Anthony Atala

Link Professor and Director, Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine

Dr. Anthony Atala is the Link Professor and Director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and the Boyce Professor and Chair of the Department of Urology at Wake Forest University. Dr. Atala’s work focuses on growing tissues and organs for patients and for physiological modelling. He is Editor-in-Chief of Stem Cells- Translational Medicine, and BioPrinting. Fifteen applications of technologies developed in his laboratory have been used clinically. He is editor of 25 books, has published over 800 journal articles and has applied for or received over 250 national/international patents. Dr. Atala was elected to the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Inventors. He is a recipient of the US Congress funded Columbus Foundation Award, the Edison Science/Medical Award, the R&D Innovator of the Year Award, and the Smithsonian Ingenuity Award. Dr. Atala’s work was listed twice as Time Magazine’s top 10 medical breakthroughs of the year, and he was named by Nature Biotechnology as one of the top 10 translational researchers in the world. Dr. Atala completed his MD degree at the University of Louisville, and his specialty training at Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School, where he remained as a faculty member before moving to Wake Forest.

Jeffrey T. Borenstein

Group Leader, Bioengineering, Draper

Jeffrey T. Borenstein, PhD, is Group Leader for Synthetic Biology and Bio Instrumentation and a Laboratory Fellow at Draper in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he leads programs in organ and disease models for drug discovery and safety testing, organ assist devices and drug delivery systems. Dr. Borenstein’s work is supported by DARPA, BARDA, NIH, and CDMRP, as well as several pharmaceutical and medical device companies. He has a Ph.D. in Physics and over twenty years of experience in the application of microsystems and microfabrication technologies toward medicine. Dr. Borenstein holds 80 issued patents and has over 120 peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings. He is a member of the National Academy of Inventors, and has served continuously for over a decade as a panel reviewer on multiple NIH study sections.

Sara Cherry

Professor of Pathology of Laboratory Medicine, Microbiology and Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics Scientific Director, High-throughput Screening Core Director, Program for Chemogenomic Discovery

Sara Cherry is a Professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Scientific Director of the High-throughput Screening Core and Director of the Chemogenomic Discovery Program in the School of Medicine. She obtained her BS with Dr. Peter Schultz at Berkeley, her PhD with Dr. David Baltimore at MIT and her postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Norbert Perrimon. Upon starting her laboratory at Penn she has applied High-throughput Screening technology to discover mechanisms by which emerging viral pathogens hijack cellular machinery while evading defenses. She has identified innate immune mechanisms and cellular interactions between viruses and cells comparing and contrasting viral families. More recently, she has uncovered new insights into the interplay between metabolic regulation, the microbiota and immune defense. Given the recent pandemic, her laboratory has now applied her screening platform to study the emerging coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 identifying new antivirals active in the respiratory tract. She has uncovered antivirals active through distinct mechanisms including innate immune modulators, direct acting antivirals and host directed antivirals. By comparing antivirals across related and unrelated viruses she has identified synergies between antivirals that may be leveraged for combination therapies.

Hans Clevers

Head of Pharma Research and Early Development, Member of the Enlarged Executive Committee, F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd

Prof. Hans Clevers obtained his MD degree in 1984 and his PhD degree in 1985 from the University Utrecht, the Netherlands. His postdoctoral work (1986-1989) was done with Cox Terhorst at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute of the Harvard University, Boston, USA. From 1991-2002 Hans Clevers was Professor in Immunology at the University Utrecht and, since 2002, Professor in Molecular Genetics. From 2002-2012 he was director of the Hubrecht Institute in Utrecht. From 2012-2015 he was President of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). From June 2015-2019 he was director Research of the Princess Máxima Center for pediatric oncology.

As of March 18th, 2022 Hans Clevers is the Head of Pharma Research and Early Development and a Member of the Enlarged Corporate Executive Committee of F.Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd , in Basel Switzerland.

Lee Gehrke

Professor, Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Microbiology, Harvard Medical School

Professor Lee Gehrke is the Hermann L.F. von Helmholtz Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Professor of Microbiology at Harvard Medical School. He was born and raised in rural Illinois before moving to Cleveland Ohio (CWRU) for graduate school, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at M.I.T. Dr. Gehrke's research has focused on RNA for his entire career, most recently on the positive sense RNA viruses and their pathogenesis. Dr. Gehrke was elected as a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) in 2021 and as a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology in 2022.

