John Chaput is Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Chemistry, Molecular Biology and Biochemistry and, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). He graduated in 1994 from Creighton University with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and earned his Ph.D. in 2000 from the University of California, Riverside. For his Ph.D. thesis, he studied the molecular recognition properties of unnatural nucleic acid polymers. Under the guidance of Chris Switzer, he designed, built, and characterized the first five-stranded DNA helix that self-assembles around a metal-nucleated iso-guanine motif. From 2000-2004, he was an HHMI Post-Doctoral Fellow in Prof. Jack Szostak’s laboratory at Harvard Medical School. While at Harvard, he studied the de novo evolution of functional proteins by mRNA display and developed early methods for synthesizing artificial genetic polymers using commercial polymerases. In 2005, he began his independent academic career as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Arizona State University (ASU). He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2011 and Full Professor in 2014. From 2005 to 2015, he was a core faculty member of the Biodesign Institute at ASU, and from 2011-2014 served as Deputy Director of the Center for Evolutionary Medicine and Informatics (CEMI). In 2015, he moved his laboratory to UCI, where he is pioneering the next generation of diagnostic and therapeutic agents based on artificial genetic polymers (XNAs) that are biologically stable and responsive to Darwinian evolution. In 2018, he was elected a AAAS Fellow for distinguished contributions to the field of chemical biology, particularly for the development of engineered polymerases that enable the evolution of artificial genetic polymers. He is a recipient of the Arizona Technology Enterprise Achievement Award, the ASU Faculty Award for Excellence in Defining Edge Research, the Athalie R. Clarke Research Achievement Award, and the Distinguished Mid-Career Research Award from the UCI Academic Senate.

Name and Title: Ru-Yi ZHU (Asst. Prof.) Office Mailing Address: 4 Science Drive 2, S9-12-01G, NUS S9 Wet Science Building, Singapore 117544 Email: rzhu@nus.edu.sg Contact Number: (65) 8206 9012 (mobile) Current Position: 09/2021-present Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry, NUS Percentage of time spent in Singapore every year for the current position: 100% Employment History: YEAR DESCRIPTION (Designation & Institution) 09/2021-present NUS Presidential Young Professorship Assistant Professor Academic Qualifications: INSTITUTION AND LOCATION DEGREE MM/YYYY FIELF OF STUDY Stanford University, USA Post-Doctoral Fellow 07/2021 Chemical Biology Scripps Research, USA Ph.D. 11/2018 Chemistry Peking University, China B.S. 07/2013 Chemistry

Jacopo Manigrasso is Director of the Nucleic Acids Department at Nostrum Biodiscovery, Barcelona. He earned his PhD in 2022 from the Italian Institute of Technology and the University of Bologna, applying molecular dynamics to RNA splicing catalysis, with a visiting period at UC Riverside on RNA:DNA hybrid processing by RNase H1. He then joined AstraZeneca as a postdoc, building computational capabilities for RNA-targeted small-molecule discovery. He is author of 11 publications, including in Nature Communications, ACS Catalysis, and Chem, and co-inventor of a patent on splicing modulators.

Dr. Sczepanski earned a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Johns Hopkins University in 2010 under the guidance of Prof. Marc Greenberg and completed postdoctoral training at The Scripps Research Institute with Prof. Gerald Joyce. He began his independent career at Texas A&M University in 2015, where he is currently a Professor of Chemistry and of Biochemistry and Biophysics. His research group has pioneered the development of “heterochiral” nucleic acid technologies that merge both enantiomers and exploit the unique, bio-orthogonal properties of mirror-image L-DNA and L-RNA to achieve novel and useful functionality. Over the past decade, his group has emerged as a leader in the development and application of L-oligonucleotides. This work has been supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIGMS, NIBIB, NIAID, and NICHD), the National Science Foundation, the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT), and the Welch Foundation.