SOUTHERN HIGHLANDS CONFERENCE ON HETEROCYCLIC CHEMISTRY
Confirmed Speakers - 2024
Dr Chris Burns
Amplia Therapeutics
Chris has worked in various roles in pharma, biotech and academia for over 30 years. After completing a Ph. D. in Organic Chemistry at the University of Melbourne, Chris undertook postdoctoral studies in the USA before moving to Pfizer UK, as a senior scientist. After 5 years he returned to Australia as a Research Fellow at the University of Sydney with the CRC for Molecular Engineering and Technology and after two years moved to the biotechnology company Ambri as Head of Chemistry. Chris then moved to the Melbourne-based biotech Cytopia as Head of Medicinal Chemistry and later as Research Director. Over this time he led teams in the discovery of two anti-cancer agents that entered clinical trial (including the drug momelotinib which was recently approved by the US FDA). Chris was subsequently recruited to the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne as a Laboratory Head before taking on executive and leadership roles with a number of privately-held biotechnology companies in Melbourne including Metaloq Pharma, Certa Therapeutics and MycRx. Dr Burns is the inventor on over 30 patents and a co-author on over 65 scientific publications, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (UK) and the Royal Australian Chemical Institute and was the recipient of the 2022 Adrien Albert Award from RACI. Dr Burns was a Founder of ASX-listed Amplia Therapeutics where he is now Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director.
Dr Milena Czyz
University of Melbourne
Milena Czyz completed her BSc (Honours) degree at The University of Adelaide and a PhD at The University of New South Wales under the supervision of A/Prof. Jonathan Morris and A/Prof Marcus Cole. She then joined the group of Prof. Corey Stephenson at The University of Michigan as a Postdoctoral Fellow. Milena later moved back to Australia where she completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at CSIRO under the supervision of Dr Anastasios Polyzos. Currently, Milena is an ARC ITTC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Melbourne working in the Polyzos group.
Prof. Gregory Fu
California Institute of Technology
Prof. Greg Fu received a B.S. degree in 1985 from MIT, where he worked in the laboratory of Prof. K. Barry Sharpless. After earning a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1991 under the guidance of Prof. David A. Evans, Prof. Fu spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Robert H. Grubbs at Caltech. In 1993, he returned to MIT, where he served as a member of the faculty from 1993–2012. In 2012, he was appointed the Altair Professor of Chemistry at Caltech. Prof. Fu is currently the Norman Chandler Professor of Chemistry at Caltech.
The current research interests of the Fu laboratory include metal-catalyzed coupling reactions and the design of chiral catalysts. In particular, the group is focused on the development of nickel-catalyzed enantioselective cross-couplings of alkyl electrophiles and on photoinduced, copper-catalyzed carbon–heteroatom bond-forming reactions.
Prof. Fu received the Corey Award of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in 2004, the Mukaiyama Award of the Society of Synthetic Organic Chemistry of Japan (SSOCJ) in 2006, the Award for Creative Work in Synthetic Organic Chemistry of the ACS in 2012, the H. C. Brown Award of the ACS in 2018, and the Noyori Prize of the SSOCJ in 2022. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2007) and of the National Academy of Sciences (2014).
Dr Becky Fuller
University of Tasmania
Becky graduated from the University of Western Australia (2010) with a PhD in synthetic chemistry and condensed matter physics. After undertaking postdoctoral research, and an independent research fellowship (2014-2018) at the same institution, she then moved to Curtin University (2018-2019) to work as an ARC DECRA recipient. Becky was appointed as a Senior Lecturer in Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Tasmania (Sept 2019). Becky’s research focuses on the development of new magnetic and radical based materials. Specifically, projects focus on the synthesis of systematically varied systems and studying how their features affect the properties.
