Bi-weekly: Thursdays, 12 pm EDT/EST, 9 am PT/PST, 5 pm BST/BDT, 6 pm CEST/CET
https://dfci.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_m7JJaw52T8yZYt8-ykL6UQ
Some seminars were recorded and accessible for a limited time on our youtube channel.
Upcoming Speakers
April 30th, 2026
Host: Mikolaj Slabicki
Ning Zheng
University of Washington
Orthosteric Molecular Glue (OMG) Inhibitors: A Selective Blockage.
Dr. Ning Zheng obtained his PhD from University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in 1997 after he attended Fudan University in Shanghai, China. He did his postdoctoral studies at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and joined the faculty at the Department of Pharmacology in the University of Washington in 2002. He is currently Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and an AAAS Fellow. His current research focuses on structural and functional analyses of ubiquitin ligases, their roles in human biology and plant hormone signaling, and their potential in mediating targeted protein degradation for novel therapeutic drug development. A pioneer in Targeted Protein Degradation, he originated the "molecular glue" concept to explain the action of auxin and jasmonate. His research continues to elucidate how this powerful effect is utilized by nature and leveraged for novel therapeutics.
May 14th, 2026
Host: Mikolaj Slabicki
Zoran Rankovic
The Institute of Cancer Research, London UK
Mining the cereblon neosubstrate landscape for cancer drug discovery.
Zoran is a Professor of Chemical Biology and Director of the Centre for Protein Degradation (CPD) at the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), London UK. Prior to joining the ICR, Zoran was Director of Chemistry at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, where he established and directed a productive Targeted Protein Degradation program, which developed novel cereblon warheads, PROTACs, and molecular glue clinical candidates. Before St Jude, Zoran was medicinal chemistry director and research fellow at Eli Lilly, Merck, Schering-Plough, and Organon. Zoran obtained his PhD in Medicinal Chemistry from the School of Chemistry at the University of Leeds, UK. During his industrial career Zoran directed teams that delivered multiple clinical candidates over a range of therapeutic areas including oncology, neurodegeneration, psychiatry and cardiovascular disorders. Zoran authored and co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed scientific publications and 30 patents, a dozen book chapters and edited two books on drug discovery topics.
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May 28th, 2026
Host: Katherine Donovan / Sean Gao
Bekky Feltham
WEHI
E3 Ligases, From Cellular Regulators to Drug Targets.
Rebecca (Bekky) Feltham is a Laboratory Head at Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research and co-founder of Ternarx. She has over 20 years’ experience in ubiquitin signalling, E3 ligase biology, and more recently targeted protein degradation (TPD).
Her research focuses on understanding and exploiting the ubiquitin system to enable new therapeutic strategies. She led the development of the E3 Ligase Compendium (the E3-ome), a globally collaborative effort involving more than 40 leading laboratories, creating the first comprehensive, expert-curated map of the human E3 ligase landscape to drive degrader discovery. She also co-developed NanoTACs in partnership with PROMEGA and established tag-targeting degrader platforms for target validation at WEHI, now used by more than 30 research groups nationally.
Ternarx is a biotechnology company developing degrader therapies for cancer and inflammatory disease. At Ternarx, she leads two core platforms, tag-targeting degrader modelling for rapid preclinical target validation, and TissueSAFE, a discovery framework for identifying tissue-selective E3 ligases. Together, these platforms underpin the company’s pipeline and are designed to de-risk therapeutic development at the earliest stages.
Outside the lab, Rebecca is also a mum and a strong advocate for flexible working, which has informed her approach to leadership, resilience, and creating supportive environments.
Vasileios Voutsinos
University of Copenhagen
Mapping degrons in human proteins.
Vasileios Voutsinos is an Assistant Professor at the University of Copenhagen. He completed his PhD in DNA repair and genome stability. During his postdoctoral studies, he switched his focus to the area of proteostasis, specifically trying to map degrons in human cytosolic proteins and transcription factors.
As part of his postdoctoral training, he was a Visiting Postdoctoral Scholar for one year at the University of Washington, where he learned about cutting-edge high-throughput techniques to analyze protein variants using growth and FACS-based assays.
His current research focuses on using these approaches to study the impact of protein mutations on function and abundance, as well as further understanding of human degrons and mechanisms of targeted protein degradation.
June 11th, 2026
Host: Mikolaj Slabicki
Michael Rapé
UC Berkeley
Modulating protein complexes in development and disease.
Michael Rapé is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the founding Head of the Molecular Therapeutics Division, and the Dr. K. Peter Hirth Chair of Cancer Biology at UC Berkeley.
Michael’s work revealed ubiquitin chain types, essential ubiquitylation enzymes and substrates, and ubiquitylation mechanisms essential for development and disease. He is known for developing the “ubiquitin code” hypothesis, discovering the role of VCP as a ubiquitin-dependent segregase, identifying quality control programs such as the reductive stress response and dimerization quality control, and pinpointing stress response silencing as a crucial process preventing neurodegenerative disease. His work has been recognized with a Pew Scholar’s Award, an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, a Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise, and the National Blavatnik Award. Michael has recently been elected as foreign member of EMBO.
Michael co-founded Nurix, Zenith, Lyterian and Reina Therapeutics, and he is an iPartner at The Column Group Ventures.