Aviv Regev 

Broad Institute, USA

Aviv Regev, a computational and systems biologist, joined the Broad Institute as a core member and MIT as a faculty member in 2006. Regev’s research centers on understanding how complex molecular circuits function in cells and between cells in tissues. She is a professor in the Department of Biology at MIT, Chair of the Faculty and founding director of the Klarman Cell Observatory and Cell Circuits Program at the Broad, and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Her lab has been a pioneer of single-cell genomics–inventing key experimental methods and computational algorithms in the field, and demonstrating how to apply it to understand cell taxonomies, histological organization, differentiation and physiological processes, and how to infer the molecular and cellular circuits that control the function of cells and tissues in health and disease. She is the Founding Co-Chair of the international initiative to build a Human Cell Atlas (HCA), whose mission is to create comprehensive reference maps of all human cells—the fundamental units of life—as a basis for both understanding human health and diagnosing, monitoring, and treating disease.

Jie Qiao

Peking University
Third Hospital, China

ie Qiao is Academician of Chinese academy of engineering, President and Chief Physician of Peking University Third Hospital, Director of the National Clinical Research Center on Obstetrics and Gynecology (OBYGN) Disease, President of China Women Doctors Association, Chair for the Reproductive Medical Society of Chinese Medical Doctor Association, Chief editor of 《Human Reproduction Update (Chinese version)》and Special Consultant《NEJM Medical frontier》.

Her reproductive research focus on the molecular mechanism of human gametogenesis and embryo development, infertility causes and clinical treatments, the protection and preservation of female fertility as well as developing new pre-implantation diagnosis methods. Qiao has led the team to achieve a number of technical and theoretical breakthroughs in the systematic study of human embryonic development and team made many landmark contributions to the development of reproductive medicine. From 2016, about 600,000 outpatients visited Peking University Third Hospital ART Center every year. Up to now, she has published 199 SCI papers as the first or corresponding author, including Science, Cell, JAMA, Nature, Lancet, Nature Genetics etc, providing new insights into the mechanism of epigenetic regulation during embryonic development and bringing hope to a great number of infertile patients in China.

Xuegong Zhang

Tsinghua University, China

Xuegong Zhang earned his BS degree in Industrial Automation in 1989 and Ph.D. degree in Pattern Recognition and Intelligent Systems in 1994, both from Tsinghua University. He joined the faculty of Tsinghua University in 1994, where he is now a Professor of Pattern Recognition and Bioinformatics in the Department of Automation, and an Adjunct Professor of the School of Life Sciences and also the School of Medicine. Dr. Zhang worked at Harvard School of Public Health as a visiting scientist on computational biology in 2001-2002, and had been a visiting scholar in the MCB program at USC in 2007. He is the Director of the Bioinformatics Division, Beijing National Research Institute for Information Science and Technology (BNRist), and the Acting Director of the Tsinghua University Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology. His research interests include machine learning, biological data mining especially for single-cell sequencing data and metagenomic sequencing data, human cell atlas, and the analyses of multi-modal big healthcare data.

Qingming Luo

Hainan University,
China

Qingming Luo is the President of Hainan University and Director of Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics (WNLO) affiliated with Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), Wuhan, China. His research interests focus primarily on multi-scale optical bioimaging and cross-level information integration. He is currently leading the project Visible Brainwide Networks at single-neuron resolution. He is the chief scientist of the project Novel Technologies and Methods of Optical Molecular Imaging for Protein Function in vivo supported by National Basic Research Program of China. Qingming holds 63 patents and has co-authored more than 200 papers in peer-reviewed journal, including Science, Nature Cell Biology, Nature Methods, Nature Communication, PNAS, Optics Letters, Optics Express and Journal of Biomedical Optics, with an h-index of 50 according to Google Scholars. He is an elected Fellow of AIMBE, OSA, SPIE, IET and COS.

Orit Rozenblatt-Rosen is scientific director of the Klarman Cell Observatory at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. In this role, she works on the scientific planning, organization, and execution of the Klarman Cell Observatory projects, collaborations, and activities. The Klarman Cell Observatory aims to systematically chart cellular circuits in mammalian cells and tissues. The Observatory builds on cutting-edge experimental and computational technologies as well as collaborations that span diverse scientific disciplines. Rozenblatt-Rosen is also the lead scientist at the Broad for the international Human Cell Atlas Initiative. The Human Cell Atlas aims to create comprehensive reference maps of all human cells as a basis for both understanding human health and treating disease.

