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Professor
Head of the Center of Evolutionary Chemical Biology
University of Copenhagen
Denmark

Subject of presentation

Molecular Click Adventures – A Leap from the Shoulders of Giants

The concept of click chemistry matured simultaneously in different laboratories around the world in the 1990’s. There was an urgent need for quantitative chemical reactions to cope with the pressure from combinatorial science to synthesize, screen and identify millions of compounds. We serendipitously discovered the CuAAC click reaction in 2001. The mechanism of the reaction will be discussed, and its applications will be presented, as well as existential aspects of our fundamental understanding of chemistry and the importance of serendipity.

Speakers's Biography

Morten Meldal is a Danish chemist and professor at the Department of Chemistry at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, alongside Barry Sharpless and Carolyn Bartozzi, for the groundbreaking development of ‘Click chemistry and biorthogonal chemistry’. Throughout Meldal’s career, his research has had innovative influences on methods in peptide and combinatorial chemistry. His involvement in method development of solid-phase and combinatorial peptide synthesis, as well as development of the CuAAc Click reaction, have become mainstream methods for application in bioorganic and organic synthesis. 

Professor 
Department of Chemistry
University of Oxford
United Kingdom

Subject of presentation

Molecular Wires and Nanorings

 Molecular wires are the most fundamental single-molecule electronic device and the molecular components of organic semiconductors. This lecture will present recent results on the investigation of molecular wires derived from porphyrins. Porphyrins are the ‘colours of life’ – they make blood red and grass green; they also survive for millions of years in minerals. They can be used to construct molecular wires and nanorings that mediate efficient charge transport over distances of several nanometers. Their small reorganization energies lead to low barriers for charge transport and they are remarkably amenable to template-directed synthesis, providing access to nanorings and other architectures. Recent work on π-conjugated porphyrin arrays will be presented.

Speakers's Biography

Harry L. Anderson completed his PhD with Jeremy Sanders at the University of Cambridge UK in 1990 and carried out postdoctoral work with François Diederich at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. He has led an independent research group at the University of Oxford since 1995. His research interests include the investigation of porphyrin-based molecular wires, cyclodextrin polyrotaxanes, insulated molecular wires, encapsulated π-systems, template-directed synthesis, multivalent cooperativity, porphyrin nanorings, polyynes, cyclocarbons, nonlinear optical chromophores and functional dyes.

John Black Professor of Bionanoscience
Institute for Biomedical Engineering and the Department of Physiology, 
Anatomy & Genetics at the University of Oxford
Deputy Director of the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience Discovery.
Imperial College London
United Kingdom

Subject of presentation

Designing new nanomaterials for tissue regeneration and therapeutics 

This talk will provide an overview of our recent developments in bioinspired materials for applications in advanced therapeutics and biosensing with focus on establishing translational pipelines to bring our innovations to the clinic [1]. Our group has developed fabrication methods to engineer complex 3D architectures that mimic anisotropic and multiscale tissue structures and generate spatially arranged bioinstructive biochemical cues [2]. I will discuss recent advances in our tunable nanoneedle arrays for multiplexed intracellular biosensing at sub-cellular resolution and modulation of biological processes [3]. We are developing creative solutions for targeted and controlled delivery using microrobots with unique bioinspired characteristics that respond to external stimuli to release a payload [4]. Our therapeutic delivery portfolio includes high molecular weight polymer carriers for enhanced delivery of saRNA therapeutics and photo-responsive nanoreactors inspired in the circadian rhythms [5]. We are exploiting the sensing capabilities of functionalised nanoparticles to engineer nanoprobes for in vivo disease diagnostics that produce a colorimetric response ideal for naked eye read-out and for CRISPR-based preamplification free detection of ncRNAs (CrisprZyme) which we have validated with cardiovascular disease patient samples [6]. I will present advances in Raman spectroscopy for high-throughput label-free characterization of single nanoparticles (SPARTA™) that allow us to integrally analyse a broad range bio-nanomaterials without any modification enabling exciting biosensing applications using extracellular vesicles as disease biomarkers, a growing area of interest in cardiovascular medicine [7]. Finally, I will explore how these versatile technologies can be applied to transformative biomedical innovations and will discuss our efforts in establishing effective translational pipelines to drive our innovations to clinical application while actively engaging in efforts towards the democratisation of healthcare [8].

References

[1] J. P. K. Armstrong… M. M. Stevens. “A blueprint for translational regenerative medicine.” Science Translational Medicine. 2020. 12(572): eaaz2253.

[2] T. von Erlach, … M. M. Stevens. Nature Materials. 2018. 17: 237-242.

