James Baker is the Ruth Dow Doan Professor of Biologic Nanotechnology at the University of Michigan. He serves as Director of the Nanotechnology Institute at the University of Michigan. This Institute promotes a multidisciplinary approach to study the application of nanomaterials to cellular engineering, drug delivery and gene transfer. He is a member of the PCAST in the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the White House, and a Fellow of the American College of Physicians.
Juan de Pablo currently holds the Howard Curler Distinguished Professorship of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He also serves as the Director of the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) on Nanostructured Interfaces. Professor de Pablo's research has focused on the study of the structure and properties of complex fluids, including polymers and glasses. His current activities include the study of stability of biological systems trapped in glasses, the study of nanofabrication by means of self-assembly of polymeric systems, and the study of bilayer membranes and of flow of biological molecules in microfabricated geometries. He has received a Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher Scholar Award, a Presidential Award in Science and Engineering, and has been an Invited Professor at the National University of Mexico, the University of Buenos Aires, and, more recently, at the ETH, Zurich. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, and has co-authored over 200 scientific papers and a text in chemical engineering thermodynamics and statistical mechanics.
Dennis Dougherty is the George Grant Hoag Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology. His laboratory works at the intersection of physical organic chemistry and neurobiology. Dr. Dougherty is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a recipient of the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award of the American Chemical Society.
Douglas Eaton is Distinguished Professor and Deputy Chairman of Physiology and Professor of Pediatrics at Emory University. His laboratory examines salt and water transport by lung epithelial cells since it is critical for normal clearance of fluid from the lungs at birth and in the post-natal lung for maintaining a thin fluid layer on the surface of the airways to promote pulmonary gas exchange and clearance of foreign particulates from the lung. This work focuses on assembly, trafficking, and degradation of ion channels and how this affects the normal physiology and pathophysiology of the lung.
Stephen Goodnick is associate vice president for research at Arizona State University. His laboratory’s research specializations lie in solid-state device physics, semi-conductor transport, quantum and nanostructure devices and device technology, and high frequency devices. Goodnick is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow.
Warren Grill is Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Neurobiology, and Surgery at Duke University. His laboratory’s interests are in neural engineering and neural prostheses and include design and testing of electrodes and stimulation techniques, the electrical properties of tissues and cells, and computational neuroscience with applications in restoration of bladder function, treatment of movement disorders with deep brain stimulation, and multi-joint limb movement.
Peter Jordan is Professor of Chemistry at Brandeis University. His laboratory’s research focuses on channel forming proteins and their phospholipid environment, with three major goals: (1) developing new methods for clarifying channels' selectivity mechanisms; (2) developing techniques for determining reaction pathways between their various conformational states; (3) determining how phospholipid-protein interaction influences these conformational equilibria.
George Schatz is Morrison Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University. The Schatz research group is interested in using theory and computation to describe physical phenomena in a broad range of applications relevant to chemistry, physics, biology and engineering. Among the types of applications that we interested are: optical properties of nanoparticles and nanoparticle assemblies; using theory to model polymer properties; DNA structure, thermodynamics and dynamics; modeling self assembly and nanopatterning; and gas phase reaction dynamics.
Shankar Subramaniam is Professor of Bioengineering, Chemistry and Biochemistry and Biology and Director of the Bioinformatics Graduate Program at the University of California at San Diego. He also has adjunct Professorships at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Subramaniam is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and is a recipient of Smithsonian Foundation and Association of Laboratory Automation Awards. Subramaniam was honored in 2002 as "High Performance Computing's Highest Guru" by Genome Technology Magazine. His research interests are in bioinformatics and systems biology.
Samuel Wickline is Professor of Internal Medicine, Biomedical Engineering, Physics, Cell Biology, and Physiology at Washington University in St. Louis. The Wickline laboratory is engaged in a multidisciplinary effort (physics, engineering, chemistry, cell physiology, pharmacology) to develop systemically deliverable ligand-targeted nanoparticles for noninvasive, in vivo image-based detection of picomolar quantities of pathological epitopes that are the sources of cancer and cardiovascular disease. They also have devised strategies for delivering drugs or genes to those sites with the use of these targeted nanoparticle carriers.