James Murphy is a Deputy Director and Professor at WEHI in Melbourne, Australia, with a joint appointment in Drug Discovery Biology at the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences. He studied at the University of Canterbury and Australian National University before postdoc training as a NHMRC CJ Martin Fellowship in the lab of the signalling guru, the late Tony Pawson (Toronto, Canada). He moved to the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in 2007, was appointed group leader in January 2015 and served as Head of the Inflammation Division (2019-2024).

His work has focused on signaling mechanisms and deconvoluting functions of protein kinases and their zombie cousins, the pseudokinases. His findings have been reported in >190 articles, which have attracted >17500 citations. He is highly engaged in learned society journals, including as Chair of the IUBMB Publications Committee; Editor-in-Chief of Biochemical Society Transactions; Associate Editor and incoming Editor-in-Chief of Biochemical Journal. His work has been recognised by numerous awards, including the Biochemical Society International Award (2022) and election as Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand Te Apārangi in 2026.

Mark Lemmon is Alfred Gilman Professor and Chair of Pharmacology at Yale University and Director of the Yale Cancer Biology Institute. His research focuses on mechanistic, structural and biochemical aspects of signaling by growth factor receptor tyrosine kinases, particularly the EGF receptor. Educated in Oxford, England (BA in biochemistry), Yale (PhD in Mol. Biophysics and Biochemistry with Donald Engelman) and NYU (postdoc in pharmacology with Joseph Schlessinger), he became an Assistant Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine in 1996, and later George W. Raiziss Professor and Chair of that Department.

He moved to Yale in 2015 to build a new Cancer Biology Institute on Yale’s West Campus, and was later appointed Chair of Pharmacology in 2023. Dr. Lemmon is Chair of the Editorial Board of the Biochemical Journal, and also serves on the Advisory Boards of Cell, Molecular Cell, Science Signaling, and other journals. Honors include the Protein Society’s Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin Award (2012). He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2016, as an ASBMB Fellow in 2023, a Life Fellow of the European Academy of Medical Sciences in 2023, and as a member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering (CASE) in 2024.

Ricardo G. Correa, PhD, is a pharmacist and scientist with over 20 years of experience in biochemistry, molecular biology, and analytical development across academia and industry. He currently serves as Senior Scientist/Manager at MilliporeSigma / Merck KGaA.

Dr. Correa has built an international career at leading institutions including The Salk Institute (USA), University College London (UK), and the Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil). Over the past 15 years, his research has focused on viral vector technologies and cellular signaling pathways involved in inflammation, innate immunity, tumorigenesis, and cancer progression.

During his PhD, he became the first researcher in Brazil to file a patent for a novel human gene identified as a potential tumor marker. In his postdoctoral training, he advanced understanding of NF-κB signaling using zebrafish models to study proliferative processes in vertebrates.
He later served as Assistant Professor at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) and Pontifícia Universidade Católica (PUC) in Brazil before relocating to San Diego, California, to join the SBP Medical Discovery Institute (SBMRI). He also remains active in academia as a Visiting Professor at the University of São Paulo.

David is a Programme Leader at the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences and Professor of Biochemistry at the Hammersmith Hospital Campus of Imperial College London. David studied Biochemistry at Bristol University and completed a PhD and post-doctoral fellowship in Prof. Grahame Hardie’s laboratory at the MRC Protein Phosphorylation Unit, University of Dundee. In 1989, he was awarded an MRC Training Fellowship to work in Prof. James Scott’s group at the MRC Clinical Research Centre, Northwick Park Hospital to develop emerging techniques in molecular biology. In 1992 he moved to the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre, Hammersmith Hospital on a tenure-track position to continue work on cloning components of the AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) cascade. In 1998 David was appointed as an MRC Programme Leader to investigate the physiological role of AMPK in metabolism.

MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences and Institute of Clinical Sciences, Imperial College London, UK

Keywords: AMP-activated protein kinase, cell signalling, metabolism, protein phosphorylation, prostate cancer