The International Chemical Biology Society is pleased to announce the winners of our annual ICBS Young Chemical Biologist and Global Lectureship awards.  Awardees will deliver their award lectures at the ICBS2026 Annual Conference in San Francisco, CA, on October 12-15, 2025.  


About the Awards:  
To recognize and advance the career development of young investigators in chemical biology, the ICBS has established a special session at its annual meeting to showcase up-and-coming chemical biologists through the ICBS Young Chemical Biologist Awards. Awardees are scheduled to speak in the Rising Stars session and will be further recognized for their achievements with a certificate and monetary award of $1,000 USD to each awardee.  

The ICBS Global Lectureship award was created to recognize distinguished investigators whose research has significantly advanced and impacted the field of chemical biology. Selection of the awardee is based on their impact on chemical biology research, service to the field, and demonstrated leadership in continuing the advancement of chemical biology around the globe. The award lecture will be delivered at this year’s ICBS conference and the awardee will serve as an ambassador of ICBS to promote chemical biology globally.  In addition to these opportunities, the award recipient will be highlighted on the ICBS website and presented an award certificate and a monetary award of $2,000 USD.  

2026 ICBS Global Lectureship Award

Peng Chen, Professor, Peking University. Professor Chen has been awarded the 2026 ICBS Global Lectureship Award in recognition of his highly-significant research achievements in driving the frontier of live-cell chemistry for mechanistic study of biological systems as well as for therapeutic innovations for clinical needs. Dr. Chen is currently the Distinguished Professor at Peking University, New Cornerstone Investigator (Chinese equivalent of HHMI), Chair of the Chemical Biology Division of Chinese Chemical Society, and he has also taken on leadership roles in the American Chemical Society through his service as the Executive Editor of ACS Chemical Biology.

Professor Chen’s laboratory develops and applies new chemistry tools to investigate protein-based interactions and activities in living cells. He has expanded the bioorthogonal chemistry beyond ligation, with the particular focus on “bond cleavage” types of reactions that can be triggered by organometallic catalysts, small molecules or light. The concept of “bioorthogonal cleavage” reaction has drawn considerable attention in recent years, with Peng as a pioneer and widely recognized leader.

With an h-index of 81 and more than 19,000 citations and 140 publications, Dr Chen has led publications in Nature group journals (27, including 4 in Nature), ACS journals such as JACS (23), Science, Cell, PNAS, Angewandte Chemie, Chemical Society Reviews, Chemical Communications and many more, predominantly the last 5 years alone. Professor Chen has accumulated almost 30 major awards, the most recent being the 2026 Emil Thomas Kaiser Award, The Protein Society.

2026 ICBS Young Chemical Biologist Award

Angad P. Mehta,Ph.D., University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA (ICBS member since 2024). Dr. Mehta is being recognized for his research work in engineering immune systems for directed evolution of proteins and biologics in human cells, especially the development of continuous directed evolution platforms.” 

Award lecture: “In vitro immune-like systems for continuous directed evolution of biologics

Yilong Zou, Ph.D., Westlake University, China (ICBS member since 2021). Dr. Zou is being recognized for his original research work in applying chemistry principles to significantly advance the understanding of ferroptosis, and for the intervention of the ferroptosis pathway to develop associated therapeutic strategies. 

Award lecture: “Chemical basis and intervention of ferroptosis in cancer and tissue injury

George M. Burslem, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, USA (ICBS member since 2017). 
Dr. Burslem is being recognized for his research work on the development of cutting-edge research tools to study post-translational modifications associated with protein synthesis and degradation in health and disease biology, e.g., intracellular protein editing within living mammalian cells. 

Award lecture: “Gain-of-function chemical biology approaches