4th Empowering Women in Organic Chemistry Europe Conference

Dr. Nuria Díaz is an Executive Director Research in Discovery Chemistry at Eli Lilly.

She did her Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid under the supervision of Professor Juan Carlos Carretero.

Following completion of her Ph.D., she joined Lilly as an Organic Chemist Associate in Lilly Spain R&D Department in 2000. Nuria has over 25 years of experience in drug discovery, her focus has been on Medicinal Chemistry, working in targets from different therapeutic areas: endocrine/cardiovascular, neuroscience, oncology, and immunology. She has worked also in targets at various levels of development, from hit identification to early clinical development. Nuria has contributed to several projects that delivered molecules into the clinic and she has served as chemistry project leader on several occasions, one of them delivered Muvalaplin, a molecule in clinical trials for the treatment of high lp(a) levels, a well-known cardiovascular risk factor.

Margaret received her B.Sc. and M.Sc degrees from University College Dublin, Ireland. She received her Ph.D. degree in Synthetic Organic

Chemistry from Harvard University with Professor David A. Evans. In 1993

Margaret joined the Chemical Process R&D group at Eli Lilly and Company and in 2003 went to Amgen Inc, in Thousand Oaks, CA where she is currently Vice President of Drug Substance Technologies within Process Development and Amgen Massachusetts Site Head.

Since joining Amgen in 2003 Margaret has held numerous positions of increasing responsibility including Executive Director of the Pivotal Drug Substance Technologies, Vice President of Drug Product Technologies, and Vice President of the Manufacturing and Clinical Supply Chain organization. She has supported the advancement of the Amgen portfolio from clinical through to commercial development and been instrumental in the integration of innovative technologies into the manufacturing network. Margaret has invested a significant effort in evolving a green and sustainable culture in the workplace and these efforts have been recognized by Amgen being a recipient of the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award.

Margaret has a strong external scientific presence with ~100 publications in peer review journals. She is a Fellow of the American Chemical Society and an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering. She is a past chair of the Board of Directors of the International Consortium for Innovation and Quality in the Pharmaceutical Industry and a founding member of the Enabling Technologies Consortium. Margaret is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Organic Process R&D, she has been an associate editor for Organic Letters and is a member of the editorial boards for Science of Synthesis, Organic Syntheses, Synthesis and SynLett, and Tetrahedron and Tet Lett.  In partnership with Thiéme and the Science of Synthesis she sponsors the Dr. Margaret Faul Award for Women in the Chemical Sciences.

Nina Hartrampf is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Zurich (UZH) in Switzerland. She studied chemistry and biochemistry at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich (Germany) and obtained her PhD in the field of natural product synthesis and chemical biology in the group of Dirk Trauner. In 2018, she moved to the group of Brad Pentelute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) as a postdoctoral researcher, where she worked on the flow-based synthesis of peptides and proteins using an automated synthesis platform.

In 2020, Nina relocated to Switzerland to launch her independent career as an assistant professor (tenure track). Her lab specializes in the chemical synthesis of post-translationally modified peptides and proteins, including peptidic natural products such as lasso peptides and the oncogenic transcription factor MYC. Additionally, the lab develops innovative tools for flow-based peptide synthesis to enable to e.g. the synthesis of “difficult sequences”.

Her independent work has been recognized with several awards including the “2024 DECHEMA Award”, the “2025 Early Career Lectureship” from the American Peptide Society, the DECHEMA “Nachwuchswissenschaftler-Preis für Naturstoffforschung” (2025), the “ADUC Young Talent Award” (2025) from the GDCh, the “2024 Chemical Biology Lectureship”, the RSC “CEM Emerging Investigator in Protein and Peptide Science Award” (2024) and the “Bachem Award for Peptide Science” (2021) from the Austrian Peptide Society.

Sarah was awarded her PhD from the University of Manchester where she worked under the supervision of Prof. Nicholas Turner. Shortly after completing her PhD she took a position as a Senior Scientist at GlaxoSmithKline where her primary focus was engineering enzymes for use in manufacturing processes. In 2017 she moved back to academia where she secured a position as a BBSRC/MRC Innovation Fellow working in Dr Anthony Green’s lab. In 2020, Sarah was awarded a Presidential Fellowship and UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship allowing her to start her own independent research group. Sarah’s research focusses on the development of versatile biocatalytic approaches for the synthesis of therapeutic oligonucleotides.

Associate Professor Helena Lundberg leads a research group at KTH Royal Institute of Technology since 2019, focusing on synthetic method development and mechanistic studies of catalytic and electrosynthetic transformations. After a BSc in theoretical philosophy and an MSc in organic chemistry, Helena received her Ph. D. degree in 2015 from Stockholm University, Sweden, under the guidance of Professor Hans Adolfsson. After postdoctoral research at Stockholm University, working with DFT calculations with Professor Fahmi Himo, she joined Professor Donna G. Blackmond as a postdoctoral fellow in 2017 at Scripps Research for mechanistic studies of radical transformations. Helena is the recipient of various grants, fellowships and distinctions, including an ERC Starting Grant (2024), a Future Research Leader grant by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research (2022), a JSP fellowship for the Bürgenstock conference (2022) and the Sigrid Arrhenius Award (2015).

Graduated in Chemistry from the Universitat Autonoma of Barcelona in 2010. MSc studies in Synthesis and Catalysis at ICIQ followed by PhD degree with Prof. Antonio Echavarren in 2014. Postdoctoral researcher at the Scripps Research Institute (La Jolla) in the lab of Prof. Ryan Shenvi in 2015. Humboldt-Bayer fellow at the Max Planck Institute fur Kohlenforschung in Germany with Prof. Benjamin List in 2017. Joined Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine in 2021 as part of Discovery Process Research in Belgium; this team strategically bridges drug discovery and process development focusing on the delivery of multigram scale synthetic solutions as well as enabling new routes to unlock SAR exploration. She has contributed to multiple small-molecule and peptide programs from pre-portfolio to new-molecular-entity declaration within distinct therapeutic areas, which led to the internal Innovation Leadership Award from Therapeutics Discovery. She was promoted to Principal Scientist in 2024. 

Bruna Pladevall Sánchez studied chemistry at the University of Barcelona and completed a Master’s in Synthesis, Catalysis and Molecular Design at ICIQ/URV, followed by a PhD in Computational Chemistry at the ICIQ exploring reaction mechanisms at the interface of homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysis.

After several years in research, she transitioned into strategy consulting, first at Metyis working on big‑data‑driven solutions for FMCG companies, and later at McKinsey & Company as an Associate supporting clients across sectors including private equity, pharma, and public institutions.

She is currently Strategy & Transformation Manager at DSM‑Firmenich, driving strategic initiatives and transformation programs across the organization.”

Mariola Tortosa obtained her PhD at the Organic Chemistry Institute (CSIC, Madrid, Spain) in 2005. Then, she moved to The Scripps Research Institute in Florida (USA) to work as a Postdoctoral Fellow with Prof. William R. Roush. In 2008 she returned to the Organic Chemistry Institute (Madrid, Spain) as a Research Assistant. In 2011 she started her independent career at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM) as an Assistant Professor (Ramón y Cajal Fellow), and in 2017, she was promoted to Associate Professor at UAM. Biologically active compounds are a continuous inspiration for her research which is focused on the development of novel catalytic transformations to build molecular complexity in a sustainable way.  In 2013 she received an ERC-Starting Grant awarded by the European Research Council to work on the project “Design and Applications of Unconventional Borylation Reactions”. More recently (2020), she was awarded with an ERC-Consolidator grant to work on the project “Selective pathways for carbon-nitrogen bond cleavage”. She has received several awards including the Young Investigator Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry of Spain (2014), the Young Spanish Investigator Eli Lilly Award (2014), the Thieme Chemistry Journal Award (2015), the Barluenga Medal (2021) and the Excellence Award from the Spanish Royal Society (2025). Since November 2019, she serves as an Associate Editor of the ACS journal Organic Letters. Her presentation will focus on different catalytic strategies to prepare sp3-rich building blocks with regio- chemo- and stereocontrol.