Zemin Zhang 

Peking University, China

Zemin Zhang is a Professor of Peking University and a principal investigator at BIOPIC, the Center for Life Sciences of Peking and Tsinghua Universities, and Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Genomics. Dr. Zhang obtained his BS from Nankai University, PhD from Penn State University and postdoctoral trainings at UCSF. Dr. Zhang spent >16 years at Genentech/Roche, leading the cancer genomics and bioinformatics group to discover anticancer targets and biomarkers using cutting technologies such as machine learning and high throughput sequencing. He has pioneered multiple research directions in computational cancer biology and cancer genomics including the first ever whole genome tumor sequencing. He is also an inventor for 60 issued US patents and has directly contributed to the initial finding of the molecular targets of multiple cancer therapeutic agents in clinical trials. His lab currently focuses on understanding the interplay between immune and cancer cells using both large-scale cancer genomics data and the cutting-edge single cell sequencing technologies. He is a CUSBEA Scholar as well as Cheung Kong Scholar.

Muzlifah Haniffa

Newcastle University, UK

Muzlifah Haniffa is Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow in Clinical Science, Lister Institute Prize Fellow, Senior Lecturer and Honorary Consultant Dermatologist Institute of Cellular Medicine. Her research program is focused on understanding the functional heterogeneity of human mononuclear phagocytes, a family of white blood cells comprising dendritic cells, monocytes and macrophages, which initiate and regulate immune responses. She has used functional genomics and comparative biology to align the human and mouse mononuclear phagocyte networks. Muzlifah's research goal is to understand how mononuclear phagocytes regulate tissue homeostasis, immunity upon vaccination and their role in disease pathogenesis. This knowledge is essential for the development of new strategies to manipulate host immune response to improve vaccination and immunotherapeutic strategies.

Jonah Cool

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, USA

Jonah Cool is a cell biologist and geneticist by training, and is currently a Science Program Officer at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, where he leads the organization's efforts to support the international Human Cell Atlas consortium. He was an American Heart Association fellow while completing his PhD at Duke Medical Center, with a focus on the role of vascularization during cell differentiation and organ morphogenesis, and was subsequently a Ruth Kirchstein Fellow at the Salk Institute studying nuclear organization during stem cell differentiation. Dr. Cool previously worked in intellectual property litigation, as well as ran an industry research group working toward therapeutic application of 3D bioprinted human tissue. He has a deep love of cell biology and, in particular, the origins of cellular heterogeneity and how diverse cells assemble into complex tissues.

Xinrong Zhang

Tsinghua University, China

Xinrong Zhang was born in 1956. He received his Bachelor's degrees at Shaanxi Normal University, China in 1982, and Ph.D degree at Ghent University, Belgium in 1997. His current research interests are focused on analytical methodology and application of mass spectrometry and luminescence analysis. He published over 190 papers in peer-reviewed journals and 10 patents related to analytical methods and instrumentation. He is now the RSC fellow and serves as Associate Editor of Analytical Chemistry (ACS), Editor-in-Chief of Luminescence (Wiley), Advisory Board Member of Talanta (Elsevier) and Analyst (RSC).

Guoji Guo

Zhejiang University, China

Guoji Guo is the deputy director of Center for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine at Zhejiang University School of Medicine. He is also the deputy chair of Stem Cell Society at Zhejiang University. Professor Guoji Guo is interested in developing new single cell analysis technologies and applying these technologies to investigate stem cell biology.

Yinqing Li

Tsinghua University, China

Yinqing Li joined Tsinghua faculty in 2018 and is currently an assistant professor in the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences. He received his B.S. in microelectronics from Fudan University in 2008 and his S.M. and PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2012 and 2016. During the course of his doctoral and postdoctoral research, Yinqing pioneered the engineering and characterization of cell and gene editing tools, co-invented single-nucleus transcriptome profiling technologies, and broadened these tools to systematically interrogate cortical-thalamic circuity function and in disease models. His current research interests include single cell characterization and genome editing technologies.

Kristin Ardlie

Broad Institute, USA

Kristin Ardlie studies the functional impact of human genetic variation, and the regulation of gene expression. She lead the Genotype Tissue Expression (GTEx) Project's, Laboratory, Data Analysis, and Coordinating Center (LDACC), producing and analyzing a resource of ~20,000 RNA-sequenced tissues from 960 donors with whole genome sequence data. She also works on RNA sequencing and analysis for the NHLBI's TOPMed initiative, is part of the NIH's Data Commons Pilot project, and serves as a program consultant on the external advisory board for the NIH/Common Fund's Molecular Transducers of Physical Activity in Humans Consortium (MoTrPAC). Most recently she has worked single cell projects in the context of GTEx, including the development of open access consent documents, and extension of the GTEx pipeline for the enrollment of new donors for single cell project efforts. Kristin received a PhD from Princeton University in 1995, completed a fellowship with the Harvard Society of Fellows, and worked at the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research.  She spent 6 years as VP of Genetics at Genomics Collaborative Inc.  

Holger Heyn

National Centre for Genomic