Third International Summit on Human Genome Editing

Mathieu Boudes

Montsouris Consilium

Mathieu Boudes is a patient engagement expert providing strategic advice, stakeholder engagement, implementation support, and partnership services to the pharmaceutical companies, patient advocacy groups and larger consultancies to unlock patient insights to R&D, clinical and access teams and public-private consortia.

Bettina Ryll

Melanoma Patient Network Europe & European Commission

Dr Ryll holds a medical degree from the Free University of Berlin, Germany and a PhD in Biomedical Sciences from University College London, UK.

After losing her husband to melanoma, she founded the Melanoma Patient Network Europe and developed a special interest in patient-centric clinical research, in particular, innovative trial designs and novel drug development concepts, such as MAPPS (medicines' adaptive pathways to patients), previously known as Adaptive Licensing. Lately, her focus has moved to sustainable healthcare models ensuring access to innovative therapies for cancer patients and incentives for sustainable innovation.

Dr Ryll is involved in numerous initiatives promoting evidence-based advocacy. She is fascinated by the enormous potential and capacity of patient networks to both educate and support patients as well as to capture data at the primary data source – the patients themselves – and to generate evidence at a granular level non-accessible to outsiders.

From 2015 - 2018 Dr Ryll chaired the ESMO Patient Advocates Working Group, the first time this position has been held by a non-oncologist. The PAWG is responsible for the Patient Advocacy Track at the annual ESMO meeting, organises workshops of interest to the wider advocacy and medical community and has an advisory function for ESMO activities.

She was also a member of the ESMO Quality of Care Task Force from 2015 – 2018 and is currently a member of the ESMO Investigational Immunotherapy Faculty Group.

Alex Pearlman

Bioethicist, Journalist & MIT Media Lab Community Biotechnology Initiative

Alex Pearlman is a bioethicist and science communicator whose work focuses on the intersection of justice, health policy, and emerging biotechnologies, specifically within the nascent DIYbio/Community Bio movements. She was formerly a researcher in the Wexler Lab at the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, and is a Research Affiliate with the MIT Media Lab's Community Biotechnology Initiative. Pearlman's reporting and analysis has been featured widely in the international press in outlets such as Stat News, New Scientist, the MIT Technology Review, and others. She is currently the Communications Director at Concentric by Ginkgo, the public health and biosecurity arm of synthetic biology company Ginkgo Bioworks. 

Māui Hudson

University of Waikato, Aotearoa New Zealand

Māui Hudson affiliates to the Whakatōhea Nation in Aotearoa New Zealand and is a member of the Whakatohea Maori Trust Board. He is an Associate Professor and Director of Te Kotahi Research Institute at the University of Waikato. He is a founding member of Te Mana Raraunga Maori Data Sovereignty Network and Global Indigenous Data Alliance, and is a co-author of the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance and the Te Mata Ira Guidelines for Genomic Research with Maori.

Mathieu Boudes

Montsouris Consilium

Mathieu Boudes is a patient engagement expert providing strategic advice, stakeholder engagement, implementation support, and partnership services to the pharmaceutical companies, patient advocacy groups and larger consultancies to unlock patient insights to R&D, clinical and access teams and public-private consortia.

Bettina Ryll

Melanoma Patient Network Europe & European Commission

Dr Ryll holds a medical degree from the Free University of Berlin, Germany and a PhD in Biomedical Sciences from University College London, UK.

After losing her husband to melanoma, she founded the Melanoma Patient Network Europe and developed a special interest in patient-centric clinical research, in particular, innovative trial designs and novel drug development concepts, such as MAPPS (medicines' adaptive pathways to patients), previously known as Adaptive Licensing. Lately, her focus has moved to sustainable healthcare models ensuring access to innovative therapies for cancer patients and incentives for sustainable innovation.

Dr Ryll is involved in numerous initiatives promoting evidence-based advocacy. She is fascinated by the enormous potential and capacity of patient networks to both educate and support patients as well as to capture data at the primary data source – the patients themselves – and to generate evidence at a granular level non-accessible to outsiders.

From 2015 - 2018 Dr Ryll chaired the ESMO Patient Advocates Working Group, the first time this position has been held by a non-oncologist. The PAWG is responsible for the Patient Advocacy Track at the annual ESMO meeting, organises workshops of interest to the wider advocacy and medical community and has an advisory function for ESMO activities.

She was also a member of the ESMO Quality of Care Task Force from 2015 – 2018 and is currently a member of the ESMO Investigational Immunotherapy Faculty Group.

Alex Pearlman

Bioethicist, Journalist & MIT Media Lab Community Biotechnology Initiative

Alex Pearlman is a bioethicist and science communicator whose work focuses on the intersection of justice, health policy, and emerging biotechnologies, specifically within the nascent DIYbio/Community Bio movements. She was formerly a researcher in the Wexler Lab at the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, and is a Research Affiliate with the MIT Media Lab's Community Biotechnology Initiative. Pearlman's reporting and analysis has been featured widely in the international press in outlets such as Stat News, New Scientist, the MIT Technology Review, and others. She is currently the Communications Director at Concentric by Ginkgo, the public health and biosecurity arm of synthetic biology company Ginkgo Bioworks. 

Māui Hudson

University of Waikato, Aotearoa New Zealand

Māui Hudson affiliates to the Whakatōhea Nation in Aotearoa New Zealand and is a member of the Whakatohea Maori Trust Board. He is an Associate Professor and Director of Te Kotahi Research Institute at the University of Waikato. He is a founding member of Te Mana Raraunga Maori Data Sovereignty Network and Global Indigenous Data Alliance, and is a co-author of the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance and the Te Mata Ira Guidelines for Genomic Research with Maori.

Amy Wagers

Harvard University

Amy Wagers is the Forst Family Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard University, Senior Investigator in the Section on Islet Cell and Regenerative Biology at the Joslin Diabetes Center, Co-chair of the department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard, an HHMI Early Career Scientist, and a member of the Paul F. Glenn Laboratories for the Biological Mechanisms of Aging at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Wagers received her PhD in Immunology and Microbial Pathogenesis from Northwestern University, and completed postdoctoral training in stem cell biology at Stanford University.

Wagers’s research seeks to understand how changes in stem cell activity impact tissue homeostasis and repair throughout life. Work from her lab provides evidence for the existence of a conserved systemic regulatory axis that modulates tissue maintenance and regeneration across a wide variety of tissues that vary significantly in their intrinsic repair capacity, and her ongoing studies have begun to identify the molecules responsible for age-variant regulation of regenerative potential. Dr. Wagers has authored more than 100 primary research and review articles, and her work has been recognized by awards from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, Beckman Foundation, WM Keck Foundation, and Glenn Foundation, and National Institutes of Health. In 2013, she received the New York Stem Cell Foundation’s Robertson Prize for outstanding achievement in translational stem cell research.

Joni L Rutter

National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, USA National Institute of Health

Joni L. Rutter, Ph.D., is the director of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Rutter oversees the planning and execution of the Center’s complex, multifaceted programs that aim to overcome scientific and operational barriers impeding the development and delivery of new treatments and other health solutions. Under her direction, NCATS supports innovative tools and strategies to make each step in the translational process more effective and efficient, thus speeding research across a range of diseases, with a particular focus on rare diseases. By advancing the science of translation, NCATS helps turn promising research discoveries into real-world applications that improve people’s health. In her previous role as the NCATS deputy director, Rutter collaborated with colleagues from government, academia, industry, and nonprofit patient organizations to establish robust interactions with NCATS programs.

Prior to joining NCATS, Rutter served as the director of scientific programs within the All of Us Research Program, where she led the scientific programmatic development and implementation efforts to build a national research cohort of at least 1 million U.S. participants to advance precision medicine. During her time at NIH, she also has led the Division of Neuroscience and Behavior at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). In this role, she developed and coordinated research on basic and clinical neuroscience, brain and behavioral development, genetics, epigenetics, computational neuroscience, bioinformatics, and drug discovery. Rutter also coordinated the NIDA Genetics Consortium and biospecimen repository.

