The RAFT X keynote speaker is Dr Matthew DeLisa, William L. Lewis Professor of Engineering from Cornell University. Prof DeLisa will be giving a lecture on “Bacterial glycoengineering: from cellular enzymes and pathways to human therapeutics and vaccines.” Prof DeLisa is an up and coming star in the area of biopharmaceutical research and has been recognized with a number of awards for his work including an NSF CAREER award, a NYSTAR Watson Young Investigator Award, a Beckman Foundation Young Investigator Award, an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, and a NYSTAR Distinguished Faculty Award. He was also named one of the top 35 young innovators (TR35) by MIT’s Technology Review in 2005 and was selected as the inaugural recipient of the Wiley-Blackwell Biotechnology and Bioengineering Daniel I.C. Wang Award, which honors a distinguished young researcher in this field. Most recently, he was honored with a Cornell Provost’s Award for Distinguished Scholarship and was the recipient of the Young Investigator Award from the American Chemical Society’s BIOT division. He will be getting the meeting off to a great start.

This meeting is the tenth biannual RAFT meeting, and one of the themes of the meeting is looking back at the development of the area over the past two decades. Our keynote speaker, Dr Robert (Bob) Schwartz of SA Consulting is ideally placed to give us an entertaining walk through those years. Bob was responsible for initiating the RAFT conference series, was co-Program Chair of the first three RAFT meetings, and has been to all of the meetings since. With forty years of industrial experience behind him, Bob is now retired from a career at Abbott Labs and elsewhere, but through his position as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology still has his finger on the pulse of recent advances in fermentation technology. Bob’s banquet speech, “The more things change, the more they stay the same….or do they?” is sure to inform and entertain.

Although we are already close to a record number of poster abstract submissions, the deadline for submitting poster abstracts has been extended to September 30 to give more people the opportunity to get involved. Submit now to ensure a place.

Registration for RAFT 10 is open at www.simbhq.org/raft/registration/. Early registration ends October 18th, so now is the time to book your place. See you in Marco Island!

[sws_divider_line] Written by E. Timothy Davies, PhD, Green Biologics Ltd. He is also member of the SIMB board of directors and chair of RAFT 10.