[3] C. Chiappini…  M. M. Stevens, E. Tasciotti. Nature Materials. 2015. 14: 532.

[4] X. Song… M. M. Stevens. Advanced Materials. 2022. 34(43): 2204791.; R. Sun… M. M. Stevens. Advanced Materials. 2022. 35(13):2207791.

[5] A. Blakney, … M. M. Stevens. ACS Nano. 2020, 14(5): 5711-5727.; O. Rifaie-Graham, … M.M. Stevens. Nature Chemistry. 2023. 15: 110–118.

[6] C. N. Loynachan, … M. M. Stevens. Nature Nanotechnology. 2019. 14: 883-890.;  M. Broto, … M. M. Stevens. Nature Nanotechnology. 2022. 10: 1038. 

[7] J. Penders, … M. M. Stevens. Nature Communications. 2018, 9: 4256.; J. Penders, … M. M. Stevens. ACS Nano. 2021, 15, 11, 18192–18205; H. Barriga, … M. M. Stevens. Advanced Materials. 2021, 34(26):2200839.

[8] A. T. Speidel, … M. M. Stevens.  Nature Materials. 2022. DOI: 10.1038/s41563-022-01348-5. 

Speakers's Biography

Professor Dame Molly Stevens DBE FRS FREng is the John Black Professor of Bionanoscience at the University of Oxford and a part-time professor at Imperial College London and the Karolinska Institute. Molly’s multidisciplinary research balances the investigation of fundamental science with the development of technology to address some of the major healthcare challenges. She is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of several companies in the diagnostics, advanced therapeutics, and regenerative medicine fields. Her work has been instrumental in elucidating bio-material interfaces. She has created a broad portfolio of designer biomaterials for applications in disease diagnostics and regenerative medicine. Her substantial body of work influences research groups around the world and she has been multiple times listed as Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researcher in Cross-Field research.

Molly holds numerous leadership positions, Deputy Director of the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience Discovery, Deputy Director of the UK Quantum Biomedical Sensing Research Hub, and Scientist Trustee of the National Gallery. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering (UK), a Foreign Member of the National Academy of Engineering (USA), an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and she was recognised with the 2023 Novo Nordisk Prize and the 2024 Royal Society Armourers and Brasiers Company Prize, amongst many other accolades.

Research Director

CNRS France

Subject of presentation

New strategies to fight bacterial sepsis: the example of Neisseria meningitidis

Our team has a long-standing interest in vascular cell biology in the context of infection and inflammation, in particular at the central nervous system level, where the blood-brain barrier tightly controls neuronal environment. Endothelial cells are major targets of sepsis-induced events. A wide range of invasive pathogens directly target endothelial cells and affect most aspects of endothelial cell biology, leading to edema, occlusive clotting, excessive inflammation and organ failure. Among them, Neisseria meningitidis (meningococcus) is still a leading cause of two rare but devastating invasive diseases: meningitis and severe sepsis (purpura fulminans). We have developed interdisciplinary approaches to elucidate the intricated network of interactions and molecular strategies elicited by thisbacterial pathogento colonize human vasculature, promote vascular dysfunction and get access to the brain. Our original research led to the identification of innovative therapeutic strategies to combat bacteria-induced severe endothelial dysfunction. We identified compounds against Type IV pili, a major virulence factor found in numerous bacterial pathogens, which contributes to meningococcal pathogenesis by promoting vascular colonization and subsequent vascular alteration. More recently, we identified a potent vascular stabilization factor conferring protection against severe bacterial sepsis.    

Speaker's Biography

Sandrine Bourdoulous earned her BSc degree in Biochemistry and a PhD in Immunology at the University Paris Descartes in 1994. After a post-doctoral training in Cancer Cell Biology at the Burnham Institute for Medical Research in La Jolla, California, in the laboratory of Professor Erkki Ruoslathi, she obtained an academic position at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in 1998 to join the Institut Cochin in Paris. She is leading a team dedicated on Vascular cell biology in Infection, Inflammation and Cancer, with a particular focus on endothelial dysfunction in invasive meningococcal disease and septic shock.  Since 2022, she is the head of the Microbiology Department of the Institut Cochin. Her honors include the Medal Louis Pasteur from the French Academy of Sciences and the Jacques Piraud prize from the French Medical Research Foundation. She was named as a Knight of the Legion of Honor in 2020.

Professor

Quantum Dynamics
Department of Applied Physics
Aalto University
Finland

Subject of presentation

Quantum geometry in superconducting and photonic systems

We discuss the role of quantum geometry in superconductivity, where it enables supercurrents in flat bands. Recent results on non-equilibrium transport in flat band superconductors and temperature dependence of the quantum geometric superfluid stiffness are presented, and their relation to recent experiments in twisted bilayer graphene. We then switch to topological photonics and discuss quantum metric measurements as well as high topological charge lasing in plasmonic quasicrystals.