Assoc. Prof. Bill Hawkins
University of Otago
Bill Hawkins completed his PhD at the University of Wollongong, Australia (Prof. Pyne and Prof. Keller) in 2007, followed by postdoctoral positions at the University of Melbourne (Prof. Rizzacasa), Ecole Polytechnique, France (Prof. Zard) and the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (Dr Chris Burns). In 2012, Bill joined the Department of Chemistry at the University of Otago (New Zealand) where he is currently an Associate Professor. His research interests include the synthesis of bioactive natural products and the development of new synthetic methodologies. He is the recipient of several awards including the Thieme Chemistry Journals award (2019) and the Easterfield Medal (RSC/NZIC, 2019).
Assoc. Prof. Yuning Hong
La Trobe University
A/Prof Yuning Hong received her BSc in Applied Chemistry from Sun Yat-sen University and PhD in Nano Science and Technology from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) in the laboratory of Prof Ben Zhong Tang. She did her postdoctoral training in Biophysical Chemistry in Prof Ekaterina V. Pletneva's group at Dartmouth College, NH, USA before returning to HKUST to take up the position of Research Assistant Professor and Junior Research Fellow of Institute for Advanced Study, HKUST. She moved to Australia in 2014 as a McKenzie Fellow in The University of Melbourne, working with Prof Trevor Smith in the Ultrafast and Microspectroscopy Laboratories. She joined La Trobe Institute for Molecular Science as a Bruce Stone Fellow late 2016 to set up her own research group and was later appointed as Senior Lecturer and subsequently Associate Professor in Chemistry. She was awarded an ARC DECRA Fellowship (2017-2020) and an ARC Future Fellowship (2022-2026). She is the recipient of the prestigious Le Fèvre Medal from Australian Academy of Science (2022) and the RACI Rita Cornforth Lectureship (2018). Her research centres around novel fluorescent bioprobe development for protein unfolding, misfolding and aggregation, oxidative stress and autophagy, and the study of their interplay in the context of neurodegenerative diseases.
Assoc. Prof. Todd Houston
Griffith University
Todd A. Houston graduated from Graceland College in Lamoni, Iowa, with a B.S. (cum laude) majoring in chemistry in 1987. He then moved to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he earned a PhD in organic chemistry in 1993 under the supervision of Prof. Masato Koreeda. He was then awarded an NIH post-doctoral fellowship to work in the labs of Prof. Craig Townsend at Johns Hopkins University. He began his independent career as an Assistant Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in 1996.
He moved to Griffith University in 2001 where he is currently Associate Professor in the School of Environment and Science and a Research Leader within the Institute for Biomedicine & Glycomics. In addition to work on boron-based receptors for carbohydrates, his research interests include glycosidase inhibitor design, polysaccharide drug delivery systems and novel antitubercular compounds. He has graduated 10 PhD and 3 Master's research students as Principal Supervisor and published over 70 research works including 3 U.S. Patents.
Assoc. Prof.Sarah Yunmi Lee
Yonsei University
Sarah Yunmi Lee obtained her BS from KAIST and her PhD from MIT in Organic Chemistry under the guidance of Professor Gregory C. Fu in 2014. Following this, she conducted postdoctoral research at UC Berkeley as an NIH postdoctoral fellow, working with Professor John F. Hartwig. In 2018, Sarah initiated her independent career in the Department of Chemistry at Yonsei University. Her research group is dedicated to the design, development, and investigation of catalytic strategies for stereoselective chemical synthesis.
Prof. Ang Li
Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry
Ang Li was born in Jilin, China. He received his B.Sc. from Peking University (China) in 2004. He earned his Ph.D. at The Scripps Research Institute (USA) in 2009 and conducted postdoctoral research at the Institute of Chemical and Engineering Sciences (Singapore), both under the supervision of Prof. K.C. Nicolaou. In 2010, he joined the faculty at the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry (SIOC), Chinese Academy of Sciences. His research focuses on the total synthesis of natural products. on the total synthesis and mechanistic characterization of natural products. He was honored with the Tetrahedron Young Investigator Award for Organic Synthesis (2017) and Thieme−IUPAC Prize in Synthetic Organic Chemistry (2020).