Alexander Klibanov received his MS in chemistry in 1971 and PhD in chemical enzymology in 1974 from Moscow University in Russia. Following his emigration to the United States in 1977, he spent two years as a postdoctoral associate at the chemistry department of the University of California, San Diego. In 1979, Klibanov joined the faculty at MIT, where he is a Novartis Endowed Chair Professor of Chemistry and Bioengineering.

His current research interests include medicinal chemistry, enzymes biotechnology; drug delivery, stabilization, and formulations; new antiviral preparations; and new microbicidal materials. Klibanov has authored more than 270 scientific papers and 16 issued U.S. patents, has given 360-plus presentations, including many named lectures all over the world, and is a member of eight journal editorial boards. He has received numerous prestigious professional awards, including the Leo Friend Award, the Ipatieff Prize, the Marvin J. Johnson Award, and the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award, all from the American Chemical Society, as well as the International Enzyme Engineering Prize. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and to the National Academy of Engineering of the United States.

In addition, Klibanov has started five biotechnology companies and has been a scientific advisor/consultant for numerous biotechnology, pharmaceutical and chemical companies, as well as for law firms in various intellectual property litigations.

Stephen J. Lippard is the Arthur Amos Noyes Professor of Chemistry at MIT, where he was head of the Department of Chemistry from 1995 to 2005. He was born in Pittsburgh and educated at Haverford College (BA in chemistry) and MIT (PhD in inorganic chemistry). After a postdoctoral year at MIT during 1965 to 1966, he joined the faculty of Columbia University, where he served until moving to MIT in 1983.

Lippard’s research activities span the fields of inorganic chemistry, biological chemistry, and neurochemistry. Included are studies to understand and improve platinum anticancer drugs, the synthesis of dimetallic complexes as models for non-heme iron metalloenzymes, structural and mechanistic investigations of methane monooxygenase and related bacterial non-heme diiron multicomponent monooxygenases, and inorganic neurotransmitters, especially nitric oxide and zinc.

He has published more than 750 papers on these and other topics and has co-authored a popular textbook with Jeremy Berg titled Principles of Bioinorganic Chemistry. He has supervised the PhD thesis research of 100-plus graduate students and more than that number of postdoctoral associates. His honors include election to the National Academy of Sciences, the National Institute of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He holds honorary DSc degrees from Haverford College, Texas A&M University and the University of South Carolina, has been elected to honorary memberships in the Italian Chemical Society, the Royal Irish Academy and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and has won numerous awards and medals from the American Chemical Society. He was awarded the 2004 National Medal of Science by President George W. Bush.

Movassaghi carried out his undergraduate research with Paul A. Bartlett at UC Berkeley, where he received his BS in chemistry with honors in 1995. He then carried out his graduate studies with Andrew G. Myers and completed his PhD at Harvard University in 2001 as a Roche Predoctoral Fellow. In 2003, after a Damon-Runyon Cancer Research Foundation postdoctoral fellowship with Eric N. Jacobsen at Harvard, he joined the faculty at MIT, where his research group focuses on the total synthesis of complex alkaloids in concert with the discovery and development of new reactions for organic synthesis. 

The Movassaghi research group’s studies have been recognized by the Dale F. and Betty A. Frey Scholar Award of the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation, an Amgen New Faculty Award, a National Science Foundation–CAREER Award, a Beckman Young Investigator Award, Merck Academic Development Program Awards, a GlaxoSmithKline Chemistry Scholar Award, a US National Committee/IUPAC Young Observer Fellowship Award, an Amgen Young Investigator Award, an AstraZeneca Excellence in Chemistry Award, a Lilly Grantee Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, a Novartis Chemistry Lectureship Award, an American Chemical Society Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award, a Roche Excellence in Organic Chemistry Award, a Bristol-Myers Squibb Unrestricted Grant in Synthetic Organic Chemistry Award, a Lectureship Award of the Society of Synthetic Organic Chemistry of Japan, and most recently the American Chemical Society Elias J. Corey Award for Outstanding Original Contribution in Organic Synthesis by a Young Investigator.

Andrei Tokmakoff has been on the MIT faculty since 1998, and is currently professor of chemistry. He joined MIT following a PhD from Stanford University in 1995 and postdoctoral positions at the Technical University Munich, the University of Chicago and UC Berkeley.

His research group is internationally recognized for studies of molecular dynamics in chemistry and biophysics using ultrafast multidimensional spectroscopy. His expertise includes of water hydrogen-bonding structure, protein conformational dynamics, chemical reaction dynamics, and 2-D IR spectroscopy.