Cathy L. Drennan is the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Biochemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Professor and Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). She received an AB in chemistry from Vassar College, and after teaching high school science and drama for three years, she returned to graduate school. Drennan received a PhD in biological chemistry from the University of Michigan, working in the laboratory of the late Professor Martha L. Ludwig. She was also a postdoctoral fellow with Professor Douglas C. Rees at the California Institute of Technology. In 1999, Drennan joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she has risen through the ranks to full professor in the Departments of Chemistry and Biology. Her research interests lie at the Chemistry-Biology interface, combining X-ray crystallography with cryo-electron microscopy and other biophysical methods to “visualize” molecular processes by obtaining snapshots of metalloproteins in action. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.  

Prof. Christian Hartinger obtained a Ph.D. in Chemistry in 2001 (supervisor: Prof. Bernhard K. Keppler) from the University of Vienna. He received a Schrödinger Fellowship in 2006 to work at the EPFL in Switzerland with Prof. Paul J. Dyson and returned to Vienna in 2009 to finish his habilitation. Prof. Hartinger was appointed as Associate Professor at the University of Auckland in 2011 where he was promoted to Professor in 2016. His research interests are wide ranging and include topics such as Biological Inorganic Chemistry, Medicinal Inorganic Chemistry, Supramolecular Chemistry, Synthetic Chemistry, Coordination and Organometallic Chemistry, and Bioanalytical Chemistry. His group is best known for their work on metal-based anticancer drugs and studies on their modes of action. Prof. Hartinger has published more than 260 peer-reviewed papers in journals such as Angew Chem, Chem Sci, Chem Rev, Coord Chem Rev, J Med Chem, Chem Comm, Inorg Chem, etc. on complexes of Ru, Au, Pt, Os, Rh, etc. His papers have been cited over 19,700 times, his Scopus h-index is 75, and he is a regular plenary and keynote speaker at conferences. Prof. Hartinger is the recipient of many national and international awards including the 2011 Carl-Duisberg-Memorial Prize (German Chemical Society), the 2016 Society of Biological Inorganic Chemistry Early Career Award, the 2016 New Zealand Institute of Chemistry Maurice Wilkins Centre Prize, the 2017 New Zealand Association of Scientists Beatrice Hill Tinsley Medal and the 2019 Morrison Medal of the Australian and New Zealand Society for Mass Spectrometry. In 2015 he was a Fellow of the New Zealand Centre at Beijing University, in 2017 a Hood Fellow (University of Cambridge, UK) and in 2021 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. He received the Royal Australian Chemical Institute Inorganic Division Burrows Award (2022), the ISBOMC Bioorganometallic Chemistry Award (2023), a Humboldt Research Award (2024), the Hector Medal of the Royal Society of New Zealand (2025), holds a New Zealand Mana Tūārangi Distinguished Researcher Fellowship (2025-2027) and is currently the Royal Society of Chemistry Australasian Lecturer.

Gilles Gasser started his independent scientific career at the University of Zurich (Switzerland) in 2010 before moving to Chimie ParisTech, PSL University in 2016 to take a PSL Chair of Excellence. Gilles was the recipient of several fellowships and awards including the Alfred Werner Award from the Swiss Chemical Society, an ERC Consolidator Grant and Proof of Concept, the European BioInorganic Chemistry (EuroBIC), the Pierre Fabre Award for therapeutic innovation from the French Société de Chimie Thérapeutique, the Coordination Chemistry Prize from the French Chemical Society (Senior Level) and recently the Seqens Prize from the French Academy of Sciences for outstanding work in medicinal chemistry. Gilles’ research interests lay in the use of metal complexes in different areas of medicinal and biological chemistry.