Linda Griffith

School of Engineering Professor of Teaching innovation, Department of Biological Engineering, and Director, Center for Gynepathology Research, MIT

Linda G. Griffith is the School of Engineering Professor of Teaching Innovation in the Departments of Biological and Mechanical Engineering at MIT, where she directs the Center for Gynepathology Research. She has pioneered approaches in tissue engineering and organs-on-chips and now integrates these platform technologies with systems biology to humanize drug development.  She has chaired numerous scientific meetings, including recently the Keystone Tissue Organoids Conference (2020), and has co-chaired the Open Endoscopy Forum at MIT annually since 2015. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), the National Academy of Medicine, ahe National Academy of Inventors, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and several awards from professional societies. She is a co-recipient of the 2021 NAE Gordon Prize, for leadership in creating the new discipline of Biological Engineering. Dr. Griffith currently serves on the advisory board of the Society for Women’s Health Research and has served on the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health. At MIT, she is a founding member of the Biological Engineering Department and led development of the undergraduate major in Biological Engineering, which was MIT’s first new undergraduate major in 39 years when it launched in 2005. She received her BS from Georgia Tech and PhD from UC Berkeley, both in chemical engineering.

Thomas Hartung

Doerenkamp-Zbinden Chair for Evidence-based Toxicology

Thomas Hartung, MD PhD, is the Doerenkamp-Zbinden-Chair for Evidence-based Toxicology in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, with a joint appointment at the Whiting School of Engineering. He also holds a joint appointment for Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Bloomberg School. He is adjunct affiliate professor at Georgetown University, Washington D.C.. In addition, he holds a joint appointment as Professor for Pharmacology and Toxicology at University of Konstanz, Germany; he also is Director of Centers for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT, http://caat.jhsph.edu) of both universities. CAAT hosts the secretariat of the Evidence-based Toxicology Collaboration (http://www.ebtox.org) and manages collaborative programs on Good Read-Across Practice, Good Cell Culture Practice, Green Toxicology, Developmental Neurotoxicity, Developmental Immunotoxicity, Microphysiological Systems and Refinement. As PI, he headed the Human Toxome project funded as an NIH Transformative Research Grant and the series of annual Microphysiological Systems World Summits starting in 2022 by almost 50 organizations. He is Chief Editor of Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. He is the former Head of the European Commission’s Center for the Validation of Alternative Methods (ECVAM), Ispra, Italy, and has authored more than 620 scientific publications (h-index 103). His toxicology classes on COURSERA had more than 14,000 active learners.

Donald E. Ingber

Founding Director, Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology, Harvard Medical School & Vascular Biology Program, Boston Children’s Hospital, Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Bioinspired Engineering, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

Donald E. Ingber, M.D.,Ph.D. is the Founding Director of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and the Vascular Biology Program at Boston Children's Hospital, and Professor of Bioengineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He received his B.A., M.A., M.Phil., M.D. and Ph.D. from Yale University.

Ingber is a pioneer in the field of biologically inspired engineering, and at the Wyss Institute, he currently leads scientific and engineering teams that cross a broad range of disciplines to develop breakthrough bioinspired technologies to advance healthcare and to improve sustainability. His work has led to major advances in mechanobiology, tumor angiogenesis, tissue engineering, systems biology, nanobiotechnology, and translational medicine, with his most recent pioneering contributions being the development of human Organ-on-Chips as replacements for animal testing and multiplexed electrochemical sensors for medical diagnostics. Through his work, Ingber has helped to break down boundaries between science, art and design, and has made great strides in translating his innovations into commercial products with many now either in clinical trials or currently being sold. He has authored more than 500 publications and almost 200 U.S. patents, founded 7 companies, and has been a guest speaker at more than 550 events internationally. Ingber is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Inventors, American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also was listed among the Top 20 Translational Researchers in 2012, 2019, and 2020 (Nature Biotechnology).

