Meet our 2024 Plenary Lecture Winners

Professor Ijeoma Florence Uchegbu

Professor of Pharmaceutical Nanoscience, University College London

Ijeoma Uchegbu FMedSci is UCL’s Professor of Pharmaceutical Nanoscience, a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, a governor on the Wellcome board (one of the largest biomedical sciences research charities in the world), a member of the Academy of Medical Sciences Council and Chief Scientific Officer of Nanomerics Ltd.   In 2024, Uchegbu will take up the position of President of Wolfson College, University of Cambridge having been elected to the position in November 2023.  Uchegbu has served as Chair of the Academy of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Scientific Secretary of the Controlled Release Society and she is the immediate past UCL Provost’s Envoy for Race Equality, a role in which she led on race equality work at UCL.  Her work led to the removal of the names of prominent eugenicists from all of UCL’s buildings in 2020. Uchegbu has also presented to the UK House of Commons on the educational racial disparities that lead to a lack of ethnic minority representation in scientific research.     

Uchegbu is an inventor and she has out licensed medicines developed in her laboratory to Virpax Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:VRPX).  Her company, Nanomerics Ltd. is also developing medicines that address sight threatening illnesses.   Technologies developed in Uchegbu’s laboratory have won prizes from the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Royal Pharmaceutical Society.

Uchegbu’s popular science book– Chain Reaction – will be published by Hodder and Stoughton.

Uchegbu is listed in Bloomsbury Publishing’s Who’s Who 2024.

Professor Seung Yon Rhee

Michigan State University

Seung Yon (Sue) Rhee is a Michigan State University Foundation Professor in the departments of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Plant Biology, and Plant, Soil, and Microbes and Director of MSU’s Plant Resilience Institute. Dr. Rhee’s group strives to understand how plants adapt and acclimate to changes in temperature, water availability, or nutrient limitation. They are also interested in decoding biological traits from molecular to organism scales. In addition, they are developing translational research programs involving engineering resilience and metabolic traits in bioenergy and cover crops. Dr. Rhee has extensive leadership, mentoring, and research experience and has trained over 160 scientists, many of whom have achieved leadership positions in academia, government, and industry. 
 
Dr. Rhee received her B.A. in biology from Swarthmore College in 1992 and a Ph.D. in biology from Stanford University in 1998. In 1999, she joined Carnegie Institution for Science as Staff Associate and became the Founding Director of the Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR, Arabidopsis.org). She rose through the ranks at Carnegie to Staff Scientist, Acting Director, and Senior Staff Scientist between 1999 to 2023, before joining MSU in 2023. Her group was instrumental in establishing the Gene Ontology system (http://geneontology.org/). She also initiated two grassroots, international scientific communities, one on Biocuration (https://www.biocuration.org/) to systematically annotate biological entities and second on Plant Cell Atlas (https://www.plantcellatlas.org/) to understand and engineer plant cells using single cell approaches. Most recently, she established a virtual institute called Water and Life Interface Institute (WALII, https://www.walii.science/) to understand how organisms survive with very little water. She has extensive leadership and community service experience with having served on over 25 scientific advisory boards, steering committees, and review boards.
 
Dr. Rhee is interested in training future leaders who come from historically excluded groups and who are interested in working on neglected research and societal problems. She emphasizes training scientists to explore the unknown and become independent in the pursuit of knowledge. While providing individualized training and mentoring program suited for each member, she strives to transition each trainee on creating and fostering agency to own their work and projects. Dr. Rhee is committed to creating a rigorous, collaborative, and innovative training environment. Expectations of lab members, which are elaborated on their lab website (https://www.rheelab.org/policies--expectations.html), are clearly communicated and discussed during recruitment, onboarding, and regularly throughout the tenure of each member. Dr. Rhee emphasizes responsible conduct of research, leadership, and communications in her training. Leadership based on service to fellow lab members, mentees, and the larger community in the department is highly valued, encouraged, recognized, and acknowledged. Every member of the Rhee lab plays active roles in improving the professional development and work environment for everyone in the lab and department. She meets with each lab member regularly (weekly or biweekly) and discuss not only their research design, implementation, data analysis, visualization, interpretation, and presentation, but also scholarly leadership, communication skills, teaching and mentoring skills, career planning, outreach and community leadership, and wellness and self-improvement. Her group performs individual development plans every six months and constantly evaluate how the training program is going via surveys, one-one meetings, and group discussions.

Prof. Tobias Wang

Aarhus University

Professor Tobias Wang (Aarhus University, Denmark) is genuinely interested in the mechanisms that dictate how animals (including humans) function, with particular focus on the physiological adaptations that enable animals to thrive under extreme conditions. This fascination has spurred studies on acid-base balance and cardiovascular function in anoxic turtles, the desire to understand how giraffes tolerate the enormous blood pressure required to secure cerebral perfusion, how air-breathing fishes avoid the problems of oxygen-deprived tropical waters, the quest to understand the functional implications of the undivided cardiac ventricle in amphibians and reptiles, and integrative studies on the metabolic, gastrointestinal and cardiorespiratory responses in digesting snakes.