Computational Chemical Genomics Screening (CCGS) Center (www.CBLigand.org/CCGS) at University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Xie is co-PI/core director of the NIH funded Pittsburgh Center for Chemical Methodologies & Library Development (UPCMLD) and NCI/SAIC funded University of Pittsburgh Center for Diversity Chemistry (UP-CDC). He was co-PI of the Pittsburgh Molecular Library Screening Center (PMLSC) which was previously funded by the NIH Roadmap Initiative. He also holds joint faculty positions at the Departments of Computational Biology and Structural Biology, and Pitt Cancer Institute MT/DD Program. Before he joined Pitt, he was an Associate Professor and a Founding Director of Pharmacoinformatics Research Center in the College of Pharmacy at University of Houston Texas. He held several joint faculty positions at the Institute for Molecular Design (MDL), Texas Learning Computing Center (TLCC), and the Keck Center for Computational & Structural Biology, served as an Advisory Committee Member for the NIH Pharmacoinformatics Training Program at Houston Gulf Coast Consortium (GCC), and was a Director of the Chemistry Coordinating Unit for GCC-Chemical Genomics Screening Center. Prior to UH, Dr. Xie was a Director of the IMS NMR Lab and a joint faculty member of the School of Pharmacy at the University of Connecticut for over 10 years. Currently, Dr. Xie is a regular member of the US NIH BPNS Study Section Review Panel, an oversea expert reviewer for the Chinese Natural Science Foundation Review Panel, an invited guest editor for AAPS Journal, and an editorial board of American Journal of Molecular Biology. He also served as an ad hoc reviewer for NIH study section panels (BLIRC, MSFD, ZRG1, ZDA1 MXL-F) and an expert reviewer of the MCMB grant for MRC United Kingdom. He was invited as an International Assessment Panelist for Fudan University, a member of the Board of Directors of the Chinese Association of Professionals in Science and Technology (CAPST), and a Chair of the CAPST-Biomedical & Pharmaceutical Society. He was also a reviewer for many peer-reviewed scientific journals and a consultant for pharma and biotech companies. He has over 100 book chapters, journal articles, patents, abstracts and presentations, as well as 7 new drug discovery patents.

GPCR CB2 membrane protein structure/function studies and small molecule drug discovery

Mark D. Shenderovich, PhD, principal and CSO of Mol3D Research, LLC, is computational chemist and molecular modeler with 15 year experience of computer-aided drug design in biopharmaceutical industry and more than 25 years of overall research experience. Mark has extensive experience in many aspects of CADD including structure- and ligand-based design, protein homology modeling, protein-ligand and protein-protein docking, virtual ligand screening, evaluation of protein-ligand binding affinities, molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo simulations, pharmacophore modeling and QSAR.He made critical contribution to discovery of IND candidate for Hsp90, and contributed to design of pre-clinical candidates for protein tyrosine phosphatase, protein kinase and cancer metabolism targets. In collaboration with Quest Diagnostics Inc. he developed Structural Phenotyping technology that provided 90% accurate predictions for resistance of clinical HIV-1 variants to commercial HIV protease inhibitors. As Scientist III, In-silico Chemistry in Myrexis / Myriad Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (2005-2011), Mark did computer-aided drug design for medicinal chemistry department consisting of 20+ synthetic chemists. He supervised molecular modeling facility and was involved in many drug design projects for cancer, virology and CNS targets. From 1997 to 2005 Mark worked as Senior and Principal Scientist at Cengent Therapeutics in San Diego, CA, where he was involved in various projects on protein modeling, virtual screening, and structure-based lead optimization. He was PI of NIH funded SBIR Grant and supervised a group of PhD scientists. Mark was a Head of Research Group for Molecular Biophysics (1990-1992) in the Latvian Institute of Organic Synthesis, Riga, Latvia. He holds PhD degree in biophysics from Belarusian National Academy of Sciences, Minsk, Belarus, and he did post-doctoral studies in computational chemistry with Professor Victor J. Hruby at the University of Arizona. He is a co-inventor of 9 US and international patents, and co-author of more than 60 peer reviewed publications.

Molecular modeling, computer-aided drug design, computational chemistry, medicinal chemistry.

