Heidemann lecture presenter named

Keynote speaker Professor Yujia Xu is an expert on collagen.

The XXXVII IULTCS Congress Organizing Committee is extremely pleased to announce that Professor Yujia Xu will be the Heidemann Lecture Presenter at the XXXVII IULTCS Congress.

The Heidemann Lecture is a keynote presentation that is held in memory of Professor Dr. Eckhardt Heidemann (1925-1999). He made significant practical contributions to the science of leather manufacture and he held a lifelong interest in the structure and properties of the collagen molecule. It is typical for the Host Society to invite a high-profile guest lecturer to make this keynote presentation of 30 – 45 minutes, as the opening lecture of the Scientific Programme.

Professor Yujia Xu received her doctorate degree in Biophysics from the University of Connecticut, and conducted her postdoctoral research in the field of protein folding in the School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She started her collagen-related research as a research associate with Prof. Barbara Brodsky and Prof. Jean Baum at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and Rutgers university. She is currently an Associate professor in the Department of Chemistry at Hunter college of the City University of New York.
Prof. Xu’s main research interest has been the molecular mechanisms of the biological functions of collagen. Using protein design and recombinant technology her lab pioneered the strategy to develop triple helical peptides that can further self-assemble into collagen-like fibrils using modular amino acid sequences. These fibril-forming collagen mimetic peptides (FCMPs) are effective molecular tools for collagen research including the investigation of molecular interactions that stabilize collagen fibrils, which is among one of the fundamental research projects pioneered by Prof. Heidemann several decades ago. The FCMPs are also being used to develop novel biomaterials for biomedical applications.

The organising committee is delighted that Professor Yujia has accepted the invitation to present the 2023 Heidemann Lecture.