The list of invited speakers will be updated continuously.

Speaker biographical details

Prof. Andreas Bender

University of Cambridge, UK

Andreas Bender is Professor for Machine Learning in Medicine at the College of Medicine and Health Sciences, Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi, and Visiting Professor for Life Science Informatics at the University of Cambridge. He received his PhD in cheminformatics from Cambridge, focusing on data-driven approaches to molecular discovery. His research develops new methods in AI, machine learning, and data science, with applications in drug discovery, chemical biology, and in silico drug safety. Beyond academia, he co-founded Healx, a company dedicated to data-driven drug repurposing for rare diseases, and PharmEnable, which focuses on unlocking novel chemical space for challenging biological targets.

Prof. Andrew Cooper

University of Liverpool, UK

Andrew I. Cooper is Professor of Chemistry at the University of Liverpool, where he is Academic Director of the Materials Innovation Factory and Director of the Leverhulme Research Centre for Functional Materials Design. He studied chemistry at the University of Nottingham, completing his PhD in 1994, and held research fellowships at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Cambridge before joining Liverpool in 1999 as a Royal Society University Research Fellow. He founded the Centre for Materials Discovery in 2007, establishing one of the first large-scale collaborations between academia and industry in functional materials research. His work integrates organic and supramolecular chemistry with robotics, high-throughput experimentation, and artificial intelligence to accelerate the discovery of materials for energy and sustainability applications. In 2017, he co-founded Porous Liquid Technologies, a spin-out company developing materials based on the novel concept of porous liquids.

Dr. Samuel Genheden

Associate Director, AstraZeneca

Samuel Genheden leads the Deep Chemistry team in Discovery Sciences, AstraZeneca R&D. He received his PhD in theoretical chemistry from Lund University in 2012, having studied computational methods to estimate ligand-binding affinities. He continued with postdocs at the Universities of Southampton and Gothenburg, where he simulated membrane phenomena using multiscale approaches. He joined the Molecular AI department at AstraZeneca in 2020 and became team leader in 2022. He leads research on the AiZynth platform for AI-assisted synthesis planning, and on agentic systems based on large language models. Samuel’s interests lie in studying chemical and biological systems with computers and using these approaches to impact drug development. He is a keen advocate for open-source software.

Bartosz Grzybowski

Ulsan National Institute of Science & Technology, South Korea

Bartosz A. Grzybowski is Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) in South Korea and Director of the IBS Center for Algorithmic and Robotized Synthesis (CARS). He is recognized as a global pioneer of computational synthesis planning and chemical AI, with additional contributions to chemical reaction networks, dynamic self-assembly, nanoscience, and surface phenomena. His group has published over 300 papers, including 18 in Nature and Science, with more than 40,000 citations. He developed landmark platforms such as Chematica (now marketed as Synthia) and Allchemy, which use AI algorithms to design synthetic routes and discover new molecules. Beyond research, he serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and on editorial boards of several journals. He has delivered invited lectures at venues such as the Solvay Conference (2019) and the IUPAC World Chemistry Congress (2023). Through CARS, he leads efforts to merge AI and robotics to transform molecular-scale synthesis into an algorithmic and automated science.

Prof. Matthew S. Sigman

University of Utah, USA

Matthew S. Sigman is the Peter J. Christine S. Stang Presidential Endowed Chair of Chemistry and holds the rank of Distinguished Professor at the University of Utah, where he has been Chair of the Department of Chemistry since 2019. He joined the University of Utah in 1999 as an Assistant Professor and progressed through Associate Professor (2004–2008), Professor (2008–2016), and Distinguished Professor (from 2016). Prior to that, he earned his Ph.D. from Washington State University in 1996, completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University under Professor Eric Jacobsen, and was briefly a NeXstar Predoctoral Fellow.

Prof. Sigman’s research program blends physical organic chemistry with data science to innovate new synthetic reactions. He and his group apply tools such as multivariate linear regression, decision trees, and machine learning to uncover structure–function relationships in areas including enantioselective catalysis, C–H functionalization, electrocatalysis, battery chemistry, and biocatalysis.

Dr. Anna Tomberg

AstraZeneca, Gothenburg, Sweden

Anna Tomberg is Associate Principal Scientist at AstraZeneca R&D in Gothenburg, where she researches drug design using machine learning and computational chemistry. She joined AstraZeneca in 2017 as a postdoctoral fellow and advanced to Senior Scientist before taking her current role in 2023. She earned her PhD in chemistry from McGill University in 2017, where she worked on computational studies of drug metabolism by CYP enzymes, following earlier research in peptide synthesis, azobenzene photochemistry, and catalysis. Her research focuses on the application of AI and computational methods to chemical reactivity, synthesis planning, and molecular design. She has co-authored work in Nature Reviews Chemistry and Nature Machine Intelligence on the integration of mechanism, data, and machine learning in chemistry. In addition to her research, she has contributed educational resources to the computational chemistry community, including tutorials on Gaussian and Orca software.