Biophysical Society Bulletin | January 2025

Public Affairs

Around the World: Meet the Sixth Cohort of BPS Ambassadors The Biophysical Society launched the Ambassador Program as an initiative created to both enhance BPS content for the global biophysical community and provide new pathways into biophysics in home countries. The first cohort of four Ambassadors began in January 2020 for a three-year term of service, joined in subsequent years by additional cohorts for a total of 12 BPS Ambassadors representing international biophysics within the Society. These Ambassadors, each rep resenting a different country, work in conjunction with BPS committees and staff to offer increased content, program ming, and voice to the international biophysical community. Eduardo Jardón-Valadez Mexico What do you do professionally? Resources Department of the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM) in Lerma City, Mexico. I graduated from the chemistry school at the Autonomous National University of Mexico with a research project on electrolyte solutions using polarizable water models and molecular simulation methods. Then, I joined an interdisciplinary group working on diseases of the endocrine system, specifically for disclosing struc ture-function relationships in membrane protein receptors. As a postdoc in the Theory and Experiments on Membrane Pro tein Organization group at the University of California, Irvine, I collaborated on projects devoted to the understanding of the interplay of lipid, water, and membrane protein interactions that shape protein function, structure, and dynamics. As a full professor at UAM, I collaborate on different projects, including membrane-active peptides, modeling of proteins of the im mune system, and developing new drugs for G protein-coupled receptor, among other studies. What led you to apply for the BPS Ambassador Program? In recent years I’ve been involved in organizing academic activ ities to disseminate research projects on applied biophysics at the BioPhys Mexico conference in 2015, 2019, and 2022. The conference was an excellent platform to bring together profes sors and researchers from many countries in the Latin America region. At this conference, students and professors had the opportunity to discuss and share their projects with experts in the field. Eduardo Jardón-Valadez I am head of the Nanomaterials and Molec ular Biophysics research group at the Earth

What are your Ambassador Program Goals? My goal as ambassador is to encourage young scientists, students, and professors to get involved in the academic activities of the Biophysical Society. Moreover, I aim to show some of the progress of interdisciplinary Biophysics in Mexico and Latin America. Daumantas Matulis Lithuania What do you do professionally? My main passion and experience are in heading a research laboratory at Vilnius University. During my PhD studies at the University of Minnesota under the guidance of Rex E. Lovrien and postdoctoral years advised by Victor A. Bloomfield , my research focused on the structure and thermo dynamics of protein, DNA, and small-molecule interactions. In Vilnius, I lead a group of scientists to fundamentally under stand protein-ligand interactions and their application in the rational design of drugs against cancer and other illnesses. What led you to apply for the BPS Ambassador Program? I have attended most Biophysical Society Annual Meetings since 1996. They tremendously influenced my career and helped me keep pace with the discoveries in this vast and quickly evolving field. In 2014, I noticed that despite numerous researchers working in the biophysics field, there were very few attending the Annual Meeting. Lithuania was not even a member of the European Biophysical Societies Associa tion (EBSA). With a group of active researchers, led by Saulius Šatkauskas at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, we organized the Lithuanian Biophysical Society, which is now a member of EBSA. The Society has just organized the 4th Baltic Biophysics Conference with more than 130 attendees from 12 countries. We also participate in every EBSA meeting. However, there are still rather few Lithuanian scientists who attend BPS meetings, and I would like more of our students and experi enced scientists to go there and learn about new developments and discoveries in biophysics. What are your Ambassador Program goals? I hope to further promote BPS in Lithuania and increase aware ness about the Society, its Annual Meeting, scientific journals, and efforts to unite the world community of biophysicists. In addition, I plan to increase the participation of Lithuanians in the Annual Meeting. Furthermore, I hope that our scientists’ activities and research accomplishments could be of interest to BPS and that there could be paths to promote them in the Society. Daumantas Matulis scientific research. Since my return from the United States to Lithuania in 2005, I have been

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