Keynote Speaker Bio
Professor and School Chair
James A. Carlos Family Chair for Pediatric Technology
School of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Georgia Institute of Technology
M.G. Finn received a B.Sc. degree in Chemistry from Caltech in 1980 (research in electrochemistry and inorganic chemistry with Profs. F. Anson and R. Gagne), and a Ph.D. degree in 1986 from MIT working with Prof. K.B. Sharpless, followed by an NIH postdoctoral fellowship with Prof. J.P. Collman at Stanford University. He joined the faculty of the University of Virginia in 1988, where his group studied and developed a variety of transition metal-mediated synthetic methods. Prof. Finn moved to the Department of Chemistry and The Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology at The Scripps Research Institute in 1998, and then to the School of Chemistry & Biochemistry and the School of Biological Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2013. He was chair of the former department from 2014 through 2024.
Prof. Finn’s current interests include the use of virus particles as molecular and catalytic building blocks for vaccine and functional materials development, the development of click reactions for organic and materials synthesis, polyvalent interactions and advanced linker technologies in drug targeting, and the use of evolution for the discovery of chemical function. He held the James A. Carlos Family Chair in Pediatric Technology until 2024, and is currently the Chief Scientific Officer of the Georgia Tech Pediatric Innovation Network, which brings new science and engineering to the aid of pediatric medicine.
Graduates from the Finn laboratory can be found in academic departments around the world, as well as in companies in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, chemical, and materials industries. Prof. Finn was the first recipient of the annual Scripps Outstanding Mentor Award, a 2017 Arthur C. Cope Scholar award, and was Editor-in-Chief of the journal ACS Combinatorial Science from 2010 to 2020.