Throughout her career, Rutter has earned a national and international reputation for her diverse and unique expertise via more than 50 publications in journals, and she has received several scientific achievement awards, including a SmithKline Beecham Student Award in Pharmacology, a Janssen Research Foundation Young Investigator Award, and a Fellowship Achievement Award from the National Cancer Institute (NCI).

Rutter received her Ph.D. from the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, Dartmouth Medical School, Hanover, New Hampshire, and completed a fellowship at NCI within the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics.

Rachel Haurwitz

Caribou Biosciences

Rachel is a co-founder of Caribou Biosciences and has been its President and Chief Executive Officer and a director since the company’s inception in 2011. Rachel is an inventor on patents and patent applications covering multiple CRISPR-based technologies, and has co-authored several scientific papers in high-impact journals characterizing CRISPR-Cas systems. In 2014, she was named by Forbes Magazine to the “30 Under 30” list in Science and Healthcare, and in 2016, Fortune Magazine named her to the “40 Under 40” list of the most influential young people in business. In 2018, the Association for Women in Science recognized Rachel with the annual Next Generation Award. She serves on the board of directors of Seer, Inc. and the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO). Rachel earned an A.B. in Biological Sciences from Harvard College and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley.

Sonja Schrepfer

University of California San Francisco & Sana Biotechnology Inc

Work by Dr. Sonja Schrepfer is at the forefront of stem immunobiology and paves the way for treatment of a wide range of diseases – from supporting functional recovery of failing myocardium to the derivation of other cell types to treat diabetes, blindness, cancer, lung, neurodegenerative, and related diseases. Her work demonstrates that protecting transplanted cells from immune rejection is the key to unlocking the potential of regenerative medicine.

Dr. Schrepfer is Professor at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), Gladstone-UCSF Institute of Genomic Immunology, and a Scientific Founder and SVP (Head of the Hypoimmune Platform) of Sana Biotechnology, Inc.

Amy Wagers

Harvard University

Amy Wagers is the Forst Family Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard University, Senior Investigator in the Section on Islet Cell and Regenerative Biology at the Joslin Diabetes Center, Co-chair of the department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard, an HHMI Early Career Scientist, and a member of the Paul F. Glenn Laboratories for the Biological Mechanisms of Aging at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Wagers received her PhD in Immunology and Microbial Pathogenesis from Northwestern University, and completed postdoctoral training in stem cell biology at Stanford University.

Wagers’s research seeks to understand how changes in stem cell activity impact tissue homeostasis and repair throughout life. Work from her lab provides evidence for the existence of a conserved systemic regulatory axis that modulates tissue maintenance and regeneration across a wide variety of tissues that vary significantly in their intrinsic repair capacity, and her ongoing studies have begun to identify the molecules responsible for age-variant regulation of regenerative potential. Dr. Wagers has authored more than 100 primary research and review articles, and her work has been recognized by awards from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, Beckman Foundation, WM Keck Foundation, and Glenn Foundation, and National Institutes of Health. In 2013, she received the New York Stem Cell Foundation’s Robertson Prize for outstanding achievement in translational stem cell research.

Joni L Rutter

National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, USA National Institute of Health

Joni L. Rutter, Ph.D., is the director of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Rutter oversees the planning and execution of the Center’s complex, multifaceted programs that aim to overcome scientific and operational barriers impeding the development and delivery of new treatments and other health solutions. Under her direction, NCATS supports innovative tools and strategies to make each step in the translational process more effective and efficient, thus speeding research across a range of diseases, with a particular focus on rare diseases. By advancing the science of translation, NCATS helps turn promising research discoveries into real-world applications that improve people’s health. In her previous role as the NCATS deputy director, Rutter collaborated with colleagues from government, academia, industry, and nonprofit patient organizations to establish robust interactions with NCATS programs.

Prior to joining NCATS, Rutter served as the director of scientific programs within the All of Us Research Program, where she led the scientific programmatic development and implementation efforts to build a national research cohort of at least 1 million U.S. participants to advance precision medicine. During her time at NIH, she also has led the Division of Neuroscience and Behavior at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). In this role, she developed and coordinated research on basic and clinical neuroscience, brain and behavioral development, genetics, epigenetics, computational neuroscience, bioinformatics, and drug discovery. Rutter also coordinated the NIDA Genetics Consortium and biospecimen repository.

Throughout her career, Rutter has earned a national and international reputation for her diverse and unique expertise via more than 50 publications in journals, and she has received several scientific achievement awards, including a SmithKline Beecham Student Award in Pharmacology, a Janssen Research Foundation Young Investigator Award, and a Fellowship Achievement Award from the National Cancer Institute (NCI).

Rutter received her Ph.D. from the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, Dartmouth Medical School, Hanover, New Hampshire, and completed a fellowship at NCI within the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics.

Rachel Haurwitz

Caribou Biosciences

Rachel is a co-founder of Caribou Biosciences and has been its President and Chief Executive Officer and a director since the company’s inception in 2011. Rachel is an inventor on patents and patent applications covering multiple CRISPR-based technologies, and has co-authored several scientific papers in high-impact journals characterizing CRISPR-Cas systems. In 2014, she was named by Forbes Magazine to the “30 Under 30” list in Science and Healthcare, and in 2016, Fortune Magazine named her to the “40 Under 40” list of the most influential young people in business. In 2018, the Association for Women in Science recognized Rachel with the annual Next Generation Award. She serves on the board of directors of Seer, Inc. and the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO). Rachel earned an A.B. in Biological Sciences from Harvard College and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley.

Sonja Schrepfer

University of California San Francisco & Sana Biotechnology Inc

Work by Dr. Sonja Schrepfer is at the forefront of stem immunobiology and paves the way for treatment of a wide range of diseases – from supporting functional recovery of failing myocardium to the derivation of other cell types to treat diabetes, blindness, cancer, lung, neurodegenerative, and related diseases. Her work demonstrates that protecting transplanted cells from immune rejection is the key to unlocking the potential of regenerative medicine.

Dr. Schrepfer is Professor at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), Gladstone-UCSF Institute of Genomic Immunology, and a Scientific Founder and SVP (Head of the Hypoimmune Platform) of Sana Biotechnology, Inc.

Mike McCune

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Joseph (“Mike”) McCune is Head of the HIV Frontiers Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a Professor Emeritus of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. After studies at Harvard College (with Jack Strominger, leading to an AB in biochemistry) and at the Rockefeller University (with Henry Kunkel and Gunter Blobel, leading to a PhD in cell biology and immunology), he started to treat patients with HIV disease as a resident in internal medicine at UCSF from 1982-1984 and has been involved in the HIV/AIDS research field ever since. This work included postdoctoral studies with Irv Weissman at Stanford (1985-1988), exploring the fusogenic properties of the HIV envelope protein and invention of the first humanized mouse model (the SCID-hu mouse) capable of multilineage human hematopoiesis and receptive to infection with primary isolates of HIV, and was continued in companies that he co-founded (SyStemix in 1988 and Progenesys in 1991) and at which he served first as CEO and then as a Scientific Director. In 1995, Dr. McCune returned to academia as an investigator at the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology and then (starting in 2006) as the Chief of the Division of Experimental Medicine (which he founded) at UCSF. Concomitantly, he was the founding PI (and Senior Associate Dean) of the Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute at UCSF (from 2005-08). In recent years, he has helped to form multidisciplinary, collaborative research teams to find a cure for HIV disease, first in the context of NIH- and amfAR-funded “collaboratories” at UCSF (2010-2016) and then as Head of the HIV Frontiers Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (2018-present). Throughout this time, he has taken care of patients with HIV disease at the San Francisco General Hospital AIDS Clinic/Ward 86 and has also actively mentored graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, many of whom have gone on to successful careers in academia or biotech/pharma.