Dr. Fang is an Associate Scientist and the Director of the Applied Bioinformatics Laboratory at the University of Kansas. He obtained his bachelor degree at Peking University, master degree at the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, Shanghai, China, and PhD at Wayne State University. His research interests include bioinformatics, cheminformatics, data mining, database development and drug discovery. He is the author or co-author of over 60 papers.

Chemical informatics, bioinformatics, genomic and proteomic data analysis and mining

Dr. G. Sridhar Prasad is the co-founder and VP of Research of CalAsia Pharmaceuticals. He has been the core member of multiple drug discovery teams, including the marketed drug, NESINA (Alogliptin, DPPIV Inhibitor) and clinical candidate MK-4965, for the treatment of HIV-1 AIDS. He obtained his Ph.D., from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India and post-doctoral training at University of Minnesota Medical School and the Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California, where he grew to the ranks of Assistant Professor. He has co-authored over 45 peer reviewed research articles, holds six US and international patents. He serves on the editorial board of Current Protein and Peptide Science.

Drug discovery

Dr. Horacio Pérez-Sánchez graduated in Theoretical and Computational Chemistry from the University of Murcia (Spain) in 1999, where he also obtained his Ph.D. degree in 2006, which consisted in the development and implementation of computational methodologies for the study of macromolecular systems. He performed research in several European Institutions such as the Institute of Structural Biology (CEA, Grenoble, France), where he successfully developed and applied computational methodologies for the prediction and interpretation of macromolecular behaviour in solution, and at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Karlsruhe, Germany), where he developed new methodologies for drug discovery and implemented them in parallel architectures such as the Cell Broadband Engine, Graphics Processing Units and Supercomputers. Currently, he is full-time researcher at the School of Computer Science of the University of Murcia in the Parallel Computer Architecture Group where he works in several research lines related with the implementation and exploitation of bioinformatics methodologies in parallel architectures. Dr. Pérez-Sánchez has co-authored more than 25 conference and journal papers, book chapters and European patents. He has served as a reviewer for several conferences/journals/book editorials. His primary research interests are in the areas of Bioinformatics, mainly Drug Discovery, and its exploitation in parallel architectures. He has participated in several projects funded by the European Commission and the Spanish and German Ministries of Science.

Bioinformatics and drug discovery

Dr. Rossé has been involved in drug discovery research and development for more than 15 years. He is currently Associate Director, Structure Guided Chemistry, at Dart Neuroscience and also serves as Adjunct Associate Professor at Drexel University as well as Adjunct Professor in Medicinal Chemistry at the Pennsylvania Drug Discovery Institute. Prior he functioned in leadership and scientific positions in medicinal chemistry with Cephalon, Sanofi and F. Hoffman-La Roche. During his industrial tenure, he led multidisciplinary teams and invented multiple pre-clinical candidates and compound lead series spanning a wide range of therapeutic indications. These include CNS (cognition, schizophrenia, alzheimer’s disease), Inflammation, Metabolism, Oncology, Cardiovascular disease and Antibacterial agents. Dr. Rossé’s career is also characterized by implementation of innovative high throughput technology platforms in the area of small molecules and peptides drug discovery, analytical chemistry and data management that increased productivity and accelerated the drug discovery process. Dr. Rossé is a distinguished speaker at business meetings in US and Europe and has authored 40+ patents and publications. He received the Ph.D. degree in chemistry from the University of Basel in Switzerland and postdoctoral training at Stanford University.

Drug discovery research and developemnt

Dr. Alexander Heifetz is a Principal Scientist at Evotec (UK) Ltd, a drug discovery services company. He provides CADD expert support for drug discovery programs. He obtained his PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, in 2001 under supervision of former Israeli president and Foreign Member of the Royal Society, Prof. Ephraim Katzir and Dr. Miriam Eisenstein. Dr. Heifetz has more than 12 years of experience in drug discovery industry (EPIX Pharmaceuticals and Evotec) and was involved in discovery of 3 clinical drug candidates for treatment of anxiety, major depressive disorder, pulmonary hypertension, and Alzheimer’s disease. He has more than 18 patents, patent applications and a wide range of publications in the area of medicinal chemistry and molecular modelling. Recently, he received the Royal Society Industry Award and established a collaboration with academic group of Dr. Phillip Biggin from the University of Oxford, for development of methods for GPCR modelling.

