**About the Editors**

#### **Mariana Spetea**

Mariana Spetea earned a M.Sc. degree in Biochemistry (1993) from the University of Bucharest (Romania) and her Ph.D. degree in Biology (1998) from the Jozsef Attila University ´ (Szeged, Hungary). She spent two years (1998-–1999) as a post-doctoral fellow at the Karolinska Institute (Stockholm, Sweden), with research fellowships awarded by the Swedish Institute and the Wenner-Gren Center Foundation. In 2000, she joined the "Opioid Research Group" leaded by Prof. Helmut Schmidhammer at the University of Innsbruck (Austria), as a research associate and assistant professor, where she has habilitated in Pharmacology (2010). Since 2011, she is the head of the "Opioid Research Group". An important focus of her research is dedicated to opioid drug discovery and development. Central topics of her research include structure-activity relationships of new opioid ligands, modulation of the ligand/opioid receptor system in pathological pain and molecular mechanism of opioid actions. She has been a research leader and associate researcher of several research projects, as well as the scientific coordinator of a European Union research project. Besides science, Prof. Spetea is devoted to education in Pharmaceutical Sciences of undergraduate and graduate students at the Faculty of Chemistry and Pharmacy, University of Innsbruck. Her scientific achievements have been published in numerous peer-reviewed articles, reviews, conference proceedings and patents, and have been disseminated in popular science reports. Beside several numerous awards, she was also the receiver of "Science4Life Venture Cup 2003". Prof. Spetea is Editorial Board Member of Frontiers (Frontiers in Neuroscience, Pharmacology, Neurology, Psychiatry and Drug Discovery) and Molecules, and was a Guest Editor of Special Issues of Current Pharmaceutical Design (2013) and Molecules (2020 and 2021).

#### **Richard M. van Rijn**

Richard M. van Rijn received a B.S./M.S. degree in Bio-Pharmaceutical Sciences from Leiden University (The Netherlands). For his Ph.D. training, he joined the pharmacochemistry research group of Prof. Dr. Rob Leurs at VU University Amsterdam in 2002. After a brief stint in a research associate position at Biofocus DPI, a Galapagos subsidiary serving as contract research organization creating custom adenoviruses, he joined the laboratory of Dr. Jennifer Whistler at the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center within the Department of Neuroscience at the University of California San Francisco in 2007. Here, he received post-doctoral training in the behavioral neuropharmacology of opioid receptors in the area of substance use-, pain-, and mood disorders. He was awarded a K99/R00 pathway to independence award from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism to study the delta opioid receptor as a target to treat alcohol use disorders. In 2013, he started his own laboratory in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Purdue University. His research program combined high-throughput chemical library screening with natural product drug discovery to identify novel opioids with distinct and unique pharmacology to treat a variety of neurological disorders, focusing on biased signaling. He received multiple grants from the NIH and patents covering both opioids and adenylyl cyclase inhibitors. He received young investigator awards from the Brain and Behavior Foundation and the International Narcotics Research Conference. In 2020, he carried out a sabbatical in the laboratory of Dr. Brian Shoichet in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at UCSF. In 2021, he joined Septerna Inc., a pharmaceutical start-up company cofounded by Drs. Robert Lefkowitz, Arthur Christopoulos and Patrick Sexton specialized in small molecule drug discovery at G protein-coupled receptors.