Speakers's Biography

Professor Päivi Törmä is an Academy Professor at the Department of Applied Physics and leads the Quanty dynamics (QD) research group. Her research interests are in the area of many-body quantum physics, superconductivity and nanoplasmonics.

Professor Törmä earned a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Helsinki in 1996, developing theory for optical multiports and their usage in measuring the quantum state of light. She worked as a postdoc at the University of Ulm and as a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Innsbruck where she was one of the first theorists to initiate work on ultracold Fermi gases, and proposed a spectroscopic probe of superfluidity. In 2001 she became a professor at the Ģ��ֱ��, Finland and started experiments in nanophotonics and plasmonics. She moved to Aalto University (at that time Helsinki University of Technology) in 2008, and was an invited guest professor at ETH Zurich in 2015. Her research has led to pioneering observations of strong-coupling, lasing,and condensation phenomena in nanoplasmonic systems. Her theory work has revealed a quantum geometric contribution of superfluidity which can provide superconductivity in flat bands, essential in the search for superconductors that work at high temperatures. In her experiments, Päivi has worked on strong coupling of surface plasmon polariton modes and molecules, and her group succeeded in realizing the first plasmonic Bose-Einstein condensate. 

Professor Törmä has served the academic community by leading the Nanoscience Centre at Ģ��ֱ�� 2002-2005, as director of the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in Computational Nanoscience 2013-2017, vice chair of the Academy of Finland board 2010-2014, and member of the Research and Innovation Council chaired by the prime minister of Finland 2007-2015. Since 2017 she is the chair of the Millennium Technology Prize International Selection Committee.

Professor

Aalto University

Finland

Subject of presentation

Quantum thermodynamics in superconducting circuits

Quantum thermodynamics in superconducting circuitsRecent fast progress in developing superconducting circuits mainly for quantum information processing purposes enables researchers to employ them also in various other types of investigations and applications. My group’s speciality is to couple these circuit QED structures to on-chip heat baths formed of normal metals with controllable temperatures and sensitive thermometry. I will review the work for which we laid the basis already in 1990’s at the Ģ��ֱ��, and then I move to our recent and ongoing work on superconducting qubits in studies of quantum heat transport, heat valves and diodes, heat engines, thermometers etc. The combination with heat baths made of metallic or graphene absorbers, allows for ultrasensitive bolometry and calorimetry of quantum systems, e.g., with promise of wide-band single quantum detection in the microwave regime. I will also highlight the potential of superconducting circuits as highly controlled open quantum systems, and on the other hand as virtually isolated quantum systems for fundamental studies of thermalization.

Speakers's Biography

Jukka Pekola was born in 1958 in Pihlajavesi, Finland. In 1982 he completed M.Sc. in technology (physics) at the Helsinki University of Technology (HUT), now Aalto, and in 1984 gained his doctorate with a thesis on critical flow and persistent current experiments in superfluid helium-3. He continued his work on the superfluid with a postdoc in the physics department of the University of California, Berkeley, followed by a return to HUT to a position of group leader in the low-temperature laboratory. In 1992 Pekola moved to the Ģ��ֱ��, co-founding the first nanophysics laboratory in Finland, and joining the faculty in 1995. He returned to Helsinki in 2002, where he is now full professor of quantum nanophysics at Aalto. There he founded the PICO research group in the low-temperature laboratory which he heads to this day. His research programme in the physics of nanoscale devices has led to many breakthroughs and landmark results. Currently he leads the Centre of Excellence in Quantum Technology by Research Council of Finland, and the Finnish Quantum Institute, InstituteQ.

In 2001 Pekola was elected to the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters and to the Finnish Academy of Technical Sciences in recognition of his contributions to both fundamental and applied physics. He was awarded the Theodor Homén Prize by the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters in 2016, Simon Memorial Prize in 2020, and the Prize of the Finnish Cultural Foundation in 2024.

Professor

CSSB Centre for Structural Systems Biology

Hannover Medical School

Germany

Subject of presentation

From in-silico to in cellulo: Illuminating viral morphogenesis

Herpesviruses encode for hundreds of proteins, many of which are needed to assemble to form infectious particles that can transmit the viral genome and establish a consecutive, productive infection cycle. It is mostly unknown how all these factors are assembled and brought together in an infected, living cell at the single-particle level. Using the recent developments in AI-driven structural predictions, we have generated a comprehensive and stringently scored structural prediction database of all human herpesviruses proteins as well as their complexes. These data are freely accessible at . By integrating these structural predictions with live-cell microscopy, CLEM and Cryo-EM, we are unraveling how viral factors interact over space and time in infected cells. I will illustrate this approach along our recent findings of a previously unkown family of viral proteins that mediate viral replication.

