Invited Speakers

Alois Fürstner is a native of Austria. He obtained his doctoral degree from the Technical University of Graz in 1987. After a postdoctoral at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and completion of his Habilitation in Graz in 1992, he joined the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung in Mülheim, Germany, in 1993 as a group leader. In 1998, he was promoted to the rank of Director and served two terms as the Managing Director of the Institute. Fürstner’s research interests in the area of organometallic chemistry, homogeneous catalysis and the development of new synthetic methods to applications in natural product total synthesis. He has authored about 500 publications and has been honored with numerous prestigious awards, including the Leibniz Prize (1999), the Karl Ziegler Prize (2013), and the Nagoya Gold Medal (2024).

Minna Hakkarainen is Professor in Polymer Technology at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. She got her M.Sc. in Polymer Chemistry from University of Helsinki in 1992 and Ph.D. in Polymer Technology from KTH in 1996. Since 2011 she is full professor and since 2012 the Head of Polymer Technology at KTH. Hakkarainen's research interests include sustainable biobased, biodegradable, recyclable polymers, design of polymer materials for several applications, etc. She has published around 300 papers and co-authored a text book on Applied Polymer Science (Springer). She is Associate Editor for ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces and in Editorial Advisory Board of several international journals such as Biomacromolecules, Polymer Testing and Macromolecular Materials and Engineering.

Luigi Mondello is Professor of Analytical Chemistry, leading the Food and Analytical Chemistry Group at the University of Messina, Italy. His research focuses on developing conventional and multidimensional chromatographic instrumentation to study complex constituents and contaminants in food. He is co-author of about 750 scientific papers and more than 1300 conference presentations of which more than 240 invited. He is the Editor of Green Analytical Chemistry and a recipient of the Marcel Golay, A.J.P. Martin, and Tswett-Nernst medals. Additionally, he is a permanent scientific committee member for the International Symposium on Capillary Chromatography and many other conferences.

Alexandre Bonvin obtained his PhD at Utrecht University in the Netherlands in 1993. After two post-doc periods at Yale University (USA) and the ETHZ (CH), he joined Utrecht University in 1998 where he was appointed full professor of computational structural biology in 2009. He is participating to several EU projects including the BioExcel Center of Excellence in Biomolecular Simulations and the European Open Science Cloud Hub. Bonvin's research group focuses on the development of reliable bioinformatics and computational approaches to predict, model and dissect biomolecular interactions at atomic level. His work has resulted in over 350 publications.

Sanofi, a global leader in the healthcare industry, will bring a high-level industrial perspective to JMJC 2026. The presentation will provide an in-depth exploration of the chemical development and synthetic processes associated with Sanofi’s current commercial drug portfolio. By offering these practical insights, this contribution serves as a crucial bridge between academic research and industrial application. It provides attendees with a unique opportunity to understand how scientific excellence is translated into life-saving treatments on a global scale.

Dr. Sylwia Baluta is a researcher at the Faculty of Chemistry, Wrocław University of Science and Technology, Poland. She got her PhD in 2014 in the field of Biotechnology and Medicinal Chemistry. Her work focuses on the development of advanced biosensing platforms and engineered biointerfaces for biomedical diagnostics and point-of-care applications. Dr. Baluta has authored more than 20 peer-reviewed publications and several patents related to biosensor technologies. Her scientific achievements have been recognized with several prestigious distinctions, including the Minister of Science and Higher Education Scholarship for Outstanding Young Scientists.

Prof. Francesco Di Maiolo received his PhD (summa cum laude) from the University of Parma in 2018 under the supervision of Prof. Anna Painelli. He subsequently joined the group of Prof. Irene Burghardt at Goethe University Frankfurt as an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow. He is currently Assistant Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Parma, holding 20 peer-reviewed publications currently. His research focuses on method development in excited-state dissipative quantum and quantum-classical dynamics, as well as electronic structure theory, with particular interest in molecules for organic electronics and spintronics.