Conférenciers Keynote

Kenneth Kam-Wing Lo

Professor Kenneth Kam-Wing Lo obtained his BSc and PhD degrees from The University of Hong Kong. He then worked as a Croucher Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory at the University of Oxford. In 1999, he joined the Department of Biology and Chemistry (now the Department of Chemistry) at City University of Hong Kong as an Assistant Professor, and he has been a Chair Professor since 2023. His research interests include the utilization of luminescent inorganic and organometallic transition metal complexes as biomolecular probes, cellular imaging reagents, and photocytotoxic agents. He received the APA Prize for Young Scientist from the Asian and Oceanian Photochemistry Association in 2005 and the Distinguished Lectureship Award from the Chemical Society of Japan in 2011. In 2015, he was awarded a Croucher Senior Research Fellowship from the Croucher Foundation and was admitted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) in 2018. He received the Elsevier Lectureship Award from the Japanese Photochemistry Association in 2024.

 Hannah Shafaat

Hannah Shafaat's scientific career began at Caltech, where, in addition to earning a B.S. in Chemistry in 2006, she became enamored with the research enterprise while developing spectroscopic endospore viability assays with Adrian Ponce at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She earned her Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in 2011, under the direction of Professor Judy Kim, investigating amino acid radical intermediates in biological electron transfer reactions. Hannah was awarded a Humboldt Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship and traveled across the ocean to Germany to study hydrogenase and oxidase enzymes and learn advanced EPR techniques working under Director Wolfgang Lubitz at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion. She started her independent career in 2013 at The Ohio State University, initially developing hydrogenase mimics and expanding into the study of one-carbon activation reactions and organonickel proteins. Hannah's group also studies new classes of Mn/Fe oxidase enzymes. In recognition of her research on metalloproteins, Hannah was awarded the 2018 Sloan Research Fellowship. Hannah Shafaat and her group moved to UCLA in 2023 and have been enjoying the science, sun, and scenery of Southern California!

 Ana M. Pizarro

Ana M. Pizarro completed a PhD in Chemistry from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in 2004, focusing on trans-platinum cytotoxic compounds, under the supervision of Professor Carmen Navarro-Ranninger. She then received a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship to conduct research at The University of Edinburgh under Professor Peter Sadler FRS, exploring new ruthenium-based organometallics. She continued her work with Prof. Sadler at The University of Warwick, investigating how selected metallodrugs exert their anticancer effects in tumour cells. In 2014, she joined IMDEA Nanociencia (Madrid) as a Ramón y Cajal Fellow. She got tenure in April 2019. Pizarro leads the Molecular Metallodrugs research group at IMDEA Nanociencia. Her main research interest lies in exploiting the extraordinary features of transition metal complexes inside the human cell to interfere and modulate its machinery: (i) at the molecular level, fully understanding metal-based chemistry inside the cell, (ii) at the organelle level, identifying chemistry confinement, and (iii) in a timeline.

 Justin Wilson

Justin Wilson began his research career as an undergraduate in the lab of Prof. Jeff Long at UC Berkeley, where he investigated cyanide-bridged transition metal clusters as single-molecule magnets. After graduating in UC Berkeley with Highest Honors and the Departmental Citation in 2008, he began is PhD studies in Inorganic Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the mentorship of Prof. Stephen J. Lippard. Justin’s graduate research focused on the design and investigation of novel platinum-based anticancer drug candidates, for which he received the annual Davison Prize for best inorganic thesis. From 2008–2013, Justin was a Seaborg Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he worked with Dr. Eva Birnbaum on radioisotope production, separation, and ligand design. In 2013, Justin began his independent career as an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Cornell University, and was subsequently promoted to the rank of associate professor with tenure in 2021. In 2024, Justin joined the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at UC Santa Barbara as a professor. His research program has been recognized by a number of awards including the Cottrell Scholar Award, the Jonathan Sessler Award for Emerging Leaders in Bioinorganic and Medicinal Inorganic Chemistry, the Ed Stiefel Young Investigator Award at the Metals in Biology Gordon Research Conference, and the National ACS Harry Gray Award for Creative Work in Inorganic Chemistry by a Young Investigator.