Professor van der Donk of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign is an expert in the synthesis of peptide conjugates and has extensive experience in the development of biosynthetic technologies which have led to an array of several platforms, such as the discovery of an enzyme that acts on 30 very different substrates to generate a combinatorial library of cyclic peptides, or the recent development of the first example of yeast display of ribosomally synthesised and postranslationally modified peptides (RiPPs). As one of the leading international scientists working in the field of RiPPs, Professor van der Donk has highly important expertise about the ability to produce modified peptides using ribosomes.