Félix Torres
Félix is a pharmacist by training and an NMR spectroscopist by passion. After completing his pharmacy doctorate at the University of Paris Cité, he pursued his academic training at ETH Zurich to obtain his PhD in NMR drug discovery at the Riek Lab.
Félix participated in developing NMR2 and in the invention of a hyperpolarized NMR toolbox for fragment-based drug design.
He is currently the co-founder and CEO of NexMR AG, an ETH Zürich
spin-off that develops solutions for fragment-based drug design by NMR.
Kate Smith
Kate Smith, PhD, is a member of the Macromolecular Crystallography Data group at the Swiss Light Source (SLS). She is responsible for the data acquisition and processing software that serves all three MX beamlines, the Fast Fragment and Compound Screening (FFCS) software suite at the Crystallisation Facility, and the development of the HEIDI sample management portal.
Kate earned her Biochemistry and Mathematics degree at Charles Sturt University, Australia, where she later completed her structural biology and protein biochemistry PhD research on nuclear transport and host-viral protein interactions in 2019. Prior to her current role, she worked at the Australian Synchrotron as a beamline scientist for a year, developing beamline automation protocols for chemical crystallography experiments. She then joined the SLS as a postdoctoral fellow, focusing on beamline automation and unattended data collection.
Since 2021, Kate has been a permanent staff member at the SLS, heavily involved in automation and software development for fragment screening at the MX beamlines.
Ben Davis
Dr Ben Davis is a Research Fellow and Director of Business Development at Vernalis Research, a biotech company based in Cambridge UK which has been at the forefront of fragment-based approaches since 1998. His research focus is in developing and applying NMR and other biophysical techniques to enable drug discovery against challenging therapeutic targets and systems. Since 2022, he has also been responsible for developing Vernalis’s business through a mixture of short-term and long-term collaborations.
Following a PhD in protein folding and ligand binding with Professor Alan Fersht at Cambridge University, Dr Davis developed and applied biophysical techniques to study small molecule interactions with proteins and RNA in academic and industrial settings. He has over 25 years of experience in the drug discovery industry. He has contributed to six books over the last decade and is an author on more than thirty scientific publications. He is a frequent speaker at scientific conferences and has been running FBLD and NMR training workshops since 2007.
Christina Spry
Christina Spry completed a Bachelor of Science with Honours at the Australian National University (ANU), studying both chemistry and biology. She continued at the ANU for her graduate studies, and in 2009 was awarded a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology for her work with Prof Kevin Saliba, investigating and targeting the metabolism of vitamin B5 by the human malaria parasite.
After her PhD, Christina briefly worked as a postdoc with Profs Saliba and Kiaran Kirk, before being awarded an NHMRC Early Career Fellowship. Enjoying work at the interface of chemistry and biology, but keen to try her hand at fragment-based drug discovery, she used her Fellowship to switch organisms and move to the University of Cambridge, UK, to work on Mycobacterium tuberculosis with Prof Chris Abell. During this time, she contributed to an international consortium focused on identifying ‘High-quality hits against TB’ (Hit-TB). After four years in the Abell group (2011 – 2015), she returned to the Saliba lab, ANU, to complete the return-leg of her NHMRC Fellowship, where she continued until 2022, when she was appointed lecturer and group leader (also at ANU).
Her group – the Infectious Diseases Drug Discovery group, based in the Research School of Biology – focuses on validating new drug targets and identifying new drug leads to combat key pathogenic microbes responsible for human disease. The primary diseases in their sights are malaria and tuberculosis.
Yun Shi
Dr Yun Shi obtained his PhD in Chemistry from Simon Fraser University (Canada) in 2015, after which he relocated to Griffith University (Australia) for his postdoctoral work in biochemistry and early drug discovery. Yun routinely integrates computational, biophysical, and biochemical methods to investigate the interactions between proteins and their ligands at the molecular level, providing valuable information for multiple drug discovery programs targeting infectious and neurodegenerative diseases. His work has led to high-impact publications in academic journals such as Science, Molecular Cell, Neuron, and Science Advances.
In 2016, Dr Shi was awarded a Griffith University Postdoctoral Fellowship to establish a fragment-based drug discovery platform using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy as the primary technique. This platform has generated and optimized numerous hits for a variety of drug discovery programs. After a period of parental leave in 2020, Yun returned to research with a focus on understanding the molecular mechanisms behind the function and inhibition of enzymes involved in nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) metabolism. These include Toll/interleukin-1 receptor (TIR) domains, many of which are enzymes involved in innate immunity and neurodegenerative diseases, as well as other glycohydrolases. In 2024, Dr Shi was awarded a National Health and Medical Research Council (Australia) Investigator Grant to continue his work on understanding the molecular basis of an NAD+ synthase and developing small-molecule modulators for neuroprotection.
Roxanne Smith
Roxanne undertook a PhD in Biochemistry at La Trobe University, under Professor Begoña Heras, co-supervised by Professor Megan Maher, and externally supervised by Professor Martin Scanlon at the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences.
Her PhD project aimed to develop narrow spectrum antibiotics targeting Neisserial pathogens using Structural Biology and Fragment-Based Drug Design. Roxanne relocated to Frankfurt, Germany to work as a Post Doc in the world-renowned company: Bayer, in their Crop Science Division. Roxanne remained in Europe for her next position in England, where she took a Post-Doctoral Training fellow in Cancer Therapeutics and Structural Biology, at the Institute of Cancer Research, London.
Roxanne returned to Melbourne at the end 2022, to take on the role of Protein Crystallisation Specialist in the Bio21-WEHI Crystallisation Facility, at the Bio21 Institute, the University of Melbourne.
Mehdi Mobli
Prof Mehdi Mobli (BSc ChemEng, Chalmers, 2000, Sweden) received his PhD in physical organic chemistry from the University of Liverpool (UK) in 2004 through a collaborative project with GSK, focusing on the development of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) methods for automated characterisation of drug-like molecules. He undertook postdoctoral studies at the University of Connecticut Medical School (USA), the University of Manchester (UK), and the University of Queensland, where he notably contributed to the development of fast acquisition methods in multidimensional NMR spectroscopy and structural characterisation of venom peptides.
He established his research group in 2012 through an ARC Future Fellowship at UQ’s Centre for Advanced Imaging (CAI), and now continues his work as a Senior Group Leader at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN). The impact of his research has been recognised through several awards, including the Sir Paul Callaghan Medal (ANZMAG), the Tregear Award (Australian Peptide Society), and the MERCK Research Medal (ASBMB).
Mehdi serves as a founding Executive Editor of Magnetic Resonance (Copernicus), an advisory board member of the Biological Magnetic Resonance Data Bank (BMRB), and a member of the Board of Directors of the Australia and New Zealand Society for Magnetic Resonance (ANZMAG).