Kiyoko F. Aoki-Kinoshita became involved in glycoinformatics after working in a bioinformatics software company between 2000-2004 as a senior software engineer, when she joined the Bioinformatics Center in Kyoto University first as a post-doctoral fellow and later as an assistant professor until 2006. She developed several machine learning methods for modeling glycan recognition patterns by glycan-binding proteins. She started her own laboratory at Soka University in 2006 where she has been developing RINGS (http://www.rings.t.soka.ac.jp), which is a freely-available Web resource of data mining tools for glycan analysis. Since 2014, she has been PI of a national project funded by the Japanese government involving scientists from a wide range of glycoscience fields including glycomics, glycoproteomics and bioinformatics. She has been developing the international glycan repository, GlyTouCan (http://www.glytoucan.org), for assigning unique accession numbers to all glycan structures and monosaccharide compositions (Aoki-Kinoshita, et al., NAR, 2016). At the same time, her group has been promoting collaboration with glycoinformaticians in the United States, Australia and Europe, to link the accession numbers of GlyTouCan with other major databases. Moreover, as of April, 2017, she has been PI of a project developing the GlyCosmos Portal (https://glycosmos.org) as an extension of GlyTouCan, which aims to integrate glycomics data with other omics fields (Yamada, et al., Nat. Methods, 2020). GlyCosmos is a member of the GlySpace Alliance, which aims to provide an international collaboration between GlyGen and Glycomics@ExPASy, to openly maintain and share glycan-related data under the FAIR guidelines.

Ramray Bhat is an associate professor in the department of Molecular Reproduction Development and Genetics, and an associate faculty with Biosystems Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore India. He is a member of the EMBO Global Investigator Network. He holds an undergraduate degree in Medicine from the University of Calcutta, a PhD in cell biology and anatomy from the New York Medical College and was a Komen postdoctoral fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His interests are in cancer, development, and evolution and his group’s research is funded by the Wellcome Trust-DBT India Alliance and the John Templeton Foundation, USA. 

Professor Simon Cool recently joined the University of Queensland, School of Chemical Engineering in 2022 as Professor of Bioengineering and Director of the Advanced Cell Therapy Manufacturing Initiative. Professor Cool began his scientific career at the University of Queensland more than 30 years ago where he received his BSc (hons) and PhD degrees and subsequently held a faculty position in the School of Biomedical Sciences. In 2003, Professor Cool was invited to join the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB), A*STAR, Singapore as a Principal Investigator. He then joined A*STAR's Institute of Medical Biology (IMB) in 2008 serving as Senior Principal Investigator and in October 2020 re-joined the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB) as a Research Director. Through these appointments he focused on developing novel glycosaminoglycan biomolecules that enhance wound repair and control adult human mesenchymal stem cell activity. Professor Cool has 117 patent applications with 52 granted in the fields of glycosaminoglycan biochemistry, regenerative medicine, and stem cell science and over 150 publications and continues to foster strong collaborations nationally and internationally with clinical, academic and industry groups. He has a strong biomanufacturing and translational focus with experience in taking glycosaminoglycan-based devices through discovery RnD on to pre-clinical and clinical testing. Professor Cool also has an entrepreneurial and licensing background having successfully spun-off some of his technology to a US-based regenerative medicine start-up company, SMC Biotechnology Ltd. Professor Cool holds a Visiting Professor appointment at the IMCB, A*STAR, Singapore and an Adjunct Professor (Research) appointment in the Orthopaedic Department at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Prior to his move back to UQ, he previously held the position of Treasurer, Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society, Asia Pacific Chapter (TERMIS-AP) and Treasurer, Stem Cell Society Singapore (SCSS). He also held senior leadership positions in several Singapore-based R&D programmes, notably as Director, Allogeneic Stem Cell Manufacturing (ASTEM) and Theme Leader in Advanced Manufacturing for Biological Materials (AMBM). Prof Cool currently serves on the Editorial Board of the journals Biomaterials, Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, and is Asia-Pacific Regional Editor for Stem Cells and Development

Mia Huang is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Molecular Medicine at Scripps Research. After completing her PhD working on peptidomimetics at New York University, she became a postdoc at UC San Diego, where she earned a K99 Pathway to Independence Award. She started her independent career at Scripps in 2018, where her lab seeks to merge the proteome and glycome using chemical biology tools to precisely define the functional roles of protein glycoconjugates in health and disease.

