Organising Committee

Philip Gribbon (Chair) is Co-ordinator of the EU-OPENSCREEN European Research Infrastructure and Assistant Head of Department, Fraunhofer IME. After receiving a PhD in Biophysics from Imperial College on Biophysical Properties of Glycosaminoglycans, Philip worked at the University of Manchester using fluorescence photobleaching to track glycan interactions in connective tissue. Moving to industry in 2000, Philip was part of the assay development and screening teams at Pfizer. In 2005, Philip moved to GSK and was involved in the development of label free assay technologies. In 2008, Philip became Chief Scientific Officer of the European ScreeningPort a small molecule screening company working exclusively with academic partners. In 2014, Philip joined the Fraunhofer organization. Philip’s research interests are directed towards maximising the impact of screening methods through the use of assays with greater biologically relevance (eg iPS derived cell lines) and development of biophysical based screening methods based on surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy.

Michael Bader is group leader in the Cardiovascular Department at the MDC-Berlin and Professor for Molecular Cardiovascular Endocrinology at the Charité, Berlin. He studied at the University of Freiburg, was Postdoctoral Fellow at the Heidelberg University in the Department of Pharmacology and German Institute for High Blood Pressure Research, and attained his Habilitation in Pharmacology and Toxicology at the Freie Universität Berlin. Michael Bader is interested in hormone research, such as angiotensin, bradykinin and serotonin, focusing on their role in the regulation of the cardiovascular system and in the pathogenesis of hypertension and its consequences.

Petr Bartunek is group leader at the Institute of Molecular Genetics (IMG, Prague), Czech Republic and Director of CZ-OPENSCREEN: National Infrastructure for Chemical Biology. He graduated in biochemistry from Charles University, Prague in 1987 and received his PhD from Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in 1991. He did the postdoctoral training at the Research Institute of Pathology (IMP, Vienna) and in 1995 he moved to Max-Delbrueck Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC, Berlin) to work as a staff scientist. From 2003 he is a group leader at the IMG and from 2006-2011 he served as a coordinator of the Center for Chemical Genetics. The main interest of his laboratory is to use small molecules to dissect the molecular mechanism of cell fate determination. The focus is on the signaling pathways that regulate self-renewal and differentiation of hematopoietic and neural stem cells. 

Mark Brönstrup studied Chemistry at the Philipps-Universität Marburg and at the Imperial College in London. In 1999 he received his doctorate from the Technical University Berlin in Organic Chemistry. After his graduation, he worked from 2000 to 2004 as a laboratory head for Mass Spectrometry at Aventis, complemented by a research sabbatical in 2003 at Harvard Medical School. From 2005 to 2010 he led the Natural Product Sciences section at Sanofi-Aventis in Frankfurt. He dealt with translational research projects from 2010 to 2013 as a section head for Biomarkers & Diagnostics in the Diabetes Division, and a domain head for Biomarkers, Bioimaging & Biological Assays at Sanofi.
Since December 2013, he heads the department Chemical Biology at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research; additionally, he holds a Professorship (W3) at the Leibniz Universität Hannover. His research is focused on the discovery, characterization and optimization of novel antibacterial and antiviral agents, in particular through the synthesis of targeting conjugates in infectious diseases and the application of techniques like metabonomics, peptide arrays, high content imaging or impedance spectroscopy to analyze the mode of action of active agents.

Christian P. R. Hackenberger, born 1976, studied chemistry in Freiburg and Madison/WI (M.Sc. 1999 with Samuel H. Gellman). In 2003 he received his Dr. rer. nat. with Carsten Bolm at the RWTH Aachen. After his postdoctoral studies with Barbara Imperiali at MIT he moved in 2005 to the Freie Universität Berlin, where he founded his own research group. In 2012 he was appointed as the Leibniz-Humboldt full professor of Chemical Biology at the Leibniz-Institute for Molecular Pharmacology (FMP Berlin) and the Humboldt University Berlin. Christian Hackenberger is the head of the DFG-funded priority program 1623 "Chemoselective reactions for the synthesis and application of functional proteins". 
His research focus is located on the interface between organic chemistry, biochemistry and biophysics, in particular on the synthesis of functional proteins as well as protein- and peptidconjugates and the development of new chemoselective and bioorthogonal reactions to study important biochemical and disease-related pathways and engineering.

Gary R. Lewin is an independent group leader at the MDC and full Professor at the Charité University Medical Faculty in Berlin. The projects in his lab focus on the molecular basis of sensory neuron mechanotransduction as well as on the physiological role of the neurotrophins. Gary received his first degree in Physiology and Pharmacology from Sheffield University and his doctoral thesis St. Thomas's Hospital Medical school in the Sherrington school of Physiology in London. After that he worked at the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at the State University of New York at Stony Brook before he left for Germany for a Humboldt Fellowship in the department of Neurobiochemistry at the Max-Planck Institute for Psychiatry in Munich.

Christian Ottmann, born 1971, studied biology in Bochum (M.Sc. 1999 with Elmar Weiler). In 2003 he received his Dr. rer. nat. with Claudia Oecking at the Eberhard Karls University in Tuebingen. After funding a Biotech company (AmbAgon Technology) and a postdoctoral stay with Alfred Wittinghofer at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Physiology he took up the position of a group leader at the Chemical Genomics Centre of the Max Planck Society in 2006. In 2012 he became Associate Professor for Molecular Cell and Structural Biology at Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands.
He works on small-molecule modulation of Protein-Protein Interactions (PPIs) with a special focus on stabilization of 14-3-3 adapter protein PPIs. He is particularly interested in protein crystallography and biophysical interaction analyses of small-molecule/protein complex interactions.

Giulio Superti-Furga directs the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. His work includes the elucidation of basic regulatory mechanisms of tyrosine kinases in human cancers, the discovery of fundamental organization principles of the proteome of higher organisms and the development of integrated approaches to understand the mechanism of action of drugs at the molecular level. Most recently he has focused on studying and understanding the time-resolved molecular impact of perturbations, such as drugs or viruses, on the human system. He is a member of EMBO, Austrian Academy of Sciences, German Academy of Sciences, European Academy of Cancer Sciences and chair of the EMBL Alumni Association. Dr. Superti-Furga studied molecular biology at the University Zurich, Genentech, and IMP/Vienna in the laboratory of Meinrad Busslinger. He was a post-doctoral fellow with Giulio Draetta and Sara Courtneidge at the EMBL and later became an EMBL team leader. He also co-founded the companies Cellzome and Haplogen.

The Organising Committee is supported by:

Ronald Frank - EU-OPENSCREEN Senior Advisor

Phone: +49 (0)30 9406 3066
Mobile: +49 (0)178 2844 481
Fax:     +49 (0)30 9406 3077

Email:  frank(at)fmp-berlin.de

Anne Höner - EU-OPENSCREEN Project Manager

Phone:  +49 (0)30 9479 3286
Fax:     +49 (0)30 9479 3109

Email:   hoener(at)fmp-berlin.de