Scientific Program Committee

Petra de Jongh received her PhD in photoelectrochemistry in 1999, and worked at Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven in the Netherlands and in Singapore. In 2004 she joined  Utrecht University, while being visiting professor at the Sorbonne Université in Paris in 2013, and she stayed in 2019 at the MPI in Mulheim. At Utrecht university, Petra de Jongh holds the Chair of Catalysts and Energy Materials. With her group she investigates  catalysts, materials that allow efficient chemical conversions and hence decrease the use of energy and raw materials, but are also essential to allow the transformation from fossil to renewable fuels. She is also very active in the field of energy conversion and storage: batteries, rewenable hydrogen, and electrocatalysts, producing renewable fuels and building blocks from CO₂.

Petra holds more than 15 patents and is cited over 10,000 times. She is an elected member of the National Royal Academy of Sciences (KNAW) and the Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen (KHMW) and a member of a range of national and international advisory boards and committees.

Hermen Overkleeft studied chemistry at the University of Amsterdam, where he obtained his Master’s degree in 1992, and his PhD degree in 1997 on his Thesis entitled ‘Azasugars. Synthesis and evaluation as glycosidase inhibitors’ (promotor Prof. Dr. Upendra Pandit). From 1997 to 1999 he was postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University (supervisor Prof. Dr. Jacques van Boom) and from 1999 to 2001 he was postdoctoral researcher at the Harvard Medical School (supervisor Prof. Dr. Hidde Ploegh). Since 2001 he is Professor in Bioorganic Chemistry at the Leiden Institute of Chemistry, Leiden University. He is the recipient of several Grants and Awards, including an ERC Advanced Grant (2011), the Golden Medal from the Royal Dutch Chemical Society (2008); a Wilhelm Friedrich Bessel Forschungspreis from the Humboldt Foundation (2012) and the Jeremy Knowles Award from the Royal Chemical Society (2015). He is co-author of over 400 publications ranging a wide number of topics from organic synthesis, chemical biology, glycobiology, oncology and immunology (h-index 48). His current research interests include the design, synthesis and application in medicinal chemistry and chemical biology research of inhibitors for glycosidases, glycosyl transferases and proteases.

Theme Committees