Prof Michael Jennings works in the fields of bacterial genetics, bacterial pathogenesis, vaccine development and glycobiology. His degrees are from Griffith University, Australia. His post-doctoral training was in the laboratory of Prof Richard Moxon at the University of Oxford, supported by a Beit Memorial Fellowship for Medical Research (1992-6). In 1997 he took up a faculty position at the University of Queensland. In 2009 he returned to Griffith University to take up the position of Deputy Director and Principal Research Leader at the Institute for Glycomics. He currently holds an NHMRC Principal Research Fellowship, is a fellow of the Australian Society for Microbiology, the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences and the American Academy of Microbiology. He has >250 publications cited >12,000 times and has made major contributions to understanding virulence factor function and regulation in a range of bacterial pathogens. His current work focuses on the role of glycointeractions in infectious disease and the detection of glycobiomarkers in cancer.

Todd L. Lowary received his B.A. in Chemistry from the University of Montana in 1988 and obtained his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry under the supervision of Professor Ole Hindsgaul at the University of Alberta in 1993. He carried out postdoctoral research with Professor David R. Bundle at the University of Alberta (1993-1995), and then with Dr. Morten P. Meldal at the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen, Denmark (1995-1996). In 1996, he took a position in The Department of Chemistry at The Ohio State University as an Assistant Professor and in 2002 was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure. He was the I Raymond U. Lemieux Professor of Carbohydrate Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry from 2015–2021 and held a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair from 2014–2019. He retired from the University of Alberta in July 2021. Since July 2019 he has been a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute of Biological Chemistry at Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan and he also serves as the Director of the Institute. Research interests are in carbohydrate chemistry and biochemistry, in particular as these fields relate to bacterial glycans. Areas of particular focus are glycans from mycobacteria, including Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the pathogen that causes tuberculosis, Campylobacter jejuni, a gut pathogen that causes enteritis, and chlorella viruses. He is Fellow of the American Chemical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Royal Society of Canada

Professor Malcolm McConville has had a long-term interest in the glycobiology and metabolism of protist and bacterial pathogens responsible for diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, toxoplasmosis and leishmaniasis. He obtained his PhD in Botany/Biochemistry at the University of Melbourne before undertaking post-doctoral research at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Melbourne and the University of Dundee, Scotland. He returned to Australia in 1995 as a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow, to established a research group in molecular parasitology in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Melbourne and has subsequently been supported by NHMRC Principal Research Fellowships. He is the National Convenor for the NCRIS-funded Metabolomics Australia network and academic lead for one of Australia’s largest metabolomics facilities, located in the Bio21 Institute of Molecular Science and Biotechnology. He has served as Director and is currently the Associate Director of Infrastructure and Platforms at the Bio21 Institute.  His research group utilize advanced mass spectrometry-based metabolomics profiling and sable isotope labelling approaches, large scale gene knock-out studies and a variety of other biochemical and systems level approaches to map and study novel metabolic pathways in these medically important prokaryotic and eukaryotic pathogens with the view of identifying new drug leads and therapeutic strategies for treating these diseases.

Jenny Mortimer is Associate Professor of Plant Synthetic Biology at the University of Adelaide, Australia, in the School of Agriculture, Food and Wine, an Affiliate Staff Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA, and a Director of Plant Systems Biology at the Joint BioEnergy Institute, USA. After completing her PhD at Cambridge University, UK, she began studying the plant cell wall as a postdoc with Prof. Paul Dupree and the BBSRC-funded Bioenergy Centre (BSBEC), also at Cambridge. This was followed by a fellowship at RIKEN, Japan, before joining Berkeley Lab in 2014, and then Adelaide in 2021. Her team’s research focuses on understanding and manipulating plant cell metabolism, with a focus on complex glycosylation. The goal is to develop crops which contribute to a sustainable and renewable bioeconomy. At Adelaide, her group is using synthetic biology to develop new crops for food and materials production in controlled growth environments – including for Space settlement. Other projects include engineering glycans to deliver plants with increased (a)biotic stress tolerance. In the US, her group works to reengineer the plant cell wall for the sustainable production of fuels and biochemicals from biomass and investigating the role of plant cell walls in recruiting and retaining the rhizosphere microbiome. She was selected as a World Economic Forum Young Scientist (2016/17), where she contributed to the WEF Code of Ethics for Researchers (widgets.weforum.org/coe), and she is a Handling editor for Plant Cell Physiology. Twitter @Jenny_Mortimer1, and more about her research here: mortimerlab.org .

