Biography

Originally from Dublin, Ireland, Thomas Durcan, PhD has been at the Montreal Neurological Institute (The Neuro) since 2007. As an Associate Professor at The Neuro and McGill University (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuO2IKE4JME), his research focus is on applying patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells (IPSCs) towards the development of phenotypic discovery assays and 3D mini-brain models (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjOS_trumik) for both neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders.

As Director of the EDDU at The Neuro, he oversees a team of over 40 research staff and students, committed to applying novel stem cell technology, combined with CRISPR genome editing, mini-brain models and new microfluidic technologies towards elucidating the underlying causes of these complex disorders. Combined with new approaches in the group towards building multi-omics profiles on the patient-derived IPSC cells, the long-term strategy is to identify new personalized precision therapies. Dr. Durcan's academic research program is funded by a CIHR program grant and USA Department of Defense Research grants.

Biography

Opher Gileadi obtained his PhD in Biochemistry at the Hebrew University and was then a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University Medical School. Subsequently he led a research group at the Weizmann Institute of Science. From 2004-2021 he was both at SGC University of Oxford, first as head of the Biotechnology group, then as Principal Investigator of the Genome Integrity & Repair Group as well as Head of the SGC Kinase Chemical Biology Center at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP). In 2021 Opher took at position as Executive Director, Protein Science and Structure at Exscientia, but re-join the SGC at Karolinska in 2023.

Opher leads the Protein Science team at SGC Karolinska, focussing on developing antibodies and target-enabling packages (TEPs) for under-investigated proteins of humans and pathogens.

Biography

Matthieu Schapira, PhD is a Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, UofT, and is the head of computational chemistry, protein bioinformatics, and data management at the SGC-Toronto. He leads the CACHE initiative for benchmarking computational ‘hit finding’. Dr. Schapira is a recognized authority in the structural chemistry of drug target classes such as chromatin regulators, ubiquitylation pathways and WDR proteins, and has created popular online informatics resources for these targets such as Chromohub, Ubihub and ChemBioPort. He is interested in novel strategies to expand and ML tools to exploit the accessible chemistry space. His trainees have gone on to become important innovators in AI-driven drug discovery at Toronto-born biotechs such as Atomwise and Cyclica.