Martin Steinegger

Seoul National University – South Korea                  

Dr. Martin Steinegger is an Associate Professor in the Biology Department at Seoul National University, jointly appointed to the Interdisciplinary Program in Bioinformatics. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the Technical University of Munich in 2018 after doctoral studies at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry and later completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on developing scalable computational methods to analyze massive genomic and proteomic datasets. His group has developed widely used bioinformatics tools, including MMseqs2, Foldseek, Linclust, Plass, and ColabFold. These tools are broadly used by the life sciences community worldwide. In 2024, he received the Overton Prize from the International Society for Computational Biology.

Abby Dernburg

University of California Berkeley – USA 

Abby Dernburg is a Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. She earned her PhD from UCSF in 1996 studying chromosome organization in Drosophila with John Sedat, then carried out postdoctoral research with Anne Villeneuve at Stanford University, where she helped establish C. elegans as a premier model for meiosis research. Her laboratory deploys diverse tools, including genetics, genome editing, advanced microscopy, genomics, and biophysical modeling to uncover how chromosomes pair, recombine, and segregate during meiosis, mechanisms that underlie reproduction and genome evolution in eukaryotes. 

Liron Bar- Peled

Harvard University – USA

Liron Bar-Peled is the Rullo Family Endowed Chair for Cancer Research at Massachusetts General Hospital and an Associate Professor of Medicine in Biological and Biomedical Sciences at Harvard Medical School. He earned his Bachelor of Science 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 approaches to uncover how cells sense nutrients. As a Damon Runyon Postdoctoral Fellow at The Scripps Research Institute, he applied chemical proteomic technologies to define how cancer cells adapt to oxidative stress. Since founding his laboratory at the Krantz Family Center for Cancer Research, Dr. Bar-Peled has made key contributions to understanding how tumors sense and respond to metabolic stress, and to identifying druggable vulnerabilities by integrating high-content biochemistry, chemical biology, and computational analytics with clinical insight. His work contributed to the founding of Scorpion Therapeutics, which was later acquired by Eli Lilly, and he has been widely recognized for his contributions with honors including the Pew-Stewart Scholar Award, the Mark Foundation Emerging Leader Award, the NIH/NCI Merit Award, the V Foundation Scholar Award, the Melanoma Research Alliance Young Investigator Award, and the Damon Runyon Innovator Award.

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. Her research group studies how RNA molecules fold, and how RNAs interact with proteins for gene regulation and ribosome assembly. Dr. Woodson was elected a AAAS Fellow, served as the President of the RNA Society and received the Lifetime Service Achievement Award from the RNA Society in 2020 and Ignacio Tinoco Award in Biophysical Chemistry from the Biophysical Society in 2023.