After his PhD thesis in Rennes and a post in USA, Dr R. Grée started independent career working in various areas of organic synthesis such as: use of transition metal complexes, asymmetric synthesis and catalysis, chemistry of lipids, fluorine chemistry, total synthesis and medicinal chemistry. He has published over 300 papers in scientific journals. He is Director of Research at CNRS (Emeritus). He obtained the Award of the Organic Chemistry Division of the French Chemical Society and has been elected Honorary Fellow of the Chemical Research Society of India and Foreign Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India.
Mihaela C. Stefan
University of Texas at Dallas
United States
Mihaela C. Stefan received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering and Ph.D. in Chemistry from Politehnica University Bucharest, Romania. She worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher in Matyjaszewski’s group at Carnegie Mellon University from 2002 to 2003. She also worked as a research scientist in Richard D. McCullough's group at Carnegie Mellon University, synthesizing block copolymers containing semiconducting polythiophenes.
She joined the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Texas at Dallas in 2007 and is currently a Eugene McDermott Professor and Department Head. She received the NSF Career Award in 2010, the NS&M Outstanding Teacher Award in 2009 and 2017, the Inclusive Teaching Diversity Award in 2012, the President’s Teaching Excellence Award in 2014, Provost’s Award for Faculty Excellence in Undergraduate Research Mentoring in 2015, and Provost’s Award for Faculty Excellence in Graduate Research Mentoring in 2021. She also received the Wilfred T. Doherty Award from the Dallas Forth Worth Local Section of the American Chemical Society in 2021. Her research group is developing novel organic semiconductors for organic electronics, biodegradable and biocompatible polymers for drug delivery applications, and rare novel catalysts for polymerization of dienes and cyclic esters. At the University of Texas at Dallas, she supervised 44 graduate students, and 27 Ph.D. students graduated with a Ph.D. in Chemistry under her supervision. She also mentored ~150 undergraduate students who worked on her research lab on various projects.
Salvador Ventura
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Spain
Salvador Ventura is Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and Scientific Director of the Institut d’Investigació i Innovació Parc Taulí (I3PT-CERCA). His research explores the molecular basis of protein misfolding and aggregation, and their links to disease, aiming to develop innovative therapeutic and nanobiotechnological strategies. He obtained his PhD in Biology at UAB and carried out postdoctoral research at EMBL Heidelberg, Harvard Medical School, and the Karolinska Institutet. Author of more than 300 papers and 19 patents, he has supervised 23 PhD theses and has received multiple distinctions, including the Narcís Monturiol Medal, the Bruker “Manuel Rico” Award, and four ICREA Academia Awards. Elected Member of Academia Europaea and Co-Founder of Eureka Nanobioengineering.
