Dr. Julian Rees co-founded HOPO Therapeutics and has served as President and Chief Executive Officer since 2020. He has spent over a decade studying the interactions between metal ions and biological systems, with foci in biological inorganic chemistry, ligand and chelator design, and f-block element decorporation. Julian has authored and designed multiple research studies detailing critical investigations of the efficacy and applications of HOPO’s lead drug candidate. He received a B.A. in Chemistry from Goucher College, was a DAAD Graduate Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion, earned his M.S. and Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Washington, and completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Julian was formerly a Bakar Innovation Fellow in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and adjunct faculty in chemistry at Berkeley City College. He is currently an Activate Fellow at Berkeley Lab’s Cyclotron Road.