8th BCNP - Brazilian Conference on Natural Products

Graduated in Pedagogy from USP and post graduated in Marketing from FAAP. Fifteen years working in the pharmaceutical industry, she has created innovative products and services that help people to be healthier and live better. In 2016, she founded Wecare Skin, the first Brazilian company that takes care of the skin of cancer patients and develops solutions so that cancer patients can have more quality of life and success in their treatment.

Dan Staerk obtained his Master of Science in Chemistry and Molecular biology/Biochemistry from University of Southern Denmark in 1997 and his PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the Danish University of Pharmaceutical Sciences in 2000, where he specialized in natural products research. After a period as Assistant Professor (2000-2003) and Associate Professor (2003-2008) at Department of Medicinal Chemistry, Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Copenhagen (UCPH), he was appointed Professor at Faculty of Life Sciences, UCPH. Since 2012 he has been Professor in Natural Products Research at Department of Drug Design and Pharmacology, UCPH, where he is also heading Copenhagen Small Molecule NMR Centre. Professor Staerk's main research interest is development and application of advanced analytical techniques for accelerated analysis of bioactive natural products in complex extracts of plants and microorganisms. This includes technologies like ligand-fishing, high-resolution inhibition profiling, hyphenated HPLC-PDA-HRMS-SPE-NMR, and metabolomics. Special interest is on bioactive natural products and peptides for treatment of metabolic diseases, but his interests also include antimicrobial compounds and efflux pump inhibitors.

Denise Brentan da Silva is graduated in Pharmacy (UFMS), master in organic chemistry (UFMS), Ph.D. in Natural and Synthetic Products (FCFRP-USP) and post-doctorate (FCFRP-USP). The researcher is currently professor at UFMS and leader of the research group LAPNEM (Laboratory of Natural Products and Mass Spectrometry). She was senior researcher at the company LYCHNOFLORA P&D Ltda. She received Prof. Otto Richard Gottlieb award - Young Talent of Sociedade Brasileira de Química (2015). The researcher supervised several projects involving metabolomics approaches for determination of bioactive compounds and to understand the ecological interactions.

During the last 10 years, Dr. Endringer is a CNPQ2 scientist and participated in multidisciplinary projects, mainly as PI (principal investigator) or co-PI, in which plant materials from Brazil were used to screen new extracts and fruits and to generate new chemical entities with antimicrobials, anti-hypertensive and healing, and chemopreventive cancer and anticancer activities. She has technical, scientific, and research management experience in pharmacognosy and cell culture and product and patent development. She has authored or co-authored 136 papers, four patents, and some organization of a book and seven book chapters. In the same period, she coordinated 19 research and extension projects with funding, two with international funding, and participated as co-PI of 8 funded projects. In the period evaluated, she completed the orientation of two doctorates, 23 masters and 71 undergraduate students, and scientific initiation and conclusion bacharel Thesis. These data prove that she has experience in research management, human resources training, technical and scientific production, innovation products, and project coordination.

Eduardo Mattoso is founder of the Brazilian company Kaapi. His introduction to the fragrance business was by researching natural ingredients from the Brazilian biodiversity. His work on the Amazonian forest led to a Master’s degree in Chemistry in 2005. A few years later he started his own company aimed at exporting Brazilian ingredients to the Flavor and Fragrance industry. In 2013 Kaapi started its own fragrance operations as an attempt to use Brazilian essential oils in perfuming compositions. In 2019 he founded Iby - an initiative into the B2C market – a company driven to adding value to Brazilian food ingredients.

Greg Challis graduated with a BSc in Chemistry (1994) from Imperial College London and a DPhil in Organic Chemistry (1998) from the University of Oxford, for research carried out under the supervision of Prof Sir Jack Baldwin. He carried out postdoctoral research as a Wellcome Trust International Prize Travelling Research Fellow in the Department of Chemistry at Johns Hopkins University, USA, with Prof Craig Townsend (1998-2000) and in the Department of Genetics at John Innes Centre, UK, with Prof Keith Chater (2000-2001). In 2001 he took up a lectureship in Chemical Biology in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Warwick and in 2006 he was promoted to Professor. In July 2016, he was appointed as the Monash-Warwick Alliance Professor of Sustainable Chemistry (Chemical and Synthetic Biology), a joint position between the Department of Chemistry at the University of Warwick, and the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.  He also leads the “Engineering Biosynthetic Pathways” theme of the Warwick Integrative Synthetic Biology (WISB) Centre and is a Chief Investigator in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Innovations in Peptide and Protein Science (CIPPS). Greg’s research interests encompass the discovery, mechanism of action, biosynthesis and bioengineering of bioactive natural products. His research has been recognised by several awards, most recently a Wolfson Research Merit Award (2013-2018) from the Royal Society and the 2017 Interdisciplinary Prize of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Royal Society of Biology.

Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences.  In 2014, she was promoted to Associate Dean for Research. Her research has helped to develop three-dimensional models of the fallopian tube to define early events responsible for ovarian cancer formation.  She is interested in the use of botanicals as a novel source of compounds that activate progesterone receptor signaling. She is also actively screening natural products for anti-cancer activity with a focus on ovarian cancer. She has been the recipient of the Liz Tilberis Scholar Award from the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund and was named the UIC Rising Star in the basic life sciences in 2013 and the UIC Distinguished Researcher in life sciences in 2020.

B.S. in Pharmacy, Federal University of Paraíba (2003), M.S. in Natural and Synthetic Bioactive Products (2004), Ph.D in Natural and Synthetic Bioactive Products (2007). Dr. Tavares’ area of expertise is pharmacy with emphasis in phytochemistry, including mainly: extraction, isolation, purification of secondary metabolites and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance use to identify and/or elucidate Natural Products Chemical structures. Currently, Dr. Tavares works as an Associate III Professor of Health Science Center, Pharmaceutical Science department and he is in charge of Spectroscopic Methods Applied to Drug Analysis class. He worked as coordinator of the Post-Graduate Program in Natural and Bioactive Synthetic Products (CAPES 6), from 2014 to 2019. He has more than 140 scientific articles published on indexed periodics and supervised 12 M.S. and 8 Ph.D students. Dr. Tavares is also a member of Chemical Brazilian Society, Pharmaceutical Science Brazilian Association, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Users Association and Research Productivity Scholarship Level 2 of CNPQ.

Ph. D in Organic Chemistry from the Federal University of Pará (Brazil) and post-doctorate at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (USA). She is currently Associate Professor at the Faculty of Biotechnology of UFPA and Affiliated member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. In addition, she is Productivity scholarship of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) and the first woman in the Amazon Region to be laureated with the prize "For Women in Science" promoted by UNESCO, L’Oréal and ABC (2013). In the last ten years, she has published around 80 scientific papers in the field of Chemistry of Natural Products, especially on essential oils and aromas.

I was born in Douala-Cameroon. I obtained my PhD in Chemistry in otutelle (2010) at the University of Yaoundé 1/Université de Lorraine, France. I had three postdoctoral positions: Mar-Jul 2010 Pukyong National University, South Korea (Natural products from marine fungi), Oct 2010-Aug 2014 Johannes University of Mainz, Germany (Natural products structure elucidation); Jul 2018-Oct 2019 Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil (Phytochemistry). As a professor: Visiting professor Set 2014-Jun 2018 Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil (Phytochemistry); Assistant professor since Nov 2019 and responsible for the Laboratory of Natural Products Chemistry (Chemistry Department, UFSC). Publications: 100; Patents: 2; Book Chapters: 4; Book: 1.

Marnix Medema is an Assistant Professor of Bioinformatics at Wageningen University, The Netherlands. He obtained a Biology BSc (Radboud University Nijmegen, 2006) and a Biomolecular Sciences MSc (University of Groningen, 2008). In 2013, he completed his PhD with Eriko Takano and Rainer Breitling in Groningen; during this period, he was also a visiting fellow with Michael Fischbach at the University of California, San Francisco. Following a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, he joined Wageningen University in 2015. There, his group develops computational methodologies to unravel natural product biosynthesis using omics data, and applies these methods to the study of molecular interactions in microbiomes. He built and co-coordinates the development of the antiSMASH software for the identification of biosynthetic gene clusters, along with several other algorithms for omics-based natural product discovery. Medema is a recipient of NWO Rubicon and Veni fellowships and an ERC Starting Grant, and received several prizes for his work, including the NBIC Young Investigator Award. He is editorial board member of Natural Product Reports, mSystems and FEMS Microbes, senior editor of ISME Communications, member of the scientific advisory board of Hexagon Bio, and co-founder of Design Pharmaceuticals.

Dr. Melina Mottin received her PhD in Physical Chemistry at University of Campinas (Unicamp) (2015). She is an expert in molecular dynamics simulations, molecular docking and Machine Learning modelling. She is a Pos-doc fellow in the Laboratório de Interação Patógeno-Hospedeiro (UnB) developing the project "Artificial intelligence, molecular modeling and experimental evaluation to discover new trypanocidal agents that inhibit Trypanosoma cruzi oligopeptidases".  She also is a Research Associate in the LabMol (UFG) and has been working on the OpenZika Project to prioritize new compounds able to inhibit Zika and Dengue proteins, through the integration of several computational strategies.

