Martin Steinegger

Seoul National University – South Korea                  

Dr Steinegger is an Associate Professor in the Biology Department at the Seoul National University, with a joint appointment to the Interdisciplinary Program in Bioinformatics. He conducted his doctoral studies at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry and was awarded a Ph.D. in computer science with summa cum laude honors from the Technical University Munich in 2018, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dr Steinegger’s work covers a wide range of topics in bioinformatics, from detecting genomic assembly contamination to organizing the protein structure universe. He was awarded the Overton Prize for outstanding contributions to computational biology by the International Society for Computational Biology in 2024 and was named a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher (2024, 2025).He started his research group in 2020, focusing on the development of methods to analyse massive genomics and proteomic datasets. The group’s contributions to bioinformatics include widely used tools for predicting structures (ColabFold), clustering (Linclust), ssembling (Plass), and searching sequences (MMseqs2) and protein structures (Foldseek). His group’s software and web services have been installed and used millions of times.Dr. Steinegger is an advocate for internationality at his home institution, open science and open source.

Abby Dernburg

University of California Berkeley – USA 

Biography will be available shortly. 

Liron Bar- Peled

Harvard University – USA

Liron Bar-Peled is the Rullo Family Endowed Chair for Cancer Research at MGH and an Associate Professor of Medicine in Biological and Biomedical Sciences at Harvard Medical School. He received his Bachelor of Science degree in Biochemistry from the University of Georgia and his PhD in Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he used advanced cellular and molecular techniques to uncover how nutrients are sensed. As a Damon Runyon Postdoctoral fellow at the Scripps Research Institute, he leveraged chemical proteomic technologies to understand how cancer cells respond to oxidative stress. Having started his lab at the Krantz Family Center for Cancer Research, he has made important contributions to understanding how tumors sense and respond to metabolic stress and identifies new druggable vulnerabilities by integrating technologies that leverage high-throughput biochemistry, chemistry, and analytics with clinical insights.  Liron’s work led to the founding of Scorpion Therapeutics (acquired by Eli Lily) and he has been widely recognized in the field as a Pew-Stewart Scholar, Mark Foundation Emerging Leader Award, NIH/NCI Merit Award, V Foundation Scholar, MRA young investigator and Damon Runyon Innovator.

Monika Chodasiewicz

Professor Monika Chodasiewicz completed her Ph.D. at the Max Planck Institute of Plant Physiology in Potsdam, Germany in 2014. Her Ph.D. research contributed significantly to the discovery of the oxygen-sensing mechanism in plants, which was recognized by Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe in his 2019 Nobel lecture. She continued at Max Planck as a postdoctoral fellow in the group of Prof. Lothar Willmitzer and Dr. Aleksandra Skirycz, where she studied small molecule-protein interactions using novel methods in biochemistry. Professor Chodasiewicz developed her research topic during that time and then formed her research group at KAUST in 2020, where her group studies stress-specific complexes of small molecules, proteins, and mRNA in plants and beyond. Her and her team use biochemistry, molecular biology, and cell biology to study condensates formed in plant cells under different stress conditions. 

Professor Chodasiewicz has devoted her career to researching biomolecular condensates in plants with particular interest on the stress granules that are formed in the cell in response to stress. Her group seeks to understand the molecular mechanism of condensate formation and their contribution to stress signaling and tolerance. The major focus of the group are stress granule-associated proteins harboring different biological functions such RNA-binding, regulation of metabolism, or hormonal homeostasis. Her lab also aims to increase the portfolio of methods that allow fragile interactions within the condensate to be explored. Overall, fundamental knowledge provides a comprehensive understanding of stress response in cells and will contribute to improved field crop management.  

Michael Kharas

Memorial Sloan-Ketting Cancer Centre - USA

Dr Michael Kharas is an Investigator that leads a laboratory in the Molecular Pharmacology Program at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (New York, NY, USA) and Professor at Weill Cornell Pharmacology Graduate Program. Dr Kharas finished his postdoctoral training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and studied how signaling pathways alters stem cell regulation. In 2011 he started his laboratory at MSK and focused on the controllers of cellular fate in the blood. His laboratory has uncovered new RNA regulators and how they modulate self-renewal, cell-fate decisions, and differentiation in both normal blood development and in myeloid leukemia. Also, his laboratory is developing inhibitors that block the function of RNA regulators as a new therapeutic strategy in cancer. Dr Kharas has received recognition including the Leukemia Lymphoma Society Scholar Award and American Society of Hematology Scholar Award.  

Danny Liu

University of Sydney – Australia 

Danny Liu is a molecular biologist by training, programmer by night, researcher and academic developer by day, and educator at heart. He works at the confluence of educational technology, student engagement, artificial intelligence, learning analytics, pedagogical research, organisational leadership, and professional development. He is currently a Professor in the Educational Innovation team in the DVC (Education) Portfolio at the University of Sydney.Prior to this, Danny was a Teaching Fellow in the Faculty of Science at the University of Sydney, where he was closely involved in the award-winning redevelopment of a number of introductory science units. Having coordinated and taught large undergraduate courses with 800-1500 students, he has a strong background in student engagement (such as through technology and inquiry-based learning), student transition, and infusing technology throughout the curriculum. Danny’s research career started with a PhD in the molecular and cell biology of plants, and his research and development focus has gradually shifted towards education after seeing the wide-reaching impact of good learning and teaching.

Sarah Woodson

John Hopkins University – USA 

Sarah Woodson is the T.C. Jenkins Professor of Biophysics at Johns Hopkins University.  She received her PhD in Biophysical Chemistry in 1987 with Donald Crothers at Yale University and did postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Thomas Cech at the University of Colorado Boulder from 1987-1990.  Her research group studies how RNA molecules fold into specific three-dimensional structures, and how the RNA and proteins components of cellular complexes such as the ribosome come together. In addition to biophysical methods such as X-ray scattering and single-molecule fluorescence, her group has pioneered the application of X-ray hydroxyl radical footprinting to RNA. Dr. Woodson received a Pew Scholar Award in the Biomedical Sciences in 1993, a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award in 1995, was elected an AAAS Fellow in 2010 and the President of the RNA Society (2016-2017).