Speakers's Biography

Jens Bosse studied Molecular Biotechnology in Aachen, Germany before doing a PhD in Virology at the LMU in Munich at the Gene Centre. He did PostDocs with Lynn Enquist at Princeton, USA and Kay Gruenewald, Hamburg Germnay. In 2020 he became an assistant professor at Hannover Medical School. His lab is situated at the Centre for Structural System Biology (CSSB) in Hamburg and studies viral morphogenesis events using an integrative approach combining large-scale structural predictions with live-cell microscopy, correlative light and electron microscopy, and cryo-EM. A current focus is the role of protein condensates in viral replication.

Professor

Technische Physik
Institute of Nanostructure Technologies and Analytics (INA)
Center of Interdisciplinary Nanostructure Science and Technology (CINSaT)
University of Kassel

Subject of presentation

Nanostructured Semiconductors for Photonic and Optoelectronic Applications

Johann Peter Reithmaier, Mohamed Benyoucef, Cyril Popov

An overview is given about the group activities on the development of nanostructured materials, which includes III-V compound semiconductors as well as diamond. Several major areas of applications are addressed, such as quantum dot gain materials for diode lasers, single photon emitting structures for quantum key distribution and photonic structures in diamond to enhance light matter interaction with embedded color centers. 

Record values in temperature stability, modulation speed and ultra-narrow linewidth in InP-QD lasers were obtained in the recent years, which exhibit superior performance and indicate the potential to outperform in future state of the art QW lasers.

Due to possible geometric asymmetries in QD structures, the entanglement of polarization states is not possible, which results in a finite fine structure splitting (FSS). In more recent results based on a specific growth technique, the symmetry of semiconductor quantum dots can be significantly improved on InP-based QDs, which results in very low FSS values in the order of the lifetime limited linewidth. These single photon emitters are key devices for long range fiber-based quantum key distribution systems operating at 1.5 µm.

A very promising material system for quantum technology applications, such as quantum memory or quantum processing, are diamond structures with embedded color centers, e.g., NV or SiV centers. However, the light interaction with a single atom-like dipole is rather low, and the light-matter interaction must be enhanced by photonic nanostructures. However, the fabrication of nanopillar or nanocavities in diamond is much more challenging than in conventional compound semiconductors. In the recent years, many nanoscale photonic structures were developed, which includes ultra-smooth surfaces, nanopillars and photonic crystal based structures in diamond.

Speakers's Biography

Prof. Johann Peter Reithmaierstudied physics at TU Munich and made his PhD at Siemens and Walter-Schottky-Institute in 1990. Until 1992, he worked as Postdoc at IBM in Rüschlikon, Switzerland on III/V epitaxy. In 1992, he joined University of Würzburg where he built-up a research group working on nanostructured semiconductors and their applications in optoelectronic devices. In 2005 he became a full professor of physics and director of the Institute of Nanostructure Technologies and Analytics at the University of Kassel.

He is author or co-author of more than 830 journal and conference papers (> 380 in refereed journals, 2 books, 10 book articles and > 160 invited talks, > 16000 citations), He is a member of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft (DPG) and of IEEE Photonics Society. He became Fellow of IEEE in 2011. From 2014 to 2020, he was co-editor of OPTICA. He was and is on the advisory board of different national centers (EPSRC National Centre for III-V Technologies in UK 2010-2016, Centre of Nanophotonics for Terabit Communications (NATEC) in Denmark since 2016) and since 2021 Technical Advisory Board of EPSRC research consortium "QUantum Dot On Silicon systems for communications, information processing and sensing" (QUDOS), UK. Since 2016, he is speaker of the Center of Interdisciplinary Nanostructure Science and Technology (CINSaT) of University of Kassel. Since 2018, he is coordinator of the LOEWE priority project SMolBits (Scalable Molecular Quantum Bits).

His current interests are focused on nanostructured semiconductors and their optoelectronic applications. This includes self-assembly techniques of III-V quantum dot materials on GaAs, InP and Si substrates as well as nanostructuring by high-resolution lithographical techniques. New types of devices are investigated like nanolasers, single photon sources, ultra-high speed and narrow linewidth lasers, high power lasers, light emitting devices on silicon and nanocrystalline diamond for biomedical, quantum computing and quantum communication applications.