Aromatic Interactions : Frontiers in Knowledge and Application

Darren W. Johnson received his BS in Chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin in 1996, where he performed undergraduate research under the direction of Prof. Jonathan Sessler. He earned his PhD in Chemistry in 2000 from UC-Berkeley working with Prof. Kenneth Raymond, and he then spent two years at the Scripps Research Institute as an NIH post-doctoral fellow with Prof. Julius Rebek, Jr. He joined the chemistry faculty at the University of Oregon in 2003, where he holds the rank of Professor. Research in his group uses supramolecular chemistry as a tool to explore a variety of problems in coordination chemistry, molecule/ion recognition and inorganic cluster synthesis.

Fraser Hof received his B.Sc. at the University of Alberta in 1998, completing an Honour’s thesis with Prof. Neil Branda. He carried out his Ph.D. studies (2003) in self-assembly at the Scripps Research Institute with Julius Rebek, Jr., and was a post-doctoral fellow (2003-2005) in medicinal chemistry with François Diederich at ETH Zurich. He has been at the at the University of Victoria, where he is currently the Canada Research Chair in Supramolecular and Medicinal Chemistry, since 2005. His research program revolves around molecular recognition and epigenetic protein methylation pathways. It includes basic research projects in protein binding, molecular recognition in pure water, and solvation and salt effects in competitive media. Applications include efforts to make supramolecular affinity reagents and sensors as tools for epigenetics research, as well as medicinal chemistry approaches that target the ‘aromatic cage’ binding pockets of several epigenetic reader proteins.