Medicinal chemistry, molecular modeling, drug discovery

Larry Wilson completed his PhD from Emory University and postdoctoral studies from Stanford University. He has served various roles in research and development groups at several large pharmaceutical and small biotech companies. He has over 50 publications, patents, and review articles. He is currently principal scientist at Emory University, where he serves as project leader of the discovery of CXCR4 antagonists for potential treatments in stem cell mobilization, cancer, and HIV infection.

Drug discovery

Dr. Compadre has extensive research experience, on the development of bioactive compounds based on naturally occurring compounds, and on the use of molecular modeling in drug design and structure-activity studies. He has published over 100 papers and over 70 patents related to the development of bioactive compounds, and one FDA approved antimicrobial technology. Dr. Compadre has a BSPharm degree, and obtained his Ph.D degree in medicinal chemistry and pharmacognosy, from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He conducted postdoctoral research on structure-activity relationships studies using molecular modeling at the University of Illinois and at Pomona College working with Professor Corwin Hansch. Additionally, he had a sabbatical experience at NASA Ames Research Center in computer modeling. At the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, he established and directs the molecular modeling facility. He has extensive research collaborations with many scientists locally, nationally and internationally.

Molecular modeling, natural products, structural biology, drug design

Dr. Prabagaran Narayanasamy is a faculty member in the Department of Pharmacology and Experimental Neurosciences at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. He received his PhD at IIT in Organic Chemistry and did his postdoctoral studies at North Dakota State University, Harvard University and University of Illinois Urbana-champaign. Later, he joined as a Research Scientist at Colorado State University to explore drug discovery. He has been a faculty at University of Nebraska Medical Center since 2012. Dr. Narayanasamy’s research interests are on development, delivering and discovering drug for anti-mycobacterial medicine and antiretroviral therapy. Conventional drugs and new inhibitors are used in nanoformulation to generate active nanomedicine. For antibacterial drug discovery - glyoxalase, quorum sensing, MEP and menaquinone pathway are utilized. Additionally, development of exosomes as drug delivering agent is initiated for infectious disease. In addition, metabolites are evaluated in the infected brain for characterizing neurodegenerative disorders.

Development, delivering and discovering drug for anti-mycobacterial medicine and antiretroviral therapy

Dr. Rakeshwar has more than 80 papers including patents and book chapters published/accepted in various International Journals. Notably, in the area of Organic Chemistry, Dr. Rakeshwar has coauthored a chapter in the book entitled “Green Chemistry in Pharmaceutical industry”.
He has won the various awards in his career e.g. Chairman Excellence Award in the category of individual functional excellence, Best Cost Leadership Award  for the development of Lopinavir, Ritonavir & their components and Anveshan Award at Dr. Reddy’s. As a part of organizational building efforts, he also supervises master’s & Ph.D. students in their dissertations. He has been invited in several conferences e.g. IIT-Mumbai, IGCW-2009, BIT-Ranchi, BITS Pilani, 9th Heterocyclic Conference, University of Florida, JNTU-Hyderabad, ISCB-2011, Apollo Hospitals Educational & Research Foundation, Hyderabad etc. to deliver  lectures. He is also currently acting as an Associate  Editor of GERF Bulletin of Bioscience.   
Recently, he has become a member National Advisory Board of Indian Society of Chemists and Biologists.

Chemistry

Professor Brian S J Blagg completed his PhD from the University of Utah in 1999,followed by a postdoctoral position at The Scripps Research Institute. He is currently a Professor of medicinal chemistry at The University of Kansas and serves on several Editorial Advisory Boards for Medicinal Chemistry Journals and is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. The Blagg research Group has won several awards, including the 2009 American Chemical Society’s David W. Robertson Award for excellence in Medicinal Chemistry.

