Mr. Shyam Kumar Mishra completed his MS in Medical Laboratory Sciences Microbiology from the Institute of Medicine, Nepal, in 2009. For the next ten years, he held a lecturing position at the Institute, and during this time, he had the opportunity to work as a foreign guest researcher in the stem cell biology laboratory of Ehime University in Japan. In 2019, Shyam received the UNSW Scientia PhD scholarship and started his interdisciplinary postgraduate journey under the supervision of Professor Mark Willcox, Dr. Edgar Hoe Hon Wong, Dr. Alex Hui, and Dr Rajesh Kuppusamy. Shyam’s PhD project focuses on different aspects of peptidomimetics, including peptoids, particularly their antimicrobial activity against selected microbes.
Dr. Edgar Wong graduated with a BE in Chemical Engineering (2007) and a PhD (2011) from UNSW. He returned to UNSW as a Vice-Chancellor's Research Fellow in January 2016 and recently successfully obtained the ARC Future Fellowship in late 2021. He was also recently appointed as a UNSW Scientia Fellow in early 2022. Dr. Edgar Wong is an independent research group leader, ARC Future Fellow, and UNSW Scientia Senior Lecturer at the School of Chemical Engineering. He is a multidisciplinary researcher whose work spans several disciplines, including synthetic (polymer) chemistry, materials science, (micro)biology, and nanotechnology. His research interest in particular is in developing new functional molecules or polymeric materials for a range of targeted applications, including antimicrobial, anticancer, and antiviral applications
Prof. Annelise Barron is the W.M. Keck Associate Professor of Bioengineering at Stanford University. She is a chemical and biological engineer. She was trained in chemical engineering at the University of Washington (B.S., 1990) and U.C. Berkeley (Ph.D., 1995, mentored by Prof. Harvey W. Blanch), and was a Pharmaceutical Chemistry postdoc with Prof. Ken A. Dill (UCSF) and Dr. Ronald N. Zuckermann (Chiron Corp.). She has served on the faculty at Stanford since 2007, and prior to that, worked on the Chemical & Biological Engineering faculty of Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, for 10 years (1997-2007). She has been awarded the NIH Pioneer Award via the NIH National Institute on Aging (2020), the Oskar Fischer Award (2022), the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists & Engineers (PECASE) through NIH/NHGRI (1999), the Beckman Young Investigator Award (1999), and the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (1998), among other awards. She was the youngest scientist ever to serve on the Scientific Advisory Committee to the Director of the NIH, under Dr. Elias Zerhouni. Her research interests mainly include the mimicry of lung surfactant proteins, and antimicrobial and anticancer innate immune peptides.
