Natural Product Reports is delighted to welcome Yihua Chen, Katherine Duncan and Joshua Kellogg to the Editorial Board!
About Yihua
Yihua Chen obtained a BSc. at Nanjing Agricultural University in 1998. He received his Ph.D. degree in biochemistry and molecular biology at the Institute of Microbiology, CAS with Prof. Dr. Keqian Yang in 2005. After five years of postdoctoral research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with Prof. Dr. Ben Shen, he started his own research group in the Institute of Microbiology, CAS in 2011.
His research lies at the crossroads of bacterial genetics and natural product chemistry, with emphasis on biosynthetic mechanisms of microbial natural products and discovery of new small molecule drug leads through synthetic biology and genome mining.
About Katherine
In 2024, Kate moved to Newcastle University (UK) and leads a team focussed on microbial metabolomics and antibiotic discovery. Prior to this Kate completed a Tenure-Track Chancellor’s Fellowship at the University of Strathclyde (2016-2020) and was awarded full tenure to associate professor (2020-2023). Prior to starting her group, Kate completed two Postdoctoral Fellowships at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (California) in Marine Biomedicine and at The Scottish Marine Institute in Marine Biotechnology, a PhD in Biomedical Science (Canada) and a 5-year Masters in Chemistry (Aberdeen, Scotland) with International Placement (Florida). Kate is an advocate for community approaches to data sharing (ActinoBase, NPAtlas, MI-BiG, GNPS etc) and equality in STEMM.
Her work focuses on accelerated biodiscovery using ‘omics methodologies to understand life at molecular, cellular and organism levels. Over recent years, the group has focused on ‘omics methods to link biology (genes) to chemistry (antibiotics) and how the assessment of chemical space across biological parameters can enable informed biodiscovery of new antibiotics. They often focus on underexplored/extreme ecosystems, such as the deep-sea and Antarctica – you can find out more about the Duncan lab at: www.medicinesfromthesea.com.
About Joshua
Joshua Kellogg is an Assistant Professor of Metabolomics at the Pennsylvania State University, where he leads natural product discovery research focused on medicinal plants, ethnobotany, and analytical metabolomics.
He obtained a B.Sc. in Chemistry (University of California, Berkeley, 2004), M.Sc. in Natural Resources (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2009), and Ph.D. in Food, Bioprocessing, and Nutrition Sciences (North Carolina State University, 2014). He was an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro until 2019, when he joined the faculty at Penn State.
His work focuses on natural product discovery from plants and fungi against infectious and chronic diseases. His group is also active in developing analytical metabolomics methods and machine learning approaches to bolster botanical research and annotation. To these ends, he employs transdisciplinary approaches that are at the interface of analytical chemistry, chemical biology, bioinformatics, natural product chemistry, and molecular biology. Dr. Kellogg’s work is supported by the NIH, USDA, and industry partnerships.