Dr. McCune’s studies have led to the publication of over 280 peer-reviewed articles and reviews, and he is the holder of 21 patents and inventions. On the basis of this work, he has been awarded the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation Scientist Award in 1996, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Clinical Scientist Award in Translational Research in 2000, a MERIT Award from the NIH in 2001, the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award in 2004, a Gates Grand Challenges Explorations Phase II Award in 2011, and a number of mentoring awards for his activities with junior faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students. He is a member of many scientific and professional societies, including the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the American Association of Physicians, and the Henry Kunkel Society. He has also served on the editorial boards of multiple scientific journals. He has served as a board member for a variety of organizations, including The Rockefeller University, the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, Project Inform, Project Open Hand, the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the Foundation for AIDS and Immune Research, the Foundation for Vaccine Research, the Alliance for Lupus Research, the Immune Tolerance Network, the Bluefield Project to Cure Frontotemporal Dementia, and for the biotechnology companies, SyStemix, Progenesys, and Prosetta. 

Steve Pearson

Institute for Clinical and Economic Review

Steven D. Pearson, MD, MSc is the Founder and President of the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER).  Dr. Pearson is also a Lecturer in the Department of Population Medicine at Harvard Medical School.  

An internist, health services researcher, and ethicist, Dr. Pearson has served in many advisory and leadership roles in academia and government.  In 2004 he was awarded an Atlantic Fellowship from the British Government and chose to serve as Senior Fellow at the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE).  Returning to the United States in 2005 he was asked to serve during the George W. Bush Administration as Special Advisor, Technology and Coverage Policy, at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and also accepted an appointment as Visiting Scientist in the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health, a position he maintained from 2005-2019.  In other roles, Dr. Pearson has also served as the Vice Chair of the Medicare Evidence Development and Coverage Advisory Committee (MedCAC).

Dr. Pearson’s publications include over 150 peer-reviewed articles and commentaries on the role of evidence in the health care system, and the book No Margin, No Mission: Health Care Organizations and the Quest for Ethical Excellence, published by Oxford University Press.

Claire Booth

UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health & AGORA Initiative

Prof Claire Booth, MBBS PhD is a Gene Therapist and Paediatric Immunologist at UCL Great Ormond Street Hospital Institute of Child Health in London and leads the clinical stem cell gene therapy programme. She graduated from Guy’s, King’s and St. Thomas’ School of Medicine in 2001 and  trained in Paediatrics, subspecialising in Paediatric Immunology and Immunodeficiency.  She undertook a Wellcome Trust funded PhD at UCL developing haematopoietic stem cell gene therapy, with continued NIHR and Wellcome Trust post-doctoral support to establish her own research group.  She was appointed as a Consultant in Paediatric Immunology at Great Ormond Street Hospital in 2014 and holds an honorary position at Boston Children’s Hospital/Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School.

Claire now works as a clinical academic leading an expanding number of gene therapy clinical trials at Great Ormond Street Hospital which treats patients with immune deficiencies, haematological and metabolic disorders.  Her lab group is focused on developing novel therapies for immune system disorders using both gene therapy/gene editing and targeted small molecules.  She has extensive experience of translating, leading, and delivering first in human clinical trials and the commercialisation pathway. As an attending physician she oversees the clinical management of patients with immune deficiencies, including hematopoietic stem cell transplantation.

Claire is an internationally recognised expert in gene therapy and immunology, an elected board member of the European Society of Gene and Cell Therapy, Chair of the International Committee of the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy and previously served two terms on the board of the British Society.

She is also the co-founder of the AGORA initiative (Access to Gene therapies fOr RAre disease) which has founding members across 6 European countries and brings together clinicians and scientist with direct experience of developing and delivering ex vivo gene therapies for rare diseases, aiming to facilitate access to effective gene therapies for treatment of patients with ultra-rare diseases.

Tippi MacKenzie

University of California, San Francisco

Tippi MacKenzie is a Professor of Surgery at the University of California, San Francisco and the Director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Institute for Regeneration Medicine. She is a pediatric and fetal surgeon who is focused on developing better ways to diagnose and treat genetic diseases before birth. She runs a translational research lab examining fetal immunology and maternal-fetal tolerance, with the ultimate goal of inventing new fetal therapies for patients with genetic diseases or pregnancy complications. She has moved two fetal molecular therapies from the lab to the clinic as phase 1 clinical trials after obtaining FDA approval: in utero hematopoietic stem cell transplantation to treat fetuses with alpha thalassemia and in utero enzyme replacement therapy in fetuses with lysosomal storage disorders. Her research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the March of Dimes, the California Institute for Regeneration Medicine, and the Burroughs-Wellcome Fund. Tippi has been elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the National Academy of Medicine for her innovative work.

Tippi trained in classical piano at Juilliard before obtaining her undergraduate degree from Harvard College and her medical degree from Stanford University.  She completed her surgical residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and obtained additional fellowships in Fetal Surgery and Pediatric Surgery at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. She joined the faculty at the University of California, San Francisco in 2007 and is now a Professor of Surgery. She recently co-founded the Center for Maternal-Fetal Precision Medicine, with the aim of accelerating the processes that link basic research to clinical trials to improve maternal, fetal, and neonatal health. This Center is testing methods to improve prenatal diagnosis of birth defects and developing new cellular and molecular therapies for definitive fetal treatment. 

Eric Olson

University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center

Eric Olson is the founding Chair of the Department of Molecular Biology at UT Southwestern Medical Center.  He also directs the Hamon Center for Regenerative Science and Medicine and the Wellstone Center for Muscular Dystrophy Research at UT Southwestern.  He holds the Robert A. Welch Distinguished Chair and the Annie and Willie Nelson Professorship in Stem Cell Research.

Eric Olson and his trainees discovered many of the key genes and mechanisms responsible for development and disease of the heart and other muscles.  His most recent work has provided new strategies for correction of genetic disorders of muscle and the heart using CRISPR gene editing.

Dr. Olson is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received numerous additional honors for his work.  He has co-founded multiple biotechnology companies to design new therapies for heart and muscle disease.  

Angelo Lombardo

San Raffaele-Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy & Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Italy

Angelo obtained his PhD in Cellular and Molecular Biology in 2011 working on the development of innovative gene therapy approaches based on artificial nucleases and targeted genome editing. His early studies were the first to report gene editing in therapeutically relevant cell types, including human pluripotent stem cells, primary T cells, epidermal stem cells, and neural stem cells. His major contribution to the field further extends to the definition of the human AAVS1 locus as a safe genomic harbour for integration of therapeutic expression cassettes, the development of pioneering approaches to profile specificity of artificial nucleases, and the demonstration of targeted gene correction in human long-term repopulating hematopoietic stem cells, an achievement that paves the way for safe application of these promising technologies to hematopoietic stem cells-based gene therapy. His group has recently developed a novel strategy to permanently silence genes through targeted epigenetic editing. They are exploiting this innovate strategy to: (i) tackle diseases for which gene silencing is a valid therapeutic solution; (ii) develop cell engineering strategies for cancer immunotherapy; (iii) determine the specificity and persistence of epigenetic silencing across cell development and differentiation, two key aspects for effective and safe exploitation of the technology; (iv) shed light into the fundamental principles governing establishment and maintenance of epigenetic silencing, basic biological information that can potentially be used to further improve the platform.

Currently, Angelo is Professor of tissue biology and regenerative medicine at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University (UniSR; Milan, IT) and Group Leader at the San Raffaele-Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy (SR-Tiget; Milan, IT). He is also co-founder of Chroma Medicine, a start-up company that aims at developing novel gene therapy modalities based on targeted epigenetic editing. During his scientific career, Angelo has published 36 articles in peer-reviewed journals, including papers as first/last author in Cell, Nature, Nature Biotechnology and Nature Methods. He is inventor on several patent applications related to these works. He received several international prestigious awards, including the Young Investigator Award from the European Society of Gene and Cell Therapy and the Excellence in Research Award from the European Society of Gene and Cell Therapy.

