SBE’s Third International Conference on Biomolecular Engineering

Keynote Speakers

Invited Speakers

Keynote Speakers' Biographies

Roger Tsien, M.D. 

Dr. Roger Tsien is a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego.  He was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP).

Dr. Tsien received his A.B. in chemistry and physics from Harvard in 1972. He received his Ph.D. in physiology in 1977 from the University of Cambridge and remained as a Research Fellow until 1981. He then became a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1989 he moved to the University of California, San Diego, where he is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Professor in the Depts. of Pharmacology and of Chemistry & Biochemistry. He was a scientific co-founder of Aurora Biosciences Corporation and Senomyx Inc. 

His honors include First Prize in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search (1968), Searle Scholar Award (1983), Artois-Baillet-Latour Health Prize (1995), Gairdner Foundation International Award (1995), Award for Creative Invention from the American Chemical Society (2002), Heineken Prize in Biochemistry and Biophysics (2002), Wolf Prize in Medicine, Rosenstiel Award (2006),  E.B. Wilson Medal of the American Society for Cell Biology, and Nobel Prize in Chemistry.  He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society.

Dr. Tsien is best known for designing and building molecules that either report or perturb signal transduction inside living cells. These molecules, created by organic synthesis or by engineering naturally fluorescent proteins, have enabled many new insights into signaling via calcium, sodium, pH, cyclic nucleotides, nitric oxide, inositol polyphosphates, membrane and redox potential changes, protein phosphorylation, active export of proteins from the nucleus, and gene transcription. He is now developing new ways to target contrast agents and therapeutic agents to tumor cells based on their expression of extracellular proteases.

Leroy Hood, M.D., Ph.D.

Dr. Leroy Hood is the President and Co-founder of the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) and has played a role in the formation of more than fourteen biotechnology companies including Amgen, Applied Biosystems, and Systemix.  His most famous invention is the automated DNA sequencer which revolutionized genomics by permitting the human genome to be sequenced and provided the foundation for modern molecular biology and genomics.  Dr. Hood received his M.D. from Johns Hopkins University and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).  Since then he has served as a Senior Scientist at the National Cancer Institute and the National Instute of Health, a professor of biology at Caltech, chairman of biology at Caltech, and chairman of molecular biotechnology at the Unviersity of Washington. 

Since founding the ISB, Dr. Hood has contributed seminal papers to delineating the systems approach to biology and disease and to pioneer developing new technologies (microfluidics/nanotechnology and molecular imaging).  Dr. Hood is now pioneering the idea that the systems approach to disease, the emerging technologies, and powerful new computational and mathematical tools will move medicine from its current reactive mode to a predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory mode (P4 medicine) over the next 5-20 years.

Dr. Hood was awarded the Lasker Prize in 1987 for his studies on the mechanism of immune diversity. Dr. Hood was also awarded the 2002 Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology for the development of the five different instruments.  He received the 2003 Lemelson–MIT Prize for Innovation and Invention for the development of the DNA sequencer. Dr. Hood's lifelong contributions to biotechnology have also earned him the prestigious 2004 Biotechnology Heritage Award, as well as the 2003 Association for Molecular Pathology (AMP) Award for Excellence in Molecular Diagnostics for his pioneering efforts in molecular diagnostics.  In 2006 he received the Heinz Award in Technology, the Economy and Employment, for his extraordinary breakthroughs in biomedical science at the genetic level. In 2007 he was elected to the Inventors Hall of Fame (for the automated DNA sequencer) and in 2008 he received the Pittcon Heritage Award for helping to transform the biotech industry.  Dr. Hood has received 17 honorary degrees, has published more than 680 peer-reviewed papers, has received 26 patents, and has co-authored textbooks in biochemistry, immunology, molecular biology, genetics, and systems biology. In addition, he coauthored with Dan Keveles a popular book on the human genome project—The Code of Codes.  Dr. Hood is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Association of Arts and Sciences, the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Engineering.

Frances Arnold, Ph.D.

Frances H. Arnold is a professor of chemical engineering and biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology, where her research focuses on evolutionary design of biological systems. She is a co-founder of Gevo, Inc. and serves on the Science Advisory Boards of advanced biofuels companies Amyris Biotechnologies, Mascoma, and Codexis, as well as at the Joint BioEnergy Institute at the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. 

Frances Arnold was recently profiled in Technology Review for her work on enzymatic cellulose degradation, one of ten emerging technologies for 2008. She has more than 20 licensed patents and patent applications, has co-authored 220 scientific publications and edited several books on protein engineering and laboratory protein evolution. She was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2000, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies in 2004, and the National Academy of Sciences in 2008.

Her other recent awards and honors include the Linnaeus Lectureship at Uppsala University (2008), the Genencor Award in Enzyme Engineering (2007), the FASEB Excellence in Science Award (2007), the Olin-Garvin Medal of the American Chemical Society (2005), the Food, Pharmaceuticals and Bioengineering Division Award of the AIChE (2005), the David Perlman Memorial Lectureship of the ACS Biochemical Technology Division (2003), the Carothers Award from the Delaware ACS (2003), and the Professional Progress Award of the AIChE (2000).

Vishva Dixit, M.D.

Vishva Dixit is vice president of Early Discovery Research at Genentech. In this role, he leads the Department of Physiological Chemistry's efforts to study the biochemistry of components of signaling pathways that often go awry in disease.

Dr. Dixit received his medical degree from the University of Nairobi in Nairobi, Kenya and served as a resident at the Department of Laboratory Medicine at Washington University School of Medicine and as a postdoctoral fellow in the University's Department of Biological Chemistry.  He has previously served as a professor in pathology at the University of Michigan, director of molecular oncology, and vice president of research in molecular oncology for Genentech. 

At Michigan, his laboratory published a series of groundbreaking papers that defined the molecular components of the cell death receptor pathway. His discovery of the domain-containing adapter protein (FADD) is highlighted in all introductory texts in biology and immunology, and Dr. Dixit’s role in its discovery was featured recently in articles in Nature and Nature Cell Biology.  Other important developments of Dixit's include the identification of components of the inflammasome pathway and the development of the concept of ubiquitin editing in signaling pathways.

Dixit was awarded the Warner-Lambert/Parke David Award in Experimental Pathology in 1996, has published more than 100 scientific articles and holds a significant number of patents. Dixit continues to teach as an adjunct professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco.