Empowering Global Chemical Biology at the Dawn of the New Decade

Abstract

On January 22−24, 2020, scientific luminaries across the far-flung corners of chemical biology gathered in Geneva, Switzerland, to deliver their latest and greatest discoveries in the field. Generously supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), our academic partners, and industrial and journal sponsors, this chemical biology symposium in our opinion will remain memorable for several years to come, not only because of the diversity in scientific topics delivered by our invited eminent speakers as detailed herein, but it is also one-of-a-kind conference which reflected multidimensional balancebalance in age and gender, across these speakers. Such a remarkable speaker line-up doubtless attracted >200 attendees from academia and industry in and around Switzerland and beyond, representing a huge swathe of subfields of science interfacing chemistry and biology. Poster presentations from students and postdocs further spotlighted the exciting diversity in the field: spanning biosynthesis, optochemical genetics, genetic code expansion, lipid chemical biology, redox perturbation, microfluidics screening, membrane signaling, immune modulation, DNA circuits, and synthetic and computational biology. This notable heterogeneity in scientific topics also went hand-in-hand with the diverse representations of student/postdoc trainees from 56 institutions covering 14 countries worldwide, allowing us to witness science as a truly global enterprise.