SEB Conference Prague 2024

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

No bio provided

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.