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Milad Abolhasani is an Associate Professor and a University Faculty Scholar in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at North Carolina State University. Dr. Abolhasani leads a diverse research group that studies flow chemistry strategies tailored towards accelerated development and manufacturing of advanced functional materials and molecules using autonomous robotic experimentation. He received his Ph.D. degree in 2014 from the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering in collaboration with the Departments of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the University of Toronto. Prior to joining NC State University, he was an NSERC postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT (2014-2016).

Erik received his A. B. degree from Harvard University in 2001. During his undergraduate education, he performed research with Prof. Amir Hoveyda at Boston College focusing on enantioselective alkene metathesis. Erik continued his studies at The Scripps Research Institute in the laboratory of Prof. Erik Sorensen, moving to Princeton University before receiving his Ph. D. degree in 2006. His doctoral training involved the total synthesis of the furanosteroid viridin and the development of a palladium-catalyzed alkene aminoacetoxylation. Erik’s postdoctoral work with Prof. John Hartwig at the University of Illinois centered on synthetic and mechanistic studies of transition metal enolates. Erik enthusiastically joined the Chemistry Department faculty at UNC Chapel Hill in 2008 and was promoted to Professor of Chemistry in 2019. The Alexanian group currently focuses on the development of new methods for the aliphatic C–H functionalization of small molecules and polymers, as well as transition metal–catalyzed approaches to C–C bond construction.

Frances Arnold is the Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering and Biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology and co-Chair of President Biden’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.  She received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2018) for pioneering the directed evolution of enzymes. Her group has been using directed evolution to explore new-to-nature enzyme chemistry (mainly carbene and nitrene transfer) and enzyme-catalyzed synthesis of noncanonical amino acids. The group also develops machine-learning guided approaches to directed protein evolution.

John was born in Atlanta, GA in September 1977, and grew up in Newport News, Virginia. He attended Virginia Tech from 1996 – 2000 where he obtained two degrees: a BA in music theory and composition, and a BS in chemistry. John then pursued graduate education in chemistry, attending Texas A&M University from 2000 – 2004 where he worked as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow in the research group of Prof. F. Albert Cotton. John then did postdoctoral work in Germany on a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.  From 2004 – 2006, he worked with Prof. Karl Wieghardt at the Max Planck Institute for Bioinorganic Chemistry in Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany, on new electrochemical and photochemical routes to unstable high-valent iron intermediates. In 2006, John joined the Department of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, where he has established a vibrant research program tackling fundamental problems in coordination chemistry and bonding. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2012, full Professor in 2015, and in 2016 John was appointed the Lester R. McNall Professor of Chemistry. Outside of research, John still enjoys writing music, which he sometimes has occasion to perform on either the violin, viola, or piano.

Donna G Blackmond received a PhD in Chemical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. She has held professorships in chemistry and in chemical engineering in the US (University of Pittsburgh), Germany (Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung), and the UK (University of Hull; Imperial College London), and she has worked in the pharmaceutical industry (Merck). She is Professor of Chemistry, Department Chair, and the John C. Martin Endowed Chair in Chemistry at Scripps Research, La Jolla, California. 

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Prof. Blackmond’s research focuses on mechanistic studies of organic reactions, including asymmetric catalysis. She pioneered the methodology of “Reaction Progress Kinetic Analysis (RPKA)” for fundamental mechanistic studies of complex organic reactions as well as for streamlining pharmaceutical process research. 

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Michael G. Coleman, Ph.D. is a native of Rochester, New York. He received his B.S. in Chemistry from the University at Buffalo in 1998. After serving four years as a laboratory technician at the Research and Development division of Praxair, Inc, he returned to the University at Buffalo and he received his Ph.D. in Synthetic Organic Chemistry in the laboratories of Huw M.L. Davies, Ph.D. In 2007, he held a brief appointment as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at South Carolina State University, and shortly thereafter, he occupied a NSF Visiting Scholar position at the University of Cincinnati’s Department of Chemistry studying synthetic inorganic chemistry in the laboratory of Hairong Guan, Ph.D. He later joined the faculty at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2008 as a Visiting Professor and was later promoted to Assistant Professor in 2010. From 2011 – 2012, he occupied a joint position as Research Assistant at the Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory researching radiochemical organometallic transformations in the laboratory of Joanna Fowler, Ph.D. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of Chemistry at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Stefan Malone Cooper, Jr. obtained his B.S. in chemistry from the College of Charleston (Charleston, SC)  in 2007. There he worked, as an undergraduate researcher, on creating derivatives of the antibiotic,  Cytosporone E, advised by Dr. Justin Wyatt. Later in 2015, Stefan obtained a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry  advised by Dr. William E. Crowe. His dissertation was entitled “TRANS-POSITIONING” CARBONS  WITHIN STRAINED CAGED BICYCLIC(S): ROM/RCM (RING-OPENING/RINGCLOSING  METATHESIS AND DIECKMANN CONDESATION ROUTES TO A CIS-DECALIN  INFRASTRUCTURE. Stefan completed a short stint as a postdoctoral researcher in the lab Dr. Herman  Sintim in 2015, at the University of Maryland and later was appointed in 2016 as a Path to Professoriate  Fellow within Hampton’s University NSF Partnership for Research and Education in Material (PREM).  Stefan was appointed as an assistant professor in the department of Chemistry and Physics at Alcorn State in August 2017.

Mingji Dai received his B.S. degree from Peking University in 2002. After two years’ research with Professors Zhen Yang and Jiahua Chen in the same university, he went to New York City in 2004 and pursued graduate study under the guidance of Professor Samuel J. Danishefsky at Columbia University. After earning his Ph.D. degree in 2009, he took a postdoctoral position in the laboratory of Professor Stuart L. Schreiber at Harvard University and the Broad Institute. In August 2012, he began his independent career as an assistant professor in the Chemistry Department and Center for Cancer Research of Purdue University. He was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2018 and full professor in 2020. He most recently moved to Emory University in 2022. His research program focuses on developing novel catalytic methodologies and strategies to streamline the synthesis of complex natural products and other medicinally important molecules. 

Ampofo Darko was born in Accra, Ghana. He received his B.S. in chemistry from Guilford College and his Ph.D. from the University of Florida, where he studied tungsten-catalyzed oxidative carbonylation of functionalized amines under the direction of Prof. Lisa McElwee-White. He then performed postdoctoral research with Prof. Joseph Fox at the University of Delaware studying trans-cyclooctenes and their bioorthogonal reactivity with tetrazines. He joined the faculty at the University of Tennessee in 2014, with research interests at the interface of organic and inorganic chemistry. His group is interested in using nature as an inspiration for organometallic catalyst design, cycloaddition reactions, and organocatalysis. Most recently, the Darko lab has been interested in novel methods to control selectivity and reactivity in carbene transfer reactions.

Huw Davies is now the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Chemistry at Emory University. His research program is directed towards the development of new enantioselective synthetic methods and their applications in total synthesis and drug discovery. A major current theme of his program is catalytic asymmetric C–H functionalization by means of rhodium-carbene induced C–H insertion. He is particularly interested in catalyst controlled site selective functionalization of unactivated sp3 C-H bonds. He collaborates broadly with several academic and industrial partners to develop a mechanistic understanding of his chemistry in order to enhance further methodology development, predictive modelling, and applications in total synthesis and drug discovery.  He is currently the Director of the NSF Center for Chemical Innovation for Selective C-H Functionalization.  Recent recognition of his work includes the Paul N. Rylander Award (2018) and the ACS Herbert C. Brown Award for Creative Research in Synthetic Methods (2019).