Fyodor Urnov

University of California, Berkeley

Fyodor Urnov is a Professor of Molecular Therapeutics at UC Berkeley and a Scientific Director at its Innovative Genomics Institute. He co-developed the toolbox of human genome and epigenome editing and led the team that developed a strategy for genome editing in the hemoglobinopathies, sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia, that has yielded sustained clinical benefit for subjects in several ongoing clinical trials. At the IGI Fyodor directs efforts to develop scalable CRISPR-based approaches to treat diseases of the immune system, sickle cell disease, neurodegeneration, and neuroinflammation. His recent op-ed in the New York Times describes a major goal for the field of genomic therapies and a key focus of Fyodor's work at the IGI - expanding access to CRISPR-based treatments for N=1 genetic disease.

Sofonias Tessema

Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

Sofonias Tessema is the Program Lead for Pathogen Genomics at the Africa CDC. Sofonias received a PhD degree from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute at the University of Melbourne and was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California in San Francisco. Sofonias is passionate about capacity building for the implementation of genomic and digital epidemiology for public health in Africa. 

Tippi MacKenzie

University of California, San Francisco

Tippi MacKenzie is a Professor of Surgery at the University of California, San Francisco and the Director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Institute for Regeneration Medicine. She is a pediatric and fetal surgeon who is focused on developing better ways to diagnose and treat genetic diseases before birth. She runs a translational research lab examining fetal immunology and maternal-fetal tolerance, with the ultimate goal of inventing new fetal therapies for patients with genetic diseases or pregnancy complications. She has moved two fetal molecular therapies from the lab to the clinic as phase 1 clinical trials after obtaining FDA approval: in utero hematopoietic stem cell transplantation to treat fetuses with alpha thalassemia and in utero enzyme replacement therapy in fetuses with lysosomal storage disorders. Her research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the March of Dimes, the California Institute for Regeneration Medicine, and the Burroughs-Wellcome Fund. Tippi has been elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the National Academy of Medicine for her innovative work.

Tippi trained in classical piano at Juilliard before obtaining her undergraduate degree from Harvard College and her medical degree from Stanford University.  She completed her surgical residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and obtained additional fellowships in Fetal Surgery and Pediatric Surgery at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. She joined the faculty at the University of California, San Francisco in 2007 and is now a Professor of Surgery. She recently co-founded the Center for Maternal-Fetal Precision Medicine, with the aim of accelerating the processes that link basic research to clinical trials to improve maternal, fetal, and neonatal health. This Center is testing methods to improve prenatal diagnosis of birth defects and developing new cellular and molecular therapies for definitive fetal treatment. 

Eric Olson

University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center

Eric Olson is the founding Chair of the Department of Molecular Biology at UT Southwestern Medical Center.  He also directs the Hamon Center for Regenerative Science and Medicine and the Wellstone Center for Muscular Dystrophy Research at UT Southwestern.  He holds the Robert A. Welch Distinguished Chair and the Annie and Willie Nelson Professorship in Stem Cell Research.

Eric Olson and his trainees discovered many of the key genes and mechanisms responsible for development and disease of the heart and other muscles.  His most recent work has provided new strategies for correction of genetic disorders of muscle and the heart using CRISPR gene editing.

Dr. Olson is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received numerous additional honors for his work.  He has co-founded multiple biotechnology companies to design new therapies for heart and muscle disease.  

Angelo Lombardo

San Raffaele-Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy & Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Italy

Angelo obtained his PhD in Cellular and Molecular Biology in 2011 working on the development of innovative gene therapy approaches based on artificial nucleases and targeted genome editing. His early studies were the first to report gene editing in therapeutically relevant cell types, including human pluripotent stem cells, primary T cells, epidermal stem cells, and neural stem cells. His major contribution to the field further extends to the definition of the human AAVS1 locus as a safe genomic harbour for integration of therapeutic expression cassettes, the development of pioneering approaches to profile specificity of artificial nucleases, and the demonstration of targeted gene correction in human long-term repopulating hematopoietic stem cells, an achievement that paves the way for safe application of these promising technologies to hematopoietic stem cells-based gene therapy. His group has recently developed a novel strategy to permanently silence genes through targeted epigenetic editing. They are exploiting this innovate strategy to: (i) tackle diseases for which gene silencing is a valid therapeutic solution; (ii) develop cell engineering strategies for cancer immunotherapy; (iii) determine the specificity and persistence of epigenetic silencing across cell development and differentiation, two key aspects for effective and safe exploitation of the technology; (iv) shed light into the fundamental principles governing establishment and maintenance of epigenetic silencing, basic biological information that can potentially be used to further improve the platform.

Currently, Angelo is Professor of tissue biology and regenerative medicine at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University (UniSR; Milan, IT) and Group Leader at the San Raffaele-Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy (SR-Tiget; Milan, IT). He is also co-founder of Chroma Medicine, a start-up company that aims at developing novel gene therapy modalities based on targeted epigenetic editing. During his scientific career, Angelo has published 36 articles in peer-reviewed journals, including papers as first/last author in Cell, Nature, Nature Biotechnology and Nature Methods. He is inventor on several patent applications related to these works. He received several international prestigious awards, including the Young Investigator Award from the European Society of Gene and Cell Therapy and the Excellence in Research Award from the European Society of Gene and Cell Therapy.

Fyodor Urnov

University of California, Berkeley

Fyodor Urnov is a Professor of Molecular Therapeutics at UC Berkeley and a Scientific Director at its Innovative Genomics Institute. He co-developed the toolbox of human genome and epigenome editing and led the team that developed a strategy for genome editing in the hemoglobinopathies, sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia, that has yielded sustained clinical benefit for subjects in several ongoing clinical trials. At the IGI Fyodor directs efforts to develop scalable CRISPR-based approaches to treat diseases of the immune system, sickle cell disease, neurodegeneration, and neuroinflammation. His recent op-ed in the New York Times describes a major goal for the field of genomic therapies and a key focus of Fyodor's work at the IGI - expanding access to CRISPR-based treatments for N=1 genetic disease.

Sofonias Tessema

Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

Sofonias Tessema is the Program Lead for Pathogen Genomics at the Africa CDC. Sofonias received a PhD degree from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute at the University of Melbourne and was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California in San Francisco. Sofonias is passionate about capacity building for the implementation of genomic and digital epidemiology for public health in Africa. 

Piers Millett

International Biosecurity and Biosafety Initiative for Science

Piers D Millett, PhD is Executive Director of the International Biosecurity and Biosafety Initiative for Science (IBBIS). IBBIS is a new international organization dedicated to strengthening global biosecurity norms and developing innovative tools and incentives to uphold them. Dr Millett is a certified biorisk management professional, with a specialization in biosecurity.

Dr Millett was Deputy Head of the Implementation Support Unit for the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), a treaty for which he worked for over a decade. He has consulted for the World Health Organization, supporting their integration of research and development into responses to public health emergencies and considering the health implications of advances in technology. As Vice President for Responsibility for iGEM Foundation (International Genetically Engineered Machines Competition), Dr Millett established and ran a program strengthening the culture of responsibility and risk management with more than 300 projects led by more than 4000 young scientists and engineers from 45 countries across every inhabited continent.

Trained originally as a microbiologist, Dr Millett has worked closely with the citizen science movement, synthetic biologists, the biotechnology industry as well as national and international policymakers and decisionmakers. He has collaborated with a range of intergovernmental organizations spanning human and animal health, humanitarian law, disarmament, security, border control, law enforcement, and weapons of mass destruction— both inside and out of the United Nations system.

He holds a PhD in International Relations and Affairs, an MRes in Research Methodology, and an MA in International Politics and Security Studies—all from the University of Bradford. He has a BSc in Microbiology from the University of Leeds.

Katherine Littler

World Health Organization

Katherine Littler is currently the co-lead of the Health Ethics & Governance Unit at WHO Headquarters, Geneva. She is passionate about embedding ethics more effectively in global health decision making and increasing ethics capacity around the globe. Whilst a lot of her current focus is on COVID-related work, she is also focused on realizing the potential benefits of emerging technologies in different settings, with particular reference to human genome editing; the ethics and governance of clinical trial design and identifying gaps in ethical oversight in global health.

