Dr. Daws is a native of Australia, earning her PhD from the Flinders University of South Australia. She currently holds the Frost Bank Distinguished Professorship in Biomedical Sciences, in the Department of Cellular and Integrative Physiology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, and is Director of the Physiology and Pharmacology discipline in the Integrated Biomedical Sciences graduate program. Her research focuses primarily on monoamine transporters, and how they are involved in psychiatric and substance use disorders. One of her major contributions to this field is identification of organic cation transporters as important regulators of monoamine neurotransmission in brain, and as novel targets for the treatment of these disorders. Dr. Daws has published over 100 peer reviewed articles, reviews and book chapters, and has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), as well as private foundations throughout her career. She has served on many national and international scientific review panels. She is a Fellow of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP) and of the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET). She served as Chair of the Neuropharmacology Division of ASPET and is a member of ASPET’s Publications Committee. She served as President of the International Society for Serotonin Research (ISSR). She was co-founder of the International Transmembrane Transporter Society (ITTS) and served as President. Dr. Daws is currently Editor-in-Chief of Pharmacological Reviews.

Sonja currently works as Associate Professor at the Institute of Pharmacology, Medical University of Vienna, Austria. She received both her Undergraduate Degree with First Class Honours (in Biotechnology and Drug Design and Development), and her PhD (in Pharmacology), from the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. Her research focuses on rare, loss-of-function disease variants in neurotransmitter transporters of the solute carrier 6 (SLC6) protein superfamily. Sonja and her team investigate both the physiological repercussions and the underlying molecular basis (e.g. structural and/or protein folding/trafficking defects) of SLC6 pathogenic mutations. Dozens of such mutants have recently been linked to severe, and as yet untreatable, neurological disorders in children, e.g. epilepsy, infantile/juvenile parkinsonism-dystonia & intellectual disability. The main objective of this work is to discover new therapeutic avenues, needed for the functional rescue of these disease variants, by means of pharmacochaperoning using small molecules, known as chemical and pharmacological chaperones/allosteric modulators.

David Sauer is a biophysicist and Principal Investigator at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Medicines Discovery, focusing on the structure and function of membrane channels and transporters. He completed his PhD degree with Youxing Jiang at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, studying potassium channel structure and ion selectivity. This was followed by postdoctoral training with Da-Neng Wang at New York University School of Medicine, describing the structure, transport mechanism, and chemical inhibition of SLC13/DASS membrane transporters. Since joining Oxford in 2021, David has led a group studying membrane proteins' function, pathogenesis, and chemical targeting by small molecules. His team’s results have revealed the amino acid import by SIT1 and CAT1, the reaction mechanism and inhibition of the ceramide synthase CerS6, and the pathogenic mechanisms of the muscle-type Acetylcholine Receptor nAChR.

Rosemary Cater fulfilled her Ph.D. at the University of Sydney from 2013-2017 under the supervision of Prof. Renae Ryan. Here she used electrophysiology and x-ray protein crystallography to understand how glutamate transporters serve a secondary function as chloride channels. From 2017-2023, Dr. Cater worked as a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Filippo Mancia at Columbia University in New York City. Here she used single-particle cryo-electron microscopy and antigen-binding technology to determine structures of small membrane proteins. In January 2024, Dr. Cater was recently recruited to UQ's Institute for Molecular Bioscience as a Senior Research Fellow and Group Leader, where she currently holds an ARC DECRA fellowship. Her lab utilizes membrane protein biochemistry, cryo-EM, and biophysics to understand some of the brain’s most elusive yet important proteins. The overarching goal of the Cater Lab is to understand molecular mechanisms of transport at the blood-brain barrier.