Presenters
Simon Blakey
Simon Blakey was born in Auckland, New Zealand in 1975. He received his B.Sc. degree in Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Auckland in 1997, before moving to the U.K. to complete his Ph.D. with Professor Ian Paterson at the University of Cambridge. After three years as a postdoctoral fellow with Professor David MacMillan at the California Institute of Technology, Simon joined the faculty at Emory University in the fall of 2005. Today his research interests revolve around the invention of new chiral catalysts enabling new enantioselective reactions and the implementation of this technology to impact drug discovery.
Nikola Basarić
Nikola Basarić was born in Zagreb, Croatia in 1975. He obtained his education at the University of Zagreb, where he conducted his graduate studies of chemical engineering and received his Ph.D. in chemistry in 2002 with M. Šindler. He did postdoctoral work at the KU Leuven, Belgium in the F. C. De Schryver’s laboratory for photochemistry and spectroscopy, working with N. Boens, and at the University of Victoria, Canada, working with P. Wan. From 2006 he is employed at the Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb in Croatia where he conducts research in organic photochemistry. He is a member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Quan Cai
Quan Cai obtained his bachelor degree from East China University of Science and Technology in 2007, and then his doctoral degree from Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry with Prof. Shu-Li You in 2012. After a postdoctoral study with Prof. K. C. Nicolaou at the Scripps Research Institute and Rice University from 2012 to 2016. Then, he joined the group of Prof. Nathaneal Gray at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, focusing on chemical biology and medicinal chemistry. In 2017, he started his independent research in the Department of Chemistry at Fudan University, and promoted as a full professor in 2022. Dr. Cai’s research interest is focused the development of new synthetic methods and their applications in natural product total synthesis.
Nicolai Cramer
Nicolai Cramer obtained his PhD from the University of Stuttgart, Germany in 2005. After postdoctoral studies with Prof. Barry Trost at Stanford as Feodor-Lynen fellow of the Humboldt foundation, he started in 2007 his independent career as Habilitand associated to the chair of Prof. Erick Carreira at the ETH Zurich, Switzerland. He received the venia legendi in 2010 and subsequently moved to EPFL as Assistant Professor for Organic Chemistry heading the Laboratory of Asymmetric Catalysis and Synthesis. Nicolai was promoted to Associate Professor in 2013, and subsequently to Full Professor in 2015. From 2020-2024, he was the director of the Institute for Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at EPFL. A key focus of his research is the development of asymmetric C-H bond functionalizations and the design of broadly useful chiral ligands.
Andrés García Dominguez
Dr Andrés García Dominguez completed his PhD studies in 2018 at the University of Zurich (Switzerland), working under the supervision of Prof. Cristina Nevado on the development of nickel-catalyzed selective carbodifunctionalizations of multiple bonds by leveraging radical intermediates. He then moved to the University of Edinburgh to work with Prof. Guy C. Lloyd-Jones focusing on kinetic investigations on the reactivity of TMSCF3.
In 2022, Andrés received a prestigious Royal Society University Fellowship to commence his independent academic career at The University of Edinburgh. His group focuses on the study of reactivity of main-group reagents, catalysts and reaction mechanisms using physical organic approaches, and on the development of new chemical probes for mechanistic analysis.
Matija Gredičak
Matija Gredičak received his PhD (2010) from the University of Zagreb, working with Ivanka Jerić on the chemistry of enediyne-derived peptidomimetics. He then moved to the University of Oxford as a postdoc with prof. Martin D. Smith. In 2015 he began his independent research career in the Division of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry at Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb. He leads a synthetic organic chemistry group with interests in synthesis and asymmetric catalysis.
Marko Hapke
Marko Hapke earned his diploma and PhD degree with Prof. P. Köll and Prof. A. Lützen at the Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg, Germany. After his postdoctoral studies with Prof. J. F. Hartwig at Yale University, USA, he joined the group of Prof. U. Rosenthal at the Leibniz Institute for Catalysis (LIKAT) in Rostock, Germany, and became independent group leader. Following his habilitation, he became Professor for Catalysis at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria, affiliated with the LIKAT as external researcher. He is currently also the interim head of the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry at JKU.
Ivanka Jerić
Dr Ivanka Jerić is a Tenured Senior Scientist at the Ruđer Bošković Institute (RBI) in Zagreb, Croatia, where she has served as Assistant Director since 2018. She received her PhD in Organic Chemistry from the University of Zagreb in 2000. Her research focuses on organic chemistry, particularly the design and synthesis of peptidomimetics, non-proteinogenic amino acids, glycomimetics, and biologically relevant molecular systems.
Throughout her career, Dr Jerić has served as principal investigator or coordinator of several competitive research and R&D projects, including projects funded by the Croatian Science Foundation, ERDF and Croatia’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan. Dr Jerić has extensive experience supervising doctoral, postdoctoral, and graduate students, has been involved in postgraduate teaching for more than 15 years and holds the title of Full Professor at the University of Rijeka. Dr Jerić has authored more than 60 publications in international peer-reviewed journals and has delivered invited lectures in Croatia and abroad.
Martin Kotora
Martin Kotora graduated from the Charles University in Prague in 1986 with MsC degree in chemistry. He received Ph.D. degree form Institute of Chemical Process Fundamentals, Czech Academy of Sciences in 1991. In between 1993-1995 he was a JSPS fellow with Prof. Tamotsu Takahashi at the Institute for Molecular Science (Okazaki, Japan) and in 1995-1996 with prof. Eichi Negishi at Purdue University (West Lafayette, Indiana, USA). Then he stayed for almost 4 years as an associated professor at Catalysis Research Center, Hokkaido University (Sapporo, Japan). In 2000 he took a position at the Charles University in Prague where is currently a full professor at the Department of Organic Chemistry.
Guanqi Qiu
Guanqi Qiu obtained her B.A. in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge, UK, in 2015. After one year as a research associate at A*STAR, Singapore, in 2016, she joined the group of Prof. Robert Knowles at Princeton University, USA, for graduate studies and received her Ph.D. in 2021. From 2021 to 2023, she was University of Giessen as an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellow, hosted by Prof. Peter Schreiner. In November 2023, she started her independent career as a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Kohlenforschung, Germany. Her group focuses on principles of reactivity, in particular, conceptual developments in intrinsic reactivity and its applications in reaction design and mechanistic diagnostics. She won the ERC Starting Grant in 2025.
Ganna Lyashenko
Dr. Ganna Lyashenko studied chemistry at National Taras Shevchenko University (Kyiv, Ukraine; MSc in Physical Chemistry) and obtained her PhD in bioinorganic chemistry in 2008 from Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz (Austria) under the guidance of Nadia C. Mösch-Zanetti. Subsequently, she undertook postdoctoral research with Russ Hille at the University of California Riverside, where she developed new methods of protein isolation and purification; and various protocols for enzyme crystallization were studied to obtain high-resolution crystal structures of the enzyme in its various metal oxidation states.
She joined the team of "Chemistry - A European Journal" in August 2011 as an Assistant Editor and has been a Senior Associate Editor since 2016. In 2023, she joined the team of “Angewandte Chemie”. As an Editor, she is responsible for the selection of articles for publication (peer review), maximizing the academic quality of the journals. Her current project is focused on educating academic researchers on how to improve their scientific writing to increase the chance of peer review, as well as giving a comprehensive overview on a peer-review workflow and ethical behavior in scientific publishing.