Medicinal chemistry

Dr. Jiapu Zhang is an Australian-based Research Scientist. He finished his PhD degree in the Universities of Melbourne and Ballarat and then a CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) Postdoc training in Australia. CSIRO has a world-wide reputation for excellence and achievement in basic and applied research; the successful drug Relenza@ for influenza was designed by CSIRO with its partners. Dr. Zhang was trained by CSIRO in protein structure-based drug design, materials. Dr. Zhang has investigated the secret of prion diseases and other neurodegenerative diseases, and served as an editor, a reviewer for many academic journals, as a committee member for many academic conferences, workshops and seminars.

Protein structure and function, structural dynamics and structure based drug design

Dr. Purushottamachar Puranik is currently a Research Associate in Dr. Vincent Njar’s laboratory at University of Maryland Baltimore. He received his Ph. D. degree (2003) from University Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai University, India. Thereafter, he worked for Chemical Process Research Laboratory of US Vitamins Ltd., Mumbai before he join Dr. Vincent Njar laboratory in 2005. Dr. Puranik applies computational and synthetic chemistry techniques in discovery and development of prostate and breast cancer agents. He has published more than 25 research articles in reputed journal, and he is editorial board member of Biochemistry and Pharmacology: open access of OMICs publishing group and other.

Chemical Technology

Dr Högberg has spent over 40 years in the pharmaceutical industry and had leading roles from early drug discovery up to marketed products. He has experience from big pharma (Astra and AstraZeneca), mid pharma (ALK-Abelló), biotech (7TM Pharma) and presently LEO Pharma. He led medicinal chemistry organizations and drug development in several therapeutic areas including dermatology, pain, obesity, diabetes, dyslipidaemia, inflammatory diseases, respiratory diseases, depression, psychosis, and infection. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (CChem, FRSC), Assoc. Prof. at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm and he has published over 100 scientific papers and 50 patent applications.

Drug discovery, medicinal chemistry

Dr. Tulay A. Atesin received her Ph. D. in 2007 from the University of Rochester under the supervision of Professor William D. Jones working on the mechanisms of strong bond activation reactions. She worked on Nazarov cyclization with Professor Alison J. Frontier during her M. S. She was a postdoctoral research associate with Professors Shannon S. Stahl, Charles P. Casey and Clark R. Landis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 2007 to 2009. In 2009, she moved to Northwestern University to work with Professors Thomas J. Meade and Mark A. Ratner. She is currently a postdoctoral research associate with Professors SonBinh T. Nguyen and Joseph T. Hupp, working on the synthesis and characterization of novel coordination polymers and metal organic frameworks. She is a member of the American Chemical Society and serves as reviewer for JACS. She received a 2008 Young Investigator Award from the ACS Division of Inorganic Chemistry.

Organic reaction mechanisms, computational chemistry, and inorganic and bioinorganic chemistry

Dr. Csaba Hetényi is a Research Associate Professor at the Molecular Biophysics Research Group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He is a qualified chemist and has a PhD in Pharmacy. He has co-authored research articles in prestigious journals such as J Am Chem Soc, EMBO Reports, FASEB J, etc. and has already received more than one thousand citations for his research results. His works were favorably evaluated by several review articles. He is also co-inventor in three US patents. In 2011, Dr. Hetényi received the prestigious Talentum Academy Award of the Central-European Talent Search Foundation. Dr. Hetényi’s primary research interests focus on chemical biophysics, computational and medicinal chemistry, structural bioinformatics, molecular pathomechanisms of diseases, and he has also published works in the fields of chromatography and capillary electrophoresis.

Chemical biophysics, computational and medicinal chemistry, structural bioinformatics

Jaya Pandey has completed her PhD from Central Drug Research Institute, Lucknow and she is presently working as an Assistant Professor at Amity University. She has experience of being a research fellow at Medicinal Chemistry Division in CDRI and NBRI, Lucknow during her PhD and post-PhD dissertations. She is also conferred with two prestigious ‘Young Scientist Awards’ by the “Indian council of Chemists” and “Indian Chemical Society”, respectively for her excellent scientific contribution to the fields of medicinal/organic chemistry. Her work has mainly been associated with a development of new diarylbenzopyrans (DABPs) as Selective Estrogen Receptor Modulators (SERMs.

Medicinal/organic chemistry