Karin Markides
Chair, Uppsala University, Sweden

Karin Markides is Director of the Swedish Scientific Council for Sustainable Development. She was President and CEO of Chalmers University of Technology between 2006 and 2015. She has previously taught and conducted research at Stockholm University, Brigham Young University and Uppsala University. As part of her broad international experience, she held a guest professorship at Stanford University in the US. She tutored more than 30 PhD students and published over 250 scientific articles. As of 1999 and 1992 respectively, she is a member of The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and member of The Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences.

Between, April 2004 and August 2006, Karin Markides held the position of Deputy Director General at Vinnova, a state agency that finances research and innovation for sustainable development. She also has been board member of several high tech start-up companies in the US and the Swedish Research Council Committee for Research Infrastructure as well as acted as a board member of the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research. During 2007 to 2009 Karin Markides was a member of the High Level Group on the Competitiveness of the European Chemical Industry. She was the only representative from the academia.

Since 2009 Karin Markides holds the chair of CESAER – The Conference of European Schools for Advanced Engineering Education and Research – a non-profit-making international association of the leading European Universities of Technology, Engineering Colleges and Schools, cooperating on policy issues.

Pernilla Wittung Stafshede
Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden

Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede is since 2015 professor at the Department of Biology and Biological Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. She leads a research group that focuses on metalloprotein mechanisms (e.g., in cancer) and protein misfolding (e.g. in Parkinson's disease). Pernilla has spent 10 years as a professor in the United States (at Tulane and Rice universities) followed by 7 years at Umeå University (Sweden) before she joined Chalmers' faculty. She has published over 240 peer-reviewed papers (2020) and many popular texts. Since January 2019, Pernilla is the Head of Genie, Gender Initiative for Excellence, which is a huge 10-year initiative financed by the Chalmers Foundation in order to improve gender equality among the faculty of the university.

Mikael Akke
Lund University, Sweden

Mikael Akke is Professor of Biophysical chemistry at Lund University in Sweden, and member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. His research on how protein dynamics contribute to biological function has provided unique insights showing how conformational entropy can contribute significantly to ligand binding and allostery, which has future applications in the field of drug design. In 2007, Professor Akke has received The Göran Gustafsson Prize in Chemistry (2007), The Arrhenius Medal (2004) and The Wallmark Prize (1999).

Michael Khor
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Professor Khor is Director of Research Support Office (RSO) and Bibliometrics Analysis at NTU, Singapore since Oct 2011. He has previously held the position of Director of Research at NTU (2004-2008) and Deputy Director, Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA) prior to joining the National Research Foundation (NRF) in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) as Director (Projects) in March 2008. He returned to NTU at end-2009 to take up the position of Associate Provost (Research) until end-Sept 2011. He has been invited as Visiting Professor by the National Defense Academy, Japan in 2001 and was invited as Guest Professor by Zhejiang University, PR China. Among other research awards he received are the Japan Science and Technology Agency (STA) Fellowship and the Japan National Institutes of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) Fellowship. He has served as President, Institute of Materials East Asia since 1996 and currently chairs the Electronics Application Division board of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (IoM³).

Bengt Nordén
Founding Patron of Molecular Frontiers | Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden

Bengt Nordén is founder of Molecular Frontiers,and holds the position as Chairman.

When appointed professor of Physical Chemistry of Chalmers Bengt Nordén was for many years among the youngest Chair Professors in Sweden and had ample opportunities to build up an institution engaging young people that shared his broad interests, ranging from spectroscopy, photophysics and quantum chemistry, to molecular biology, biotechnology and medicine. He is harvesting the fruits of this interdisciplinary onset in various forms: serendipitous breakthroughs and a unique physical-chemical school at Chalmers with a world-renowned spectroscopic profile, to mention two. Being a generalist by virtue of both curiosity and training has been helpful when he has been in charge of major awarding systems, including the Nobel Prize. As a tracker of ground-breaking achievements he also in this role received continuous inspiration to new research directions.

Erling Norrby
Former Permanent Secretary of The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Sweden

Erling Norrby has an M.D. and Ph.D. from the Karolinska Institute, the School of Medicine, Stockholm. He was Professor of Virology at KI between 1972 and 1997, and Professor of Virology and chairman at the J Craig Venter Institute for 25 years. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, serving as its Permanent Secretary between 1997 and 2003. He was member of the Nobel Committee at KI between 1975 and 1980.
Professor Norrby has published the books “Nobel Prizes and Life Sciences” (2010), “Nobel Prizes and Nature’s Surprises” (2013) and “Nobel Prizes and Notable Discoveries (2016). He has been awarded the Johan von Höpken Medal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 2003, Carl XVI Gustaf's Medal of the 12th Size with the Band of the Seraphim Order in 2005 and Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star from the Emperor of Japan in 2006.

[Video] Nobel Prize and the Advance of Immunological Methods Presentation at the Molecular Frontiers Symposium in Singapore 2012

Shuguang Zhang
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States

Shuguang Zhang is at MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his B.S from Sichuan University, China and Ph.D. in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology from University of California at Santa Barbara, USA. He was an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow and was a Whitaker Foundation Investigator at MIT. His work of designer self-assembling peptide scaffold won 2004 R&D100 award. He won a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship and spent academic sabbatical in University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.  He won 2006 Wilhelm Exner Medal of Austria. He was elected to Austrian Academy of Sciences in 2010; elected to American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering in 2011, to US National Academy of Inventors in 2013; and elected to the European Academy of Science and Arts in 2021. He won the 2020 Emil Thomas Kaiser Award from the Protein Society.  He is an honorary member of the Erwin Schrodinger Society. His current research focuses on designs water-soluble membrane proteins and peptides that are short fragment of proteins.

Magdalena Eriksson
Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden and Cape Coast University, Ghana

Dr. Eriksson is professor of biochemistry at School of Medical Sciences, University of Cape Coast, Ghana.  She earned her Ph.D. in biophysical chemistry from Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 1988.  Since 2003 she holds a master’s degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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