Scientific Organisers
Alex Bullock
Alex is currently Professor of Structural and Chemical Biology at the Centre for Medicines Discovery, University of Oxford. His work focusses on the structural and functional characterization of human proteins mediating phosphorylation and ubiquitylation, particularly the BMP/TGF-beta receptor kinases, as well as the identification of small molecule starting points for drug discovery. He identified saracatinib as a potent ALK2 kinase inhibitor for the treatment of fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP) and has taken this molecule into phase 2 clinical trials.
Caroline Hill
Caroline Hill got her Ph.D from the University of Cambridge, UK, and then did her postdoc with Richard Treisman at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, London, UK. In 1995 she set up her own research lab at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, London, UK to study signalling by TGF-b family ligands. She moved to the Cancer Research UK London Research Institute in 1998, to head the Developmental Signalling Laboratory. She moved to the Francis Crick Institute in 2015, where she is now a Deputy Research Director. Her work is focused on determining the mechanisms by which TGF-b family ligands signal to the nucleus, their function in normal physiological conditions, in particular in early vertebrate development, and understanding how their deregulated signalling leads to human disease. She was elected a member of EMBO in 2002 and elected a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2019.
Wei Li
Wei Li is a British Heart Foundation Senior Basic Science Research Fellow and a Research Professor at the VPD Heart and Lung Research Institute, Department of Medicine, University of Cambridge. She received her PhD from the University of East Anglia, UK, before completing postdoctoral training with Prof. Jim Huntington at the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, where she investigated thrombin inhibition by SERPINs using structural biology. In 2010, she became a BHF lecturer and began working in the TGF-b/BMP field. She later co-founded Morphogen-IX, a Cambridge University spin-out company. Her research focuses on understanding how the BMP9 /BMP10/ALK1/endoglin/BMPR2 signalling axis is tightly regulated, why pathogenic mutations in these molecules lead to pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) and hereditary haemorrhagic telangiectasia (HHT), and how this mechanistic insight can be leveraged to develop novel therapeutics.
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