Mônica T. Pupo graduated in Pharmacy in 1990 from University of São Paulo (USP), Ribeirão Preto campus, and then earned her PhD in Chemistry from Federal University of São Carlos in 1997. She was a postdoctoral researcher at Institute of Physics of São Carlos, USP, for one year and then she joined the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences of Ribeirão Preto, USP, in 1998 as assistant professor. She was appointed as associated professor in 2009 and full professor in 2019. She was a visiting scholar at Professor Jon Clardy group (Harvard Medical School, USA) from 2006 to 2007. She coordinates the Laboratory of Microbial Chemistry (LQMo, PupoLab) and her research interests are focused on understanding the role of specialized metabolites in interspecies interactions in plant and insect microbiomes, and also natural products discovery for infectious diseases. Besides the lab research she enjoys going to the field to observe Nature and to collect biological samples. http://pupolab.fcfrp.usp.br/

Dr Nidia Yoshida is an Associate Professor in the Institute of Chemistry at Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. She received her PhD from the University of São Paulo (2013), with a sandwich period at Washington State University, USA. Her research focuses on bioactive natural products, with an emphasis on chemical analysis of plants, metabolomic analysis, isolation and characterization of secondary metabolites, evaluation of the biological properties of plant extracts, isolated molecules and essential oils, molecular biology, and biosynthesis of natural products.

Distinguished Professor Emerita in the Department of Chemistry, University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada since July, 2019. Her research program has focused on investigating the interactions of plants with pathogens to discover environmentally sustainable strategies to protect crops. Her approach to design such strategies uses a chemical-ecological understanding of the plant-pathogen system. Applying chemistry and biochemistry, the metabolic processes triggering plant infections are analyzed and deciphered at the molecular level to uncover the metabolites and reactions that cause disease outbreaks. Extensive work on the biosynthesis and biotransformation of plant defenses indicates that fungal pathogens carry out unique detoxification reactions that can be inhibited by paldoxins, unique designer molecules coined in Pedras' group. Overall, her research work described in over 200 publications points to ways of developing selective and sustainable crop protection approaches.

Sylvie Garneau-Tsodikova obtained her Ph.D. in Chemistry in 2003 from the University of Alberta (Prof. John C. Vederas). She then pursued her postdoctoral studies with Prof. Christopher T. Walsh at Harvard Medical School. In 2006, Sylvie joined the University of Michigan as the John G. Searle Assistant Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the College of Pharmacy and the Life Sciences Institute. In 2013, she relocated to the University of Kentucky as an Associate Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences with tenure at the College of Pharmacy, where she is now the Patrick P. DeLuca Pharmaceutical Technology Professor and Assistant Vice President for Research. Her work focuses on understanding and combating bacterial and fungal resistance. Her expertise is in medicinal chemistry and her group also works at the interface of biochemistry and microcrobiology. She is on the International Advisory Board of ChemMedChem, an Associate Editor for RSC Medicinal Chemistry, and a member of the editorial board of Journal of Biological Chemistry and ACS Infectious Diseases. She has published >150 manuscripts. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Vahlteich Research Award and NSF CAREER Award. She has given >100 invited talks and plenary lectures on her work worldwide (e.g., Brazil, Canada, China, England, Israel, Egypt, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Scotland, South Africa, and USA). As a result of her passion/work for outreach, she is an AAAS Leshner Fellow for public engagement as well as an AAAS/Lyda Hill IF/THEN ambassador. She is striving and working hard for equality and inclusivity in science.

Yi Tang received his undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering and Material Science from Penn State University.  He received his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from California Institute of Technology under the guidance of Prof. David A. Tirrell.  After NIH postdoctoral training in Chemical Biology from Prof. Chaitan Khosla at Stanford University, he started his independent career at University of California Los Angeles in 2004.  He is currently a professor at the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UCLA, and holds joint appointments in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry; and Department of Bioengineering.  His awards include the ACS Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award (2012), the EPA Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award (2012), NIH DP1 Director Pioneer Award (2012), the ACS Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry (2014) and the Charles Thom Award from the Society of Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology (2019).

Pharmacist with more than 15 years of experience in Regulatory Affairs in pharmaceutical companies in B2B and B2C markets. Master’s degree in Entrepreneurship at FEA-USP and Ph.D.’s Degree in progress in Business Economy at the University of Salamanca. Regulatory Consultant at Legis Consultoria and ManagerDevelopment at New Max Industrial. Specialist in Management of regulatory knowledge for the excellence of internal and external processes and Business Strategy to expand to other markets.