Richard J. Payne was born and raised in Christchurch, New Zealand. He carried out his BSc honours degree at the University of Canterbury where he graduated with 1^st class honours. In 2003, he was awarded a Gates Scholarship to undertake his PhD at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of the late Professor Chris Abell FRS. After his PhD, Richard moved to The Scripps Research Institute under the auspices of a Lindemann Postdoctoral Fellowship where he worked in the area of carbohydrate chemistry and glycobiology in the laboratory of Professor Chi-Huey Wong. In 2008, he was recruited to the University of Sydney as a Lecturer of Organic within the School of Chemistry. Since 2015 has held the position as Professor of Organic Chemistry and Chemical Biology and since 2020 has been an NHMRC Investigator (Leadership) and Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Innovations in Peptide and Protein Science. Prof. Payne’s research focuses on development of new methods to access complex biomolecules with a view to addressing important problems in biology and medicine. His lab is recognized for pioneering a number of technologies for the generation of peptides and proteins with defined and site-specific post-translational modifications (PTMs), in particular glycosylation, sulfation and lipidation. The ability to access these biomolecules has enabled his lab to reveal how PTMs modulate protein structure and function.

Vered Padler-Karavani’s research is at the interface of glycobiology, immunology, biotechnology and cancer research and focuses on studying the mechanisms that govern glycan immune recognition and responses in animal models and in humans, both in vitro and in vivo. She is particularly interested in the immunological basis of anti-carbohydrate antibodies and their implications on human diseases and theranostics. Vered received her PhD in biochemistry from Tel Aviv University. She then did her postdoctoral training with Prof. Ajit Varki at UCSD and subsequently moved back to Tel Aviv University where she joined the Department of Cell Research and Immunology in the Faculty of Life Sciences.

Dr Dianne E. van der Wal is a senior research fellow at Australian Red Cross Lifeblood R&D in Sydney, Australia. She studies all factors influencing the quality of platelet components for transfusion. She also has interests in platelet glycans, microparticles and platelet clearance mechanisms. She is the social media/associate editor for the Journal of Thrombosis and Haemostasis and co-chair of the Platelet Physiology SSC of the International Society for Thrombosis and Hemostasis (ISTH). She is also a member of the Australian & New Zealand Society for Blood Transfusion (ANZSBT) Education Standing Committee. She received multiple (inter)national grants and awards. She enjoys mentoring of students and is active in science communication on Twitter. During her first postdoc based in Toronto, Canada, she previously showed that desialylation is important for platelet clearance in bleeding disorder ITP, potentially leading to novel diagnosis or treatment approaches. During her PhD, at the University Medical Centre Utrecht in the Netherlands, she demonstrated novel platelet apoptosis pathways following cold-storage.

Associate Professor Joy Wolfram leads a nanomedicine and extracellular vesicle research program with the goal of developing innovative approaches that bring the next generation of treatments and diagnostics directly to the clinic. She has joint appointments in the School of Chemical Engineering and the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology at The University of Queensland in Australia. 

She has received more than 30 awards from eight countries, including the 2016 Amgen Scholars Ten to Watch List (best and brightest up-and-comers in science and medicine across 42 countries), the 2019 Forbes 30 under 30 list in Health Care in the United States/Canada, the 2019 shortlist for the Nature Research Award for Inspiring Science (one of ten worldwide), and the 2021 Finnish Expatriate of the Year. She has authored more than 60 publications (h-index: 39, citation: 8,000+) in journals, such as, Nature Reviews Materials, Nature Nanotechnology, and Materials Today. She has given more than 100 presentations at scientific meetings, including 70 invited talks and seven international keynote talks. She is in the top 1% of researchers worldwide in the category 'Biology & Biochemistry' (Web of Science). Her research program has led to collaborations with 160 universities and industry partners across 45 countries. She is actively involved in community outreach and education, including previous roles as the chair of an education and outreach working group of the National Institutes of Health in the United States and associate program director of the Ph.D. Program in Regenerative Sciences at Mayo Clinic. As a TED speaker, she strives to bring science to a wider audience.

Natasha Zachara is an Associate Professor of Biological Chemistry and Oncology and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She completed her undergraduate and graduate degrees at Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia), where her dissertation focused on developing new technologies to map and quantify site-specific changes in protein glycosylation. During her post-doctoral training with Dr. Gerald Hart, She discovered that cells and tissues use the O-GlcNAc modification to sense and respond to environmental and physiological injury.  Since joining the Department of Biological Chemistry (2007), Dr. Zachara has championed efforts to enhance glycoscience education and currently serves as the director of the K12 program “Immersive Training in the Glycosciences”. Her laboratory focuses on identifying the molecular mechanisms by which the sugar O-GlcNAc prevents cytotoxicity, determining how cells regulate O-GlcNAc during times of stress, and how the O-GlcNAc-mediated stress response can be harnessed in pathophysiological models.