Richard A. Yost - Professor and Head, Analytical Chemistry
Co-Director, Southeast Center for Integrated Metabolomics
Affiliate Professor, UF Pathology, Immunology, and Laboratory Medicine
Affiliate Professor, UF School of Natural Resources and Environment
Adjunct Professor, University of Utah Pathology and ARUP
Past Member, Florida Board of Governors
Department of Chemistry, University of Florida
Prof. Yost received his Ph.D. in 1979 and assumed the position of Assistant Professor at the University of Florida. He has risen through the ranks at UF to Professor and Head of the Analytical Chemistry Division. His research has involved 100 graduate students funded by over $20 million in research grants, and has led to the publication of over 160 papers and 16 patents. Over $30 billion worth of instruments have been sold based on these patents. Also contributing to these research efforts have been a number of collaborators at UF and around the world, visiting scientists, plus undergraduate and high school researchers. Current research interests center on instrumental developments, fundamental studies, and analytical applications of tandem mass spectrometry and ion mobility, including imaging mass spectrometry and FAIMS. Prof. Yost recently completed a two-year term as member of the Florida Board of Governors (Regents) and Chair of the Advisory Council of Faculty Senates of Florida. He is past Chair of the UF Faculty Senate and has served on the UF Board of Trustees. He has served as the Treasurer and Secretary of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry, and has served on the editorial boards of The Journal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry and The International Journal of Mass Spectrometry. Prof. Yost’s research was recognized with the 1993 ASMS Award for Distinguished Contribution in Mass Spectrometry.
Matthew Vander Heiden MD, PhD
Eisen and Chang Career Development Professor
Associate Professor of Biology
Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Dr. Vander Heiden is the Eisen and Chang Career Development professor and associate professor of biology at MIT and an instructor in medicine at both Harvard Medical School and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He has been a Member of the Scientific Advisory Board at Agios Pharmaceuticals, Inc. since 2008. He received the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award for Medical Scientists in 2009. Dr. Vander Heiden earned his B.S. in Biological Chemistry, M.D. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Learn more about the Vander Heiden lab and their efforts to better understand cancer cell metabolism and how small molecules might be used to activate enzymes and restore the normal state of cells - http://youtu.be/nOteIR2veoI.
Alexander (Sasha) V. Kabanov, Ph.D., Dr.Sc.
Director, Center for Nanotechnology in Drug Delivery
Mescal S. Ferguson Distinguished Professor at UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy
Co-Director, Carolina Institute for Nanomedicine
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Alexander “Sasha” Kabanov, PhD, DrSci, is the Mescal Swaim Ferguson Distinguished Professor and director of the Center for Nanotechnology in Drug Delivery at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy and codirector of the Carolina Institute for Nanomedicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to joining UNC-Chapel Hill in July 2012, Kabanov served for nearly eighteen years at the University of Nebraska Medical Center where he was the Parke-Davis Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences and director of the Center for Drug Delivery and Nanomedicine, which he founded in 2004. Kabanov received his PhD in chemical kinetics and catalysis in 1987 at Moscow State University, USSR.
Kabanov has conducted pioneering research on polymeric micelles, DNA/polycation complexes, block ionomer complexes and nanogels for delivery of small drugs, and nucleic acids and proteins that have influenced considerably current ideas and approaches in drug delivery and nanomedicine. His work led to the first-in-man polymeric micelle drug (SP1049C) to treat cancer, which successfully completed Phase II clinical trial and is under further evaluation. He cofounded Supratek Pharma, Inc. (Montreal, Canada), which develops therapeutics for cancer, and Neuro10-9, Inc. (Omaha, Nebraska, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina), which focuses on diseases of the central nervous system.
Kabanov has published more than 240 scientific papers and has more than 100 patents worldwide. His work has been cited over 16,700 times (Hirsch index 71). His cumulative research support in academia has been more than $50 million. His inventions have attracted nearly $60 million in private, foundation, and company-sponsored R&D funding in industry. He founded the ongoing Nanomedicine and Drug Delivery Symposium series in 2003 and cochaired the Gordon Research Conference on Drug Carriers in Medicine and Biology in 2006.
Kabanov received the Lenin Komsomol Prize in 1988, an NSF Career Award in 1995, the University of Nebraska ORCA Award in 2007, and the University of Nebraska Medical Center Scientist Laureate in 2009, among other distinctions. He is also the recipient of a Russian Megagrant (2010). In 2013, he was elected as a member of Academia Europaea.
Kabanov was director of the Nebraska Center for Nanomedicine, an NIH Center of Biomedical Research Excellence, from 2008 to 2012 and is a director of the Moscow State University Laboratory of Chemical Design of Bionanomaterials, which he founded at in 2010 with Megagrant support.