Nicole C. Kleinstreuer

Acting NICEATM Director, NIEHS

Dr. Nicole Kleinstreuer is the acting director of the NTP Interagency Center for the Evaluation of Alternative Toxicological Methods (NICEATM), the US federal resource for alternatives to animal testing. At NICEATM, she leads domestic and international efforts to develop novel testing and analysis strategies that provide more rapid, mechanistic, and human-relevant predictions of potential environmental chemical hazards. Kleinstreuer’s research focuses on mathematical and computational modeling of biological systems and their susceptibility to perturbations that result in adverse health outcomes. She has a secondary appointment in the NIEHS Division of Intramural Research Biostatistics and Computational Biology Branch, and adjunct faculty positions in the Yale University School of Public Health and the Eshelman School of Pharmacy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has published over 100 peer-reviewed publications and won numerous awards, including the 2019 Society of Toxicology Achievement Award, the 2016 Young Researcher Americas Award from the Lush Prize Foundation, the 2012 US EPA Office of Research and Development Impact Award, and the 2008 B.H. Neumann Prize from the Australian Mathematical Society.

Calvin Kuo

D’Ambrogio Professor of Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine

Dr. Calvin Kuo MD, PhD is the Maureen Lyles D’Ambrogio Professor of Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine.   His research interests include modeling of immunity and pathogens and cancer in 3D organoid cultures, biology of intestinal and lung stem cell populations, and molecular regulation of angiogenesis and the blood-brain barrier. He is an elected member of the Association of American Physicians, American Society for Clinical Investigation and AAAS.

Emily M. Lee

Staff Scientist I, Functional Group Lead, Advanced Models & Cell Discovery, Antiviral Program for Pandemics, Division of Preclinical Innovation, 3D Tissue Bioprinting Lab, Early Translation Branch, National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, National Institutes of Health

Emily Lee joined the Early Translation Branch in the Division of Preclinical Innovation at NCATS in 2019 as a Biologist. Drawing on her diverse background in virology, high throughput drug screening, and iPSC and primary cell complex in vitro models, Emily leads the Advanced Models & Cell Discovery Assay group within the Antiviral Program for Pandemics.

Prior to joining the Early Translation Branch at NCATS, Lee was a postdoctoral fellow in the Therapeutics Development Branch at NCATS where she developed high throughput assays for antiviral screening and for rare genetic diseases. Lee earned her doctorate in cell and molecular biology from the Florida State University, where she worked with Hengli Tang, Ph.D., to study host-pathogen interactions and to identify potential antiviral compounds with a focus on positive sense RNA viruses belonging to the family Flaviviridae.

Research Topics

Lee’s research focuses on developing and characterizing physiologically relevant cell-based and tissue-engineered platforms for viral disease modeling and antiviral drug discovery. Her and her team engage in fast-paced and highly collaborative projects and are currently engaged in projects pertaining to high impact BSL-2 and BSL-3 viral infections, including SARS-CoV-2 research. Lee’s team works closely with members of the 3D Tissue Bioprinting Lab within the Early Translation Branch, as well as with academic, government, and industry partners.

Christine Mummery

Professor of Developmental Biology, Dept. of Anatomy & Embryology, Leiden University Medical Center

Professor Christine Mummery, Ph.D. is Professor of Developmental Biology and heads the iPSC&OoC Hotel facility in the LUMC. She trained in Biophysics from the University of London and since 2015, has been guest professor at the University of Twente. Her research concerns modelling cardiovascular diseases using stem cells from patients and developing organ-on-chip models of multiple organs for safety pharmacology and potential disease and drug targets. She leads a multimillion NWO Gravity grant for this purpose and holds European Research Council Advanced and Proof-of-Concept grants. She co-founded the European Organ on Chip Society and the Netherlands Human Disease Modelling Technology organization (hDMT.technology).

She is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Science (KNAW) and past president of the International Society of Stem Cell research (ISSCR). She was founding editor of the ISSCR journal Stem Cell Reports. She is on several scientific advisory boards including the Hubrecht Institute, the Allen Institute, Mogrify and Sartorius Gmbh.

Sashi Ramani

Assistant Professor, Molecular Virology and Microbiology, Baylor College of Medicine

Sashi Ramani is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular Virology and Microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston. Her areas of interest are maternal and child health with a focus on gastrointestinal infections and vaccines. Dr. Ramani has extensive experience working on the epidemiology and pathogenesis of rotaviruses and noroviruses. The goals of her research program are to understand factors that contribute to disease susceptibility and identify mechanisms to improve immune responses to infectious agents and vaccines, with the overall objective of developing targeted interventions to improve public health. Her work using human intestinal organoid cultures from diverse donors provides a physiologically relevant and genetically representative system to understand host-pathogen interactions at a molecular level and enables preclinical testing of interventions. Through collaboration with an interdisciplinary group of researchers and through population studies to evaluate findings in human subjects, Dr. Ramani’s work takes a bench-to-bedside approach to understanding enteric infectious diseases.

