Keynote Speakers

Teresa Head-Gordon is a leader in theoretical chemistry, creating methodological advances at the interface between quantum and statistical mechanics and machine learning. Her fundamental work includes theory and methods to understand water and aqueous solvation, molecular interactions, interfaces, chemical reactivity and (bio)catalysis, drug discovery, and protein biophysics with notable impacts on energy, environment, and human health applications. Her leadership contributions to local and national service, education, and training, extends to promoting and developing the blueprint for computational science and engineering for the future. Honors include IBM SUR award; Schlumberger Fellow, Cambridge University, UK; Fellow, AIMBE; Fellow, ACS; Fellow, ReSolv German Center of Excellence, and recipient of the Humboldt Research Award from Germany. She is Director of CalSolv at UC Berkeley, a Co-Director of the National Molecular Sciences Software Institute; current or previous editorial Advisory Board Member of Journal of Chemical Physics, Journal of Physical Chemistry; Journal of Computational Chemistry; and SIAM book series on Computational Science and Engineering. She led the creation of the COVID-19 Hub in April 2020, connecting scientists across the global molecular simulation community to create and house extensive data sets, to organize a deep dive into the SARS-COV-2 biology, and enabling tools to accelerate drug discovery, while establishing partnerships with CERN, Amazon, Microsoft's AI for Good team, and Human Brain Initiative to advance the science. Locally, she created the Professional Master's in Molecular Science and Software Engineering (MSSE) degree at UC Berkeley, joint between the College of Chemistry and College of Engineering, with special emphasis on overcoming the low participation of women/minorities for entry and leadership in computational science and software engineering. She also co-led the expansion of research opportunities for junior transfer students via the Berkeley Collegium program, a cohort that represents much of UC diversity across the University of California system, to promote them for participation in STEM fields. She has served on the system-wide COMS committee and in the Berkeley Academic Senate on the COMS and CAPRA committees. Nationally, she has taken on many leadership and advisory roles for various directorates within NIH, DOE, NSF, and NAS panels for computational science and engineering, as well internationally by serving on scientific decision bodies in Europe. She has given multiple citizen public lectures, most recently for a Telluride Town Talk on the Ethics of Emerging Technologies: The Era of Artificial Intelligence, a lecture taken from her popular ethics course at UC Berkeley.

Isaac Li is an Associate Professor at UBC Okanagan, where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Single-Molecule Biophysics and Mechanobiology. He completed his PhD at the University of Toronto with Gilbert Walker, followed by postdoc with Taekjip Ha and Yann Chemla at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Center for the Physics of Living Cells. He is a Michael Smith Health Research BC Scholar, Biophysical Society of Canada Early Career Investigator Awardee, and UBCO Researcher of the Year. The group’s research focuses on quantitative mechanobiology, developing new biophysical techniques to visualize and quantify molecular forces in live cells. His group has pioneered using DNA-based force probes, super-resolution imaging methods, and analytical frameworks to quantify molecular tension. His team was the first to image and quantify molecular forces in rolling adhesion, which involves transient adhesive interactions and rapid cell movement. The group created the first artificial catch bond using DNA. Recently, they developed a quantitative live-cell super-resolution force imaging method using Molecular Beacons-based PAINT, significantly enhancing imaging speed, signal-to-noise ratio, and spatial-temporal resolution. His lab continues exploring novel DNA secondary structures to investigate exotic mechanical and conformational behaviours, aiming to precisely control cellular motility and mechanosensitivity.

Dr. Nirosha J. Murugan is a biophysicist and interdisciplinary scientist passionate about advancing disruptive technologies that provide new dimensions of understanding health and wellness. Her federally-funded research focuses on uncovering the non-chemical aspects of cellular communication and leveraging this knowledge to develop innovative technologies for health promotion and disease reprogramming. With a keen interest in the emerging field of quantum in health, Dr. Murugan explores how quantum principles can be applied to better detect, understand, and treat diseases, aiming to revolutionize the future of medicine. Through her work, she bridges biology, biophysics, and quantum science to inspire transformative technologies that reimagine our approach to health and healing. 

Sandro Keller is Full Professor of Biophysics and Head of the Biophysics Division at the University of Graz, Austria. His research integrates biophysics, physical chemistry, and molecular biology to study membrane proteins and to develop innovative membrane mimetics. His group has pioneered the design of native nanodiscs for membrane proteins and fluorescence-based microfluidic methods to quantify protein–protein interactions in membrane environments.

After receiving his Diploma degree from the University of Basel, Switzerland, and his Ph.D. from Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany, he led an independent junior research group at the Leibniz Institute of Molecular Pharmacology in Berlin. He later held faculty positions at the University of Kaiserslautern, where he also served as Dean of the Faculty of Biology. He has received several awards, including the Stig Sunner Memorial Award from the North American Calorimetry Conference (CALCON) and the Breast Cancer Research Award from the Austrian Cancer Aid.

Sandro Keller’s work advances fundamental biophysical principles while enabling new approaches to drug discovery, protein engineering, and membrane-protein structural biology. At the Chemical Biophysics Symposium, he will present recent breakthroughs in the study of membrane proteins in nanoscale lipid-bilayer environments and highlight their potential for biomedical applications.

Jung Ho Lee majored in mechanical engineering and physics as an undergraduate student at Seoul National University, Korea in 2002. He earned his master’s degree at the same university on the mechanism of adipogenesis in 2007. Lee completed his PhD in biophysics under the guidance of Prof. Silvia Cavagnero in 2013 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he conducted research on laser-enhanced NMR spectroscopy. He pursued postdoctoral studies until 2016 on intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) under the guidance of Dr. Ad Bax at the National Institutes of Health in the USA. Currently, he holds a faculty position at the Chemistry Department of Seoul National University. His current research focuses on technical developments in NMR spectroscopy, including pulse sequence development and instrumentation. Additionally, he studies IDPs using NMR spectroscopy, cellular biology, and computation in hopes of providing insights to address neurodegenerative diseases.

Nico van der Vegt is a Dutch theoretical physical chemist. He received his PhD in chemical engineering from the University of Twente, the Netherlands, in 1998 and was a lecturer at the same university from 1998 to 2002. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the ETH Zurich, Switzerland, from 2002 – 2003, before starting his independent career as a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz, Germany. In 2009, he moved to the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, where he is currently Professor of Chemistry. His main research interests are in the thermodynamics and statistical mechanics of liquids and soft matter systems. His work includes studies of the physical fundamentals of aqueous solvation, including the effects of ions, osmolytes and cosolvents on the water solubility of macromolecules, hydrophobic interactions, and the stability of proteins. He also works on the development of models and methods for coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations that aim to link chemistry, structure and dynamics over a wide range of time and length scales.