Martin Andreas Nowak is an Austrian-born professor of mathematics and biology at Harvard University. He is one of the leading researchers in evolutionary dynamics. Nowak has made contributions to the fields of evolutionary theory, cooperation, viral dynamics, and cancer dynamics.
Leukemia inhibitory factor, or LIF, is an interleukin 6 class cytokine that affects cell growth by inhibiting differentiation. When LIF levels drop, the cells differentiate.
Wen-Hsiung Li is a Taiwanese-American scientist working in the fields of molecular evolution, population genetics, and genomics. He is currently the James Watson Professor of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago and a Principal Investigator at the Institute of Information Science and Genomics Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taiwan.
Tomas Robert Lindahl FRS FMedSci is a Swedish-British scientist specialising in cancer research. In 2015, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly with American chemist Paul L. Modrich and Turkish chemist Aziz Sancar for mechanistic studies of DNA repair.
Angelika Amon was an Austrian American molecular and cell biologist, and the Kathleen and Curtis Marble Professor in Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Amon's research centered on how chromosomes are regulated, duplicated, and partitioned in the cell cycle. Amon was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017.
Michael B. Elowitz is a biologist and professor of Biology, Bioengineering, and Applied Physics at the California Institute of Technology, and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In 2007 he was the recipient of the Genius grant, better known as the MacArthur Fellows Program for the design of a synthetic gene regulatory network, the Repressilator, which helped initiate the field of synthetic biology. He was the first to show how inherently random effects, or 'noise', in gene expression could be detected and quantified in living cells, leading to a growing recognition of the many roles that noise plays in living cells. His work in Synthetic Biology and Noise represent two foundations of the field of Systems Biology. Since then, his laboratory has contributed to the development of synthetic biological circuits that perform a range of functions inside cells, and revealed biological circuit design principles underlying epigenetic memory, cell fate control, cell-cell communication, and multicellular behaviors.
Anthony Arie Hyman is a British scientist and director at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics.
David Jay Julius is an American physiologist and Nobel Prize laureate known for his work on molecular mechanisms of pain sensation and heat, including the characterization of the TRPV1 and TRPM8 receptors that detect capsaicin, menthol, and temperature. He is a professor at the University of California, San Francisco.
Uri Alon is a Professor and Systems Biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science. His highly cited research investigates gene expression, network motifs and the design principles of biological networks in Escherichia coli and other organisms using both computational biology and traditional experimental wet laboratory techniques.
Aviv Regev is a computational biologist and systems biologist and Executive Vice President and Head of Genentech Research and Early Development in Genentech/Roche. She is a core member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and professor at the Department of Biology of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Regev is a pioneer of single cell genomics and of computational and systems biology of gene regulatory circuits. She founded and leads the Human Cell Atlas project, together with Sarah Teichmann.
Gerard Ian Evan FRS, FMedSci is a British biologist and, since May 2022, Professor of Cancer Biology at King's College London and a principal group leader in the Francis Crick Institute. Prior to this he was Sir William Dunn Professor and Head of Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge (2009-2022).
Jared Diamond is an American scientist and author. Trained in physiology, and having published on ecology, anthropology, and linguistics, Diamond's work is known for drawing from a variety of fields. He is currently professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Among his awards are a Pulitzer Prize and an International Cosmos Prize. Diamond splits his time between teaching at UCLA, researching birds of the Pacific islands, writing books about human societies, and promoting sustainable ecological practices. He formerly had a secondary career path in physiology and biophysics.
Eva Julia Neer (1937–2000) was an American physician, biochemist, and cell-biology scientist who gained U.S. national research awards for her discoveries on G-protein subunit structure and function. She described the physiological roles of these subunits as an integrated and versatile molecular system of signal transduction for membrane-receptor regulation of cell function. Her research concepts turned her into a world leader in G-protein studies and impinged widely on the general understanding of cell behavior.
Peter Malcolm Colman is the head of the structural biology division at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia.
Cédric Blanpain is a Belgian researcher in the field of stem cells. He is a tenured professor of developmental biology and genetics at Université Libre de Bruxelles and director of the stem cell and cancer lab at its Faculty of Medicine. He was one of the first researchers in the world to use cell lineage tracing in cancer research and he showed for the first time the existence of cancer stem cells in solid tumors in vivo. He was selected by Nature as one of 10 People who mattered most in 2012 and he received the outstanding young investigator award of the International Society for Stem Cell Research.
Jacques Benveniste was a French immunologist born in Paris. In 1979, he published a well-known paper on the structure of platelet-activating factor and its relationship with histamine. He was head of allergy and inflammation immunology at the French biomedical research agency INSERM.
Pavan Ramdya is an American and Swiss neuroscientist and bioengineer. His research centers on understanding the cognitive and neuromechanical control of behavior toward applications in robotics and artificial intelligence. He holds the Firmenich Next Generation Chair in neuroscience and bioengineering at EPFL, and is head of the Neuroengineering Laboratory at EPFL's School of Life Sciences.
Ludger Johannes is a French-German biochemist who has specialized in the field of endocytosis and intracellular trafficking. He and his team study how sugars attached to proteins or lipids influence the transport of biological material into eukaryotic cells.
Alex Sigal is a South Africa–based virologist at the Africa Health Research Institute (AHRI) in Durban, South Africa, Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, and University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban. His work concentrates on evolution and persistence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. His laboratory was the first to isolate the live B.1.351 (Beta) variant of SARS-CoV-2 first detected in South Africa. Sigal’s laboratory was also the first to report results on the ability of the Omicron variant to escape antibody neutralization in individuals who had two doses of the Pfizer BNT162b2 vaccine as well as from previous infections, with results also suggesting that vaccination combined with a booster or previous infection can offer protection from symptomatic infection with Omicron.
Clifford P. Brangwynne is a professor of chemical and biological engineering at Princeton University, the director of the Princeton Bioengineering Initiative, and the June K. Wu ’92 Professor in Engineering. He is also a researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