Kiran Musunuru

University of Pennsylvania

An actively practicing cardiologist and committed teacher, Kiran Musunuru, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., M.L., is Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine and Genetics in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the genetics of heart disease and seeks to identify genetic factors that protect against disease and use them to develop new therapies. He is a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from the White House, the American Heart Association's Award of Meritorious Achievement and Joseph A. Vita Award, the American Philosophical Society's Judson Daland Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Clinical Investigation, the American Federation for Medical Research's Outstanding Investigator Award, and Harvard University's Fannie Cox Prize for Excellence in Science Teaching. He recently served as Editor-in-Chief of the scientific journal Circulation: Genomic and Precision Medicine. He is author of The CRISPR Generation: The Story of the World's First Gene-Edited Babies and Genome Editing: A Practical Guide to Research and Clinical Applications. He is co-founder and Senior Scientific Advisor of Verve Therapeutics.

Kaushik Sunder Rajan

University of Chicago

Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences and Co-Director, Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory. My work lies at the intersection of Medical Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (STS), with commitments to social theories of capitalism and postcolonial studies. Throughout my career, I have had a three-fold set of intellectual commitments: (a) to explore the nature of scientific knowledge, practice, and institutionalization; (b) to elucidate political economic structures that operate across multiple scales using ethnography; and (c) to theorize contemporary capitalism.

My first two books focused on the global political economy of the life sciences and biomedicine, with an empirical focus on the United States and India. My first book, Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life (Duke, 2006), is a multi-sited ethnography of genomics and post-genomic drug development marketplaces in the United States and India. My second book, Pharmocracy: Knowledge, Value and Politics in Global Biomedicine (Duke, 2017) elucidates the political economy of global pharmaceuticals as seen from contemporary India. Empirically, Pharmocracy traces the decade-long trajectory of pharmaceutical politics after India’s harmonization of clinical trials and intellectual property regimes with globally mandated norms in the mid-2000s. It thereby considers two domains of biomedical politics together, one concerning clinical trials and the other concerning intellectual property and access to medicines. Theoretically, Pharmocracy provokes questions about how value, politics and knowledge come to be related to one another in contemporary global pharmaceutical economies in ways that put both health and democracy at stake.

Katherine Littler

World Health Organization

Katherine Littler is currently the co-lead of the Health Ethics & Governance Unit at WHO Headquarters, Geneva. She is passionate about embedding ethics more effectively in global health decision making and increasing ethics capacity around the globe. Whilst a lot of her current focus is on COVID-related work, she is also focused on realizing the potential benefits of emerging technologies in different settings, with particular reference to human genome editing; the ethics and governance of clinical trial design and identifying gaps in ethical oversight in global health.

Piers Millett

International Biosecurity and Biosafety Initiative for Science

Piers D Millett, PhD is Executive Director of the International Biosecurity and Biosafety Initiative for Science (IBBIS). IBBIS is a new international organization dedicated to strengthening global biosecurity norms and developing innovative tools and incentives to uphold them. Dr Millett is a certified biorisk management professional, with a specialization in biosecurity.

Dr Millett was Deputy Head of the Implementation Support Unit for the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), a treaty for which he worked for over a decade. He has consulted for the World Health Organization, supporting their integration of research and development into responses to public health emergencies and considering the health implications of advances in technology. As Vice President for Responsibility for iGEM Foundation (International Genetically Engineered Machines Competition), Dr Millett established and ran a program strengthening the culture of responsibility and risk management with more than 300 projects led by more than 4000 young scientists and engineers from 45 countries across every inhabited continent.

Trained originally as a microbiologist, Dr Millett has worked closely with the citizen science movement, synthetic biologists, the biotechnology industry as well as national and international policymakers and decisionmakers. He has collaborated with a range of intergovernmental organizations spanning human and animal health, humanitarian law, disarmament, security, border control, law enforcement, and weapons of mass destruction— both inside and out of the United Nations system.

He holds a PhD in International Relations and Affairs, an MRes in Research Methodology, and an MA in International Politics and Security Studies—all from the University of Bradford. He has a BSc in Microbiology from the University of Leeds.

Kiran Musunuru

University of Pennsylvania

An actively practicing cardiologist and committed teacher, Kiran Musunuru, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., M.L., is Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine and Genetics in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the genetics of heart disease and seeks to identify genetic factors that protect against disease and use them to develop new therapies. He is a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from the White House, the American Heart Association's Award of Meritorious Achievement and Joseph A. Vita Award, the American Philosophical Society's Judson Daland Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Clinical Investigation, the American Federation for Medical Research's Outstanding Investigator Award, and Harvard University's Fannie Cox Prize for Excellence in Science Teaching. He recently served as Editor-in-Chief of the scientific journal Circulation: Genomic and Precision Medicine. He is author of The CRISPR Generation: The Story of the World's First Gene-Edited Babies and Genome Editing: A Practical Guide to Research and Clinical Applications. He is co-founder and Senior Scientific Advisor of Verve Therapeutics.

Kaushik Sunder Rajan

University of Chicago

Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences and Co-Director, Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory. My work lies at the intersection of Medical Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (STS), with commitments to social theories of capitalism and postcolonial studies. Throughout my career, I have had a three-fold set of intellectual commitments: (a) to explore the nature of scientific knowledge, practice, and institutionalization; (b) to elucidate political economic structures that operate across multiple scales using ethnography; and (c) to theorize contemporary capitalism.

My first two books focused on the global political economy of the life sciences and biomedicine, with an empirical focus on the United States and India. My first book, Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life (Duke, 2006), is a multi-sited ethnography of genomics and post-genomic drug development marketplaces in the United States and India. My second book, Pharmocracy: Knowledge, Value and Politics in Global Biomedicine (Duke, 2017) elucidates the political economy of global pharmaceuticals as seen from contemporary India. Empirically, Pharmocracy traces the decade-long trajectory of pharmaceutical politics after India’s harmonization of clinical trials and intellectual property regimes with globally mandated norms in the mid-2000s. It thereby considers two domains of biomedical politics together, one concerning clinical trials and the other concerning intellectual property and access to medicines. Theoretically, Pharmocracy provokes questions about how value, politics and knowledge come to be related to one another in contemporary global pharmaceutical economies in ways that put both health and democracy at stake.

Lluís Montoliu

ARRIGE & National Centre of Biotechnology (CNB-CSIC)

Sheila Jasanoff

Global Observatory & Harvard University

Sheila Jasanoff is Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School. A pioneer in the social sciences, she explores the role of science and technology in the law, politics, and policy of modern democracies. Her books include The Fifth Branch, Science at the Bar, Designs on Nature, The Ethics of Invention, and Can Science Make Sense of Life? She founded and directs the STS Program at Harvard, where she also formed the Science and Democracy Network; previously, she was founding chair of the STS Department at Cornell. In 2022, she received the Government of Norway’s Holberg Prize for law, humanities, and social sciences. Her other honors include the SSRC’s Hirschman prize, the Humboldt Foundation’s Reimar-Lüst award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Jasanoff has held distinguished visiting professorships at leading universities in Europe, Asia, Australia, and the US. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, foreign member of the British Academy and the Royal Danish Academy, and member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She served on the AAAS Board of Directors and as President of the Society for Social Studies of Science. She holds AB, JD, and PhD degrees from Harvard, and honorary doctorates from the Universities of Twente and Liège.

Simon Niemeyer

Global Citizens’ Assembly on Genome Editing & University of Canberra

Simon Niemeyer is Professor and co-founder of the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance, and project leader of the Global Citizens’ Assembly on Genome Editing. His research focusses on deliberative democracy, using empirical findings to inform its theoretical foundations and how they inform practical democratic innovations. His recent involves conceptualising, measuring, and analysing deliberative reasoning, with implications for the understanding the ethics of epistemology, the nature of deliberative capacity, the role of expertise, and distributed reasoning in deliberative systems. Much of his work is applied to environmental issues, including climate change, but also covers a broad range of topics including technological development, medical ethics, energy futures, immigration, and parliamentary reform.

