VAAM

International VAAM Symposium 2024
Biology of Bacterial Natural Product Producers
21.10.2024 in Würzburg
Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research (HIRI)

The VAAM Symposium will be held as a satellite meeting of the 5th European Conference on Natural Products

Registration for poster and talks will open in July 2024.

Admission is free!

Session topics:

  • microbial physiology and ecology
  • microbial genomics
  • microbial metabolomics
  • natural product discovery
  • natural product-based drug discovery
  • VAAM section business
  • prize and award session
    (awards for the best poster, best talk and the annual the Hendrik Wolff Prize)

Organizer:

Prof. Dr. Christine Beemelmann
Dr. Florian Hubrich
Helmholtz-Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS)

Program Chairs and Organizers of VAAM Workshop 2024

Prof. Christine Beemelmanns studied Chemistry at the RWTH Aachen, and after graduation went to Japan for a one-year research stay in the group of Prof. Sodeoka at RIKEN. Back in Germany she worked at the FU Berlin with Prof. Reißig and received her PhD in Organic Chemistry. She then worked another six month in Japan at the University of Tokyo under the supervision of Prof K. Suzuki and joined shortly afterwards the group of Prof. Clardy at Harvard Medical School (Boston) in 2011.

End of 2013, she received a call from the Hans-Knöll Institute (HKI) to work there as a Junior Research Group leader in the field of Natural Products Chemistry and Chemical Biology.

In 2020, she was elected as Margaret L. and Harlan L. Goering Visiting Professors in Organic Chemistry at UW Madison (spring term 2020).

In 2022 was appointed Professor for Biochemistry of Microbial Metabolism at the Leipzig University. In October 2022 she accepted a call for the Full Professorship on Medicinal-Pharmaceutical Microbiota Research at Saarland University together with the HIPS.

Her research combines different aspects of natural product chemistry, applied microbiology and organic and natural product chemistry and aims to chemically and to functionally characterize microbial signaling and defense molecules in different model systems. The analysis of ancient and evolved microbial interactions allows her to discover unprecedented chemical core structures with potential pharmaceutical potential.

Dr. Florian Hubrich studied chemistry and biology at the University of Freiburg. Following his Staatsexamen, he started a PhD in chemical biology supervised by Jennifer Andexer and Michael Müller at the Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences in Freiburg and graduated end of 2014.
Afterwards, Florian moved to Switzerland and worked for the Bachem AG, as project chemist for analytical method development and group leader for in-process control.


In 2019, he returned to academia and joined Jörn Piel’s lab as a postdoctoral researcher at the ETH Zurich. For his postdoctoral research, Florian studied the biosynthesis of ribosomally synthesized and post-translational modified peptides (RiPPs).

In 2024, Dr. Hubrich started his junior research group at the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS) and the Saarland University.

His research interest is the expansion of the natural product chemical space at the interface of primary and secondary metabolism. His group will focus on the bioengineering of antimicrobial lipopeptides to understand the effect of distinct lipid moieties on bioactivity and therapeutic properties.