August Ammerlaan MSc BA is a PhD candidate working in the Armstrong Group at the Leiden Institute of Chemistry. From 2016-2021, he pursued bachelor’s degrees in Chemistry and Italian Language and Culture at Utrecht University, including an Erasmus at the Università degli Studi di Salerno, where he followed master’s courses in advanced synthetic organic chemistry and molecular quantum mechanics. For his bachelor’s internship in the Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery group at Utrecht University, August enzymatically synthesized strategically 13C-labelled N-glycans receptors of H3N2 influenza A haemagglutinin, which were used for the uncovering of an extension of the lectin domain of H3N2 HA to outside the canonical binding pocket. After completion of his bachelor’s, August spent half a year travelling Italy and half a year navigating the North Sea and Baltic Sea, before starting his master’s degree in Chemistry at Leiden University. During his master’s degree, August also worked as a junior sustainability consultant in a consultancy startup that grew from 1.5 fte at the start to 6 fte when he left. He finished his master’s degree in 2023-2024 in the Bio-Organic Synthesis group with Jeroen Codée and Dmitri Filippov, working on the synthesis of methylene bisphosphonate analogues of a metabolite of Clostridioides difficile and other bisphosphonate and pyrophosphate-containing molecules. In 2024, August started his PhD under the supervision of Jeroen Codée, Zach Armstrong, and Dmitri Filippov. He is currently working on the synthesis of rhamnosylated peptides for the study of a post-translational modification in Pseudomonas aeruginosa and on the development of novel synthetic methodologies for difluoromethylene bisphosphonates

List of publications:

Unione L., Ammerlaan A.N.A., Bosman G.P., Uslu E., Liang R., Broszeti F.., Woude R. van der, Liu Y., Ma S., Liu L., Gómez-Redondo M., Bermejo I.A., Valverde P., Diercks T., Ardá A., Vries R.P. de & Boons G.J. (2024), Probing altered receptor specificities of antigenically drifting human H3N2 viruses by chemoenzymatic synthesis, NMR, and modeling, Nature Communications 15: 2979.

Ammerlaan A.N.A., Capel S., Özkan N & Speelman R.R. (eds.) (2024), Un letterato in viaggio: Liber amicorum per Raniero Speelman. Rotterdam, 2023, ISBN 978-94-6483-545-8.