Niemeyer completed his PhD at the Australian National University in 2002 in social and political theory, which followed undergraduate studies in ecology, economics and environmental policy (Griffith University, where he was awarded the university medal).  Over the past twenty years he has acted as chief investigator on 18 research projects in Australia, Sweden and the UK. He has also been recipient of two Australian Research Council fellowships, including a recent Australian Future Fellowship. In addition to the University of Canberra, he has held research positions at The Australian National University, Uppsala University, University of Birmingham, and Cambridge University. He has held visiting fellowships at numerous universities, including University of Oxford (Nuffield College), Åbo Akademi, University of British Columbia, University of Bern and University of Northern Arizona.

Sarojini Nadimpally

SAMA Resource Group for Women and Health

Sarojini Nadimipally is a social scientist and public health practitioner who has been working on Gender, health, bioethics and human rights for over 25 years and is also one of the founder members of Sama Resource Group for Women and Health. She has an academic background in Social sciences, Food & nutrition and public health.

As part of the People’s Health Movement (PHM) – an international coalition of academic and civil society health activists working to promote ‘Health for All – and founder of Sama Resource Group for Women & Health ( www.samawomenshealth.in), she has been working on various issues surrounding public health including, strengthening health systems, health policy,  sexual and reproductive health, reproductive and biotechnologies, clinical trials and access to medicines, conflict and health through research, policy advocacy and building solidarity between health and other social movements. 

Her work at local, regional, national as well as global levels has helped to develop an understanding of health through an intersectionality lens encompassing gender, caste, class, race and rights perspectives, as also the social and political pathways towards better health care and social determinants of health.

Her research experience extending over 25 years has been at the intersections of leading implementation research in a broad range of areas of public health, maternal health, sexual and reproductive health, access to medicines, research ethics, conflict and health as well as the creation of research knowledge resources towards health policy and programme implementation outcomes. This engagement also helped to understand the region-specific challenges and gaps in the context of access to universal health care, including pandemics and public health, sexual and reproductive health etc.

Sarojini has co-organised national and international conferences, and meetings on women's health, the world bioethics conference (WBC), the Feminist Bioethics Conference  (FAB)and the People’s Health Assembly-4 (PHA). Recognising her work on bioethics, access to medicines and clinical trials, the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR), a premier research institute in India,  has appointed her as a member of the Central Ethics committee on Biomedical Research on Human Participants. As a member of the ICMR committee, she was actively engaged in examining the ethics of biomedical research and was involved in developing the guidelines published in 2017. 

Having been a part of many debates around “New Vaccines, why, whom when and How”, she developed a nuanced understanding of vaccine development and critical issues around ethics, human rights, access, and affordability and is currently engaged in developing a feminist framework to address pandemics from an intersectionality lens.

Her work on medical and reproductive technologies, ethics and clinical trials has been published in many international journals.
She was the Visiting Scholar at the University of Massachusetts and was awarded as Social Justice Policy Practitioner to the Five Colleges at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She was also awarded an Academic in Residence at the University of Austin Texas, 20173). 

She has been invited to speak at the Harvard University, Boston University Schools of Public Health, MIT, UMASS, Stanford Univ, Univ of Austin Texas in the US; the London School of Economics and the University of Edinburgh in the UK; and Charite Medical College, Berlin and Goettingen University, Global Labour University in Germany. (2011, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2019) also at the UN, WHO and PMAC.

Currently, she is the Advisory for the British Medical Journal (BMJ) patients panel and the coordinator of the Health for All campaign for PHM which is on a voluntary basis. 

Ephrat Levy-Lahad

Shaare Zedek Medical Center, Israel

Ephrat Levy-Lahad is Professor of Medical Genetics and Internal Medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Director of the Genetics Institute at Shaare Zedek Medical Center (SZMC) in Jerusalem, Israel.

Professor Levy-Lahad's clinical laboratory includes a large pre-implantation diagnosis service and cancer genetics diagnostics. Her research focuses on population genetics of breast/ovarian cancer and on the genetic basis of rare diseases.  Her work on population genetics of breast cancer  has led to the recent adoption of population screening for BRCA among Ashkenazi Jews in Israel.

Professor Levy-Lahad is also active in bioethical aspects of genetic research. She was co-Chair of Israel's National Bioethics Council and was a member of the USA National Academy of Sciences Committee on gene editing. In 2018 she was awarded Israel’s EMET Prize in Life Sciences. She currently serves as Vice President of the Israel National Academy for Science in Medicine.

César Palacios-González

University of Oxford, UK

Dr César Palacios-González is a Senior Research Fellow in Practical Ethics at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, a Research Fellow at Wolfson College, a Knowledge Exchange Fellow at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, a Senior Associate at Pembroke College, and the Deputy Director of the MSt in Practical Ethics. His research interests include philosophy of medicine, applied ethics, and reproductive ethics.

Tina Rulli

University of California, Davis

Tina Rulli is an Associate Professor in the department of Philosophy at the University of California, Davis. She works in both ethical theory and bioethics, with a focus on reproductive and population ethics. Her published work includes pieces in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Bioethics, the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, and the Hastings Center Report. She received her postdoctoral training in bioethics at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center Bioethics Department and her PhD in Philosophy from Yale. 

Amander Clark

University of California, Los Angeles

Professor Amander Clark PhD is a stem cell scientist, geneticist and developmental biologist who is internationally recognized for her work on the germline and in vitro gametogenesis.  Professor Clark has authored over one hundred research articles, and is regularly invited to speak on the use of stem cells to understand fertility and the disease of infertility.  Professor Clark’s research is currently supported by grants from the National Institute of Health and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  Her research has also been supported by the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine, the Templeton Foundation and the LucaBella Foundation.  Professor Clark’s work has been recognized by Awards from the International Society for Stem Cell Research, STOP Cancer, the Lance Armstrong and Concern Foundations.  In 2022 she was awarded the Founder’s Medal from the Australian and New Zealand Society for Reproductive Biology.  Professor Clark was recruited to UCLA in 2006, awarded tenure in 2012, promoted to full Professor in 2015, and in 2017 became Department Chair of the UCLA Department of Molecular Cell and Developmental Biology. Professor Clark is currently the inaugural Director of the UCLA Center for Reproductive Science, Health and Education, and President-Elect of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, a global non-profit that promotes excellence in stem cell science and applications to human health.

Katsuhiko Hayashi

Kyushu University, Japan

Katsuhiko Hayashi (born Dec. 2, 1971), a full professor in Department of Genome Biology, Graduate School of Medicine, Osaka University, is working on germ cell development and its reconstitution in vitro through his career: 1994-1996, MS course of Meiji University; 1996-2002, an assistant professor in Tokyo University of Science; 2002-2005, a staff researcher in Osaka Medical Center (Ph.D. 2004); 2005-2009, post-doctoral fellow in the Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge; 2009-2014, associate professor in Kyoto University; and 2014-2021 a full professor in Kyushu University. From 2021, He has been in the current position in Osaka University.  

Kyle Orwig

University of Pittsburgh

Dr. Orwig is a Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He is also the director of the Fertility Preservation Program and the Center for Reproduction and Transplantation at Magee-Womens Hospital of UPMC. Research in the Orwig laboratory focuses on stem cells, germ lineage development, fertility and infertility. Our progress investigating reproductive function in fertile individuals provides a basis for understanding the mechanisms of infertility caused by disease, medical treatments, genetic defects or aging.  Infertility impacts one in seven couples in the United States and can have a devastating impact on relationships, emotional well-being and overall health.  The Orwig lab is ideally located in Magee-Womens Research Institute and Magee-Womens Hospital of the University of Pittsburgh and is committed to translating lab bench discoveries to the clinic for diagnosis, prevention and treatment of infertility.

Mitinori Saitou

Kyoto University

Saitou has been promoting studies on the developmental mechanisms of germ cells, the origin of all life. He clarified the formation mechanisms of mouse germ cells and successfully generated primordial germ cell-like cells (PGCLCs) in vitro from mouse ESCs and iPSCs to produce sperm, oocytes and healthy offspring. He used this experimental system as a model to investigate the molecular mechanisms of key phenomena in germ cell development, including epigenomic reprogramming, oocyte differentiation, and meiosis induction mechanisms. Saitou’s analysis of the developmental mechanisms of cynomolgus monkeys has allowed us to identify the characteristics of pluripotent cell lineages in mice, monkeys and humans and the formation mechanisms of germ cells in primates. He has also generated PGCLCs and oogonium from human iPSCs and pioneered research on in vitro reconstitution in the process of human germ cell development.

Saitou aims to promote advanced human biology that develops these studies, to identify the characteristics and evolutionary mechanisms of humans and primates, and to lay out new possibilities in medical science.

Amander Clark

University of California, Los Angeles

Professor Amander Clark PhD is a stem cell scientist, geneticist and developmental biologist who is internationally recognized for her work on the germline and in vitro gametogenesis.  Professor Clark has authored over one hundred research articles, and is regularly invited to speak on the use of stem cells to understand fertility and the disease of infertility.  Professor Clark’s research is currently supported by grants from the National Institute of Health and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  Her research has also been supported by the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine, the Templeton Foundation and the LucaBella Foundation.  Professor Clark’s work has been recognized by Awards from the International Society for Stem Cell Research, STOP Cancer, the Lance Armstrong and Concern Foundations.  In 2022 she was awarded the Founder’s Medal from the Australian and New Zealand Society for Reproductive Biology.  Professor Clark was recruited to UCLA in 2006, awarded tenure in 2012, promoted to full Professor in 2015, and in 2017 became Department Chair of the UCLA Department of Molecular Cell and Developmental Biology. Professor Clark is currently the inaugural Director of the UCLA Center for Reproductive Science, Health and Education, and President-Elect of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, a global non-profit that promotes excellence in stem cell science and applications to human health.

Kyle Orwig

University of Pittsburgh

Dr. Orwig is a Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He is also the director of the Fertility Preservation Program and the Center for Reproduction and Transplantation at Magee-Womens Hospital of UPMC. Research in the Orwig laboratory focuses on stem cells, germ lineage development, fertility and infertility. Our progress investigating reproductive function in fertile individuals provides a basis for understanding the mechanisms of infertility caused by disease, medical treatments, genetic defects or aging.  Infertility impacts one in seven couples in the United States and can have a devastating impact on relationships, emotional well-being and overall health.  The Orwig lab is ideally located in Magee-Womens Research Institute and Magee-Womens Hospital of the University of Pittsburgh and is committed to translating lab bench discoveries to the clinic for diagnosis, prevention and treatment of infertility.

Katsuhiko Hayashi

Kyushu University, Japan

Katsuhiko Hayashi (born Dec. 2, 1971), a full professor in Department of Genome Biology, Graduate School of Medicine, Osaka University, is working on germ cell development and its reconstitution in vitro through his career: 1994-1996, MS course of Meiji University; 1996-2002, an assistant professor in Tokyo University of Science; 2002-2005, a staff researcher in Osaka Medical Center (Ph.D. 2004); 2005-2009, post-doctoral fellow in the Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge; 2009-2014, associate professor in Kyoto University; and 2014-2021 a full professor in Kyushu University. From 2021, He has been in the current position in Osaka University.  

Mitinori Saitou

Kyoto University

Saitou has been promoting studies on the developmental mechanisms of germ cells, the origin of all life. He clarified the formation mechanisms of mouse germ cells and successfully generated primordial germ cell-like cells (PGCLCs) in vitro from mouse ESCs and iPSCs to produce sperm, oocytes and healthy offspring. He used this experimental system as a model to investigate the molecular mechanisms of key phenomena in germ cell development, including epigenomic reprogramming, oocyte differentiation, and meiosis induction mechanisms. Saitou’s analysis of the developmental mechanisms of cynomolgus monkeys has allowed us to identify the characteristics of pluripotent cell lineages in mice, monkeys and humans and the formation mechanisms of germ cells in primates. He has also generated PGCLCs and oogonium from human iPSCs and pioneered research on in vitro reconstitution in the process of human germ cell development.

Saitou aims to promote advanced human biology that develops these studies, to identify the characteristics and evolutionary mechanisms of humans and primates, and to lay out new possibilities in medical science.

Dieter Egli

Columbia University Irving Medical Center

Dr. Egli received his Ph.D. in molecular biology in 2003 from the University of Zurich, Switzerland, with the mentorship of Prof. Walter Schaffner. He then joined the laboratory of Prof. Kevin Eggan at Harvard University as a postdoctoral fellow where he studied somatic cell reprogramming.  Joining the New York Stem Cell Foundation Research Institute as one of the founding members in 2008, first as a postdoctoral fellow and then as an independent group leader, he worked on understanding diabetes using pluripotent stem cells, mitochondrial replacement and somatic cell nuclear transfer.  In 2014, he started his laboratory at Columbia University Medical Center, performing studies on genome stability in the contexts of gene editing, early embryonic development, somatic cell reprogramming, and cell differentiation. 

Shoukhrat Mitalipov

Oregon Health and Science University

Dr. Shoukhrat Mitalipov earned his Ph.D. in Human Genetics in 1994 from the Research Center for Medical Genetics in Moscow. He then moved in 1995 to USA and completed a postdoctoral training at Utah State University and joined in 1998 as a faculty the Oregon National Primate Research Center at  Oregon Health & Science University. Currently,  Dr. Mitalipov is a director of Center for Embryonic and Gene Therapy at Oregon Health & Science University. His research is focused on investigating and developing novel cell and gene therapy approaches for treatment of female infertility. 

Another research topic in his laboratory is investigating novel germ line gene therapy approaches that would allow repairing gene defects in gametes or early preimplantation embryos and thus prevent passage of thousands of heritable genetic disorders from parents to their children. Dr. Mitalipov’s laboratory is exploring applications of gene editing and gene replacement strategies in preclinical and clinical studies demonstrating feasibility, efficacy and long-term safety of these approaches.

As part of other ongoing germ line gene therapy projects, his laboratory pioneered the concept of mitochondrial replacement therapy (MRT) to prevent the transmission of pathogenic mtDNA mutations from mothers to their children. This work has been initially developed and tested in a nonhuman primate model and more recently extended to clinical trials that resulted in birth of healthy children. 

Kathy Niakan

Francis Crick Institute & University of Cambridge

Kathy Niakan is Mary Marshall and Arthur Walton Professor of Reproductive Physiology, Director of the Centre for Trophoblast Research and Chair of the Strategic Research Initiative on Reproduction at the University of Cambridge and Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute in London. Her laboratory investigates the mechanisms that direct cell fate in human embryos and stem cells. She obtained a B.Sc. in Cell and Molecular Biology and a B.A. in English Literature from University of Washington. She obtained her PhD at University of California, Los Angeles. She undertook postdoctoral training at Harvard University. She was a Centre for Trophoblast Research Next Generation Research Fellow at University of Cambridge.

Dagan Wells

Nuffield Department for Women's and Reproductive Health, University of Oxford

Yuyu Niu

State Key Laboratory of Primate Biomedical Research & Kunming University of Science and Technology

Yuyu Niu, Ph.D., is a professor in life sciences, and is now the Vice-chancellor of Kunming University of Science and Technology, China. He is also the Dean of Faculty of Life Science and Technology, Kunming University of Science and Technology, China and the Associate Director of State Key Laboratory of Primate Biomedical Research, China. Research in Yuyu Niu’s laboratory is focused on primate pre- and post- implantation embryo development, which play a significant role in cell differentiation and organ formation and therefore has an enormous impact on human diseases. Built on the strength in non-human primate research, the Yuyu Niu's laboratory has expanded its capability to use a variety of state-of-the-art techniques, including CRISPR/Cas9-based genomic editing, somatic cell nuclear transfer, single cell transcriptomics, cell lineage tracing and stem cells to understand the molecular events at the beginning of primate life and cell reprogramming. His long-term goal is to apply what has learned in basic research to studies of: 1) the development and application of biotherapy technology involving gene editing and stem cells; 2) the engineered construction and application of organoids; 3) the genetic basis of human aging and explore strategies for healthy aging. Yuyu has made substantial contributions to non-human primate genetic engineering and early embryo development that include: 1) the first transgenic rhesus monkey model in China (PNAS, 2010); 2) the first monkey model with a genome engineered by precision gene-targeting (Cell, 2014; Cell, 2017); 3) the continuous development of monkey embryos in vitro beyond early gastrulation and 20 days post fertilization (Science 2019; Cell 2021).

Dieter Egli

Columbia University Irving Medical Center

Dr. Egli received his Ph.D. in molecular biology in 2003 from the University of Zurich, Switzerland, with the mentorship of Prof. Walter Schaffner. He then joined the laboratory of Prof. Kevin Eggan at Harvard University as a postdoctoral fellow where he studied somatic cell reprogramming.  Joining the New York Stem Cell Foundation Research Institute as one of the founding members in 2008, first as a postdoctoral fellow and then as an independent group leader, he worked on understanding diabetes using pluripotent stem cells, mitochondrial replacement and somatic cell nuclear transfer.  In 2014, he started his laboratory at Columbia University Medical Center, performing studies on genome stability in the contexts of gene editing, early embryonic development, somatic cell reprogramming, and cell differentiation. 

Shoukhrat Mitalipov

Oregon Health and Science University

Dr. Shoukhrat Mitalipov earned his Ph.D. in Human Genetics in 1994 from the Research Center for Medical Genetics in Moscow. He then moved in 1995 to USA and completed a postdoctoral training at Utah State University and joined in 1998 as a faculty the Oregon National Primate Research Center at  Oregon Health & Science University. Currently,  Dr. Mitalipov is a director of Center for Embryonic and Gene Therapy at Oregon Health & Science University. His research is focused on investigating and developing novel cell and gene therapy approaches for treatment of female infertility. 

Another research topic in his laboratory is investigating novel germ line gene therapy approaches that would allow repairing gene defects in gametes or early preimplantation embryos and thus prevent passage of thousands of heritable genetic disorders from parents to their children. Dr. Mitalipov’s laboratory is exploring applications of gene editing and gene replacement strategies in preclinical and clinical studies demonstrating feasibility, efficacy and long-term safety of these approaches.

As part of other ongoing germ line gene therapy projects, his laboratory pioneered the concept of mitochondrial replacement therapy (MRT) to prevent the transmission of pathogenic mtDNA mutations from mothers to their children. This work has been initially developed and tested in a nonhuman primate model and more recently extended to clinical trials that resulted in birth of healthy children. 

Kathy Niakan

Francis Crick Institute & University of Cambridge

Kathy Niakan is Mary Marshall and Arthur Walton Professor of Reproductive Physiology, Director of the Centre for Trophoblast Research and Chair of the Strategic Research Initiative on Reproduction at the University of Cambridge and Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute in London. Her laboratory investigates the mechanisms that direct cell fate in human embryos and stem cells. She obtained a B.Sc. in Cell and Molecular Biology and a B.A. in English Literature from University of Washington. She obtained her PhD at University of California, Los Angeles. She undertook postdoctoral training at Harvard University. She was a Centre for Trophoblast Research Next Generation Research Fellow at University of Cambridge.

Dagan Wells

Nuffield Department for Women's and Reproductive Health, University of Oxford

Yuyu Niu

State Key Laboratory of Primate Biomedical Research & Kunming University of Science and Technology

Yuyu Niu, Ph.D., is a professor in life sciences, and is now the Vice-chancellor of Kunming University of Science and Technology, China. He is also the Dean of Faculty of Life Science and Technology, Kunming University of Science and Technology, China and the Associate Director of State Key Laboratory of Primate Biomedical Research, China. Research in Yuyu Niu’s laboratory is focused on primate pre- and post- implantation embryo development, which play a significant role in cell differentiation and organ formation and therefore has an enormous impact on human diseases. Built on the strength in non-human primate research, the Yuyu Niu's laboratory has expanded its capability to use a variety of state-of-the-art techniques, including CRISPR/Cas9-based genomic editing, somatic cell nuclear transfer, single cell transcriptomics, cell lineage tracing and stem cells to understand the molecular events at the beginning of primate life and cell reprogramming. His long-term goal is to apply what has learned in basic research to studies of: 1) the development and application of biotherapy technology involving gene editing and stem cells; 2) the engineered construction and application of organoids; 3) the genetic basis of human aging and explore strategies for healthy aging. Yuyu has made substantial contributions to non-human primate genetic engineering and early embryo development that include: 1) the first transgenic rhesus monkey model in China (PNAS, 2010); 2) the first monkey model with a genome engineered by precision gene-targeting (Cell, 2014; Cell, 2017); 3) the continuous development of monkey embryos in vitro beyond early gastrulation and 20 days post fertilization (Science 2019; Cell 2021).

Leigh Turner

University of California, Irvine

Leigh Turner is the Executive Director of the University of California, Irvine’s Bioethics Program and a Professor in the Program in Public Health’s Department of Health, Society, and Behavior. He is also a member of UCI’s Stem Cell Research Center and serves as Ethics Lead for UCI’s Institute for Clinical and Translational Science. Turner’s current research addresses ethical, legal, and social issues related to stem cells and regenerative medicine products. In particular, he uses approaches from health ethics and the social sciences to study the activities of clinics engaged in direct-to-consumer marketing of unproven and unlicensed cell-based interventions. He has also written about ethical dimensions of health-related travel, crowdfunding for medical interventions, and end-of-life care in multicultural societies. Turner is a co-editor of Risks and Challenges in Medical Tourism: Understanding the Global Market for Health Services and The View from Here: Bioethics and the Social Sciences. 

María de Jesús Medina Arellano

National Autonomous University of Mexico

María de Jesús Medina-Arellano is a PhD in Bioethics and Medical Jurisprudence. She is also a qualified lawyer who graduated from the Autonomous University of Nayarit (UAN), Mexico in 2004. Currently, she is a permanent research professor at the Legal Research Institute in the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She is a member of the National Research System in Mexico, SNI- level 2, in Mexico’s CONACyT. Currently, she is on annual sabbatical research as an academic visiting scholar at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford and the Centre for Social Ethics and Policy at the Department of Law of the University of Manchester in the UK. 

She is a member of Mexican Society for Stem Cell Research since 2016. From November 2019, she is a member of the Ethics Board of the National Council of Health in Mexico. From January 2019, she is a member of the University Ethics Committee of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She is a member of Hinxton International Group. From 2028-2022 she was member of the Board of Directors of the International Association of Bioethics.

In December 2008 she was recognised as the Young Academic Talent of the Year, an award granted by the Nayarit Government in Mexico. In 2010, she was awarded the UNAM-Alfonso Caso silver medal for outstanding achievement, as the best postgraduate student of the 2008 class in social sciences. In 2019 she obtained the medal of women excellence in science at UNAM, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and in 2020 she was granted with the price National University for Youth Scientists in Social Sciences at UNAM.

Yaojin Peng

Chinese Academy of Sciences

Dr Yaojin Peng, Zhiyi Professor, Institute of Zoology (Chinese Academy of Sciences, CAS), Beijing Institute of Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine (BISCRM); Director of the Centre for Ethics of Science and Technology (CEST); Director of the Life Sciences and Medical Ethics Committee of the CAS. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in life science and a Master’s degree in Law. He finished his PhD at the Faculty of Law, Maastricht University, the Netherlands. Dr Peng’s research focuses on biotechnology law and bioethics, intellectual property rights (patents) and standards, science and technology policy and management. He currently is a member of the expert committee of China Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Collaborative Innovation Platform; Deputy Secretary General of the Academic committee of the Center for Science & Technology Development and Governance, Tsinghua University; a member of the Standard Working Group of Chinese Society for Stem Cell Research (CSSCR); He used to be a fellow member of the Ius Commune Research School, researcher of the Institute for Globalization and International Regulation (IGIR), Maastricht University, team advisor of the 17th Congress of the European Intellectual Property Institutes Network (EIPIN). He visited the School of Law, Singapore Management University (SMU) for six months. He has chaired or participated in many projects. In 2021, he was selected into the “Youth Innovation Promotion Association of the CAS”, and had the honour to win the Awards of “Advanced Individual for Stem Cell Social Welfare” of the CSSCR.