Edwin A. Rosado-Olivieri

Vice President, RumiViro

Dr. Rosado-Olivieri is the Vice President of RumiViro and directs the technological developments for viral infectious diseases at Rumi Scientific. He obtained his doctoral degree in Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology from Harvard Medical School, under the mentoring of Dr. Douglas Melton, after completing his bachelor’s degree in Cell and Molecular Biology from the University of Puerto Rico. As a postdoctoral scholar, he joined the laboratory of RumiViro’s founder Dr. Ali Brivanlou at The Rockefeller University, where he developed an innovative stem cell-based platform to track infection by respiratory viruses and identify therapeutics for COVID-19, in collaboration with the laboratory of Dr. Charles Rice. He spearheaded the creation of RumiViro, which focuses on the discovery of first-in-class broad-spectrum antiviral therapeutics for respiratory viruses and virus-induced acute kidney injury. Among his awards, he is the recipient of the Merit Award from the International Society for Stem Cell Research in 2019, Harvard Blavatnik Biomedical Accelerator Award in 2019, Harvard Distinction in Teaching Award in 2016, UPR Distinction in Research Award in 2015, and the NFS GRFP fellowship in 2014.

Evi Struble

Research Pharmacologist, Plasma Derivatives Branch, Division of Plasma Protein Therapeutics, Office of Tissues and Advanced Therapies Center, for Biologics Evaluation and Research, U.S. Food and Drug Administration

Dr. Struble earned a PhD in Biophysics from Johns Hopkins University followed by a post-doctoral training at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, Md. She is a Research Pharmacologist in CBER, FDA where she performs reviews of regulatory applications and mission related research. Dr. Struble’s regulatory responsibilities include advice and evaluation of preclinical studies for plasma protein therapeutics, including hyperimmune globulin preparations for infectious disease indications.

As a research scientist, Dr. Struble investigates appropriate animal and in vitro models for assessing safety and efficacy of antibody drugs during pregnancy. Her most recent work has been focused on therapies for Zika viral (ZIKV) infections. In collaboration with National Center of Toxicologic Research, Dr. Struble is working towards developing an MPS that recapitulates critical features of human placenta with the goal of using it to test anti-ZIKV antibody therapy during pregnancy.

Zhengpeng (Jason) Wan

Postdoc Associate

Zhengpeng Wan received his Ph.D. degree in Biology from Tsinghua University in 2018. He studied B lymphocyte mechanobiology in Dr. Wanli Liu's lab. Currently, he is a postdoc in Roger D. Kamm's lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working on vascularized tumor and organoid models using microfluidic technology.

Jia Zhu

Associate Professor, Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division, Fred Hutch Cancer Center; Research Associate Professor, Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology, University of Washington School of Medicine

Jia Zhu, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and Research Associate Professor in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology, University of Washington School of Medicine. She obtained her PhD in Microbiology from Chinese Academy of Science, Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica. After a broad postdoctoral and fellowship training in areas of basic virology of herpes simplex virus (HSV) at the Wistar Institute and Harvard Medical School, she joined University of Washington and extended her scientific interests into clinical aspects of human HSV-2 pathogenesis.

Dr. Zhu studies the tissue-based immune response to HSV infection in human skin and genital mucosa, focusing on intricate interactions between HSV and local immune responses. Early on she developed novel laboratory tools to detect how immune cells behave in genital tissues during the active and latent phases of herpes infection. These pivotal studies led to the plausible explanation on how local inflammation by chronic HSV reactivation increases HIV acquisition, as well as the discovery of tissue resident memory CD8+ T cells accumulating at sites of virus release and performing immune surveillance and rapid clearance. Currently, her team has bioengineered a 3-D vascularized, biomimetic ‘Skin-on-Chip’ device that is capable of immune-cell and drug perfusion, which might serve as an alternative platform for deciphering complex and dynamic host pathophysiology to HSV infection and for preclinical evaluation of antiviral drug efficacy in humans.