Metals in Biology and Medicine

Peggy Carver, Pharm.D., FCCP, is Associate Professor at the College of Pharmacy, and a Clinical Pharmacist in Infectious Diseases at the University of Michigan Health System. Although Dr. Carver's research focuses mainly on the epidemiology, prevention, and treatment of fungal infections, her more recent research has focused on the role of metal ions in infectious diseases. She is a fellow of the American College of Clinical Pharmacy, a past president of the Society of Infectious Diseases Pharmacists, and a recipient of the College of Pharmacy's Teaching Excellence Award Vincent Pecoraro is John T. Groves Collegiate Professor of Chemistry at the University of Michigan. The Pecoraro research group discovered a new class of metal chelating agents that have been named metallacrowns based on the structural similarity of these materials to organic crown ethers. The group has published extensively on the applications of these materials to magnetism, supramolecular chemistry, and catalysis. Present research interests deal with (i) synthetic models for the active site structure and chemical mechanism of manganese enzymes, (ii) biological chemistry of vanadium, (iii) development of the chemistry of metallacrowns, (iv) de Novo metallopeptide design. Henryk Kozlowski is Full Professor at the University of Wroclaw, where he obtained his Ph.D. (1973). He was a pioneer of bioinorganic chemistry in Poland. His main research interests include molecular mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases; structure and thermodynamics of bioinorganic systems; metal interactions with natural peptides and their derivatives, pesticides, nucleotides, and nucleic acids; molecular mechanisms of metal-related toxicity and carcinogenesis; chelating agents for toxic metals; and effects of toxic metals on biomolecules Gianni Valensin received his degree in Chemistry from the University of Florence, Italy, in 1970. He was appointed Full Professor of Physical Chemistry in 1986 at the University of Basilicata, Italy, and, later, Full Professor of Inorganic Chemistry in 1990 at the University of Siena, Italy. He is currently the President of the NMR Centre of the University of Siena.