Carbohydrate Chemistry

Rene Roy was born in Quebec, Canada. He holds a Canadian Research Chair in therapeutic chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at the Universite du Quebecontreal, Quebec, Canada since 2004. He has more than 40 years of experience in carbohydrate chemistry. He earned his PhD in carbohydrate chemistry in 1980 from the Universite de Montreal, under the expert guidance of Professor Stephen Hanessian. He joined the National Research Council of Canada in Ottawa (Canada), where he was active from 1980 till 1985, and acquainted himself with carbohydrate-based vaccines. He then served as a professor at the Department of Chemistry, University of Ottawa, during 1985-2002. He was the recipient of the 2003 Melville L. Wolfrom Award from the ACS Division of Carbohydrate Chemistry for his contributions in the design of vaccines and glycodendrimers. He has more than 310 publications and has contributed to the development of two commercial carbohydrate-based vaccines against meningitis. His current interests are in multivalent carbohydrate protein interactions, medicinal chemistry, and nanomaterials.

Sebastien Vidal is a Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) researcher at the University of Lyon, Lyon, France. He earned his PhD in organic chemistry (2000) at the University of Montpellier, France, under the guidance of Professor Jean-Louis Montero, where he synthesized mannose-6-phosphate analogues for drug delivery applications. He then joined the group of Sir J. Fraser Stoddart at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) as a postdoctoral fellow. During the following two and a half years, he studied the synthesis and characterization of glycodendrimers but also the design of pseudorotaxanes. In 2003, he moved to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL, Golden, Colorado) and studied with Prof. Joseph J. Bozell the combination of organometallic and carbohydrate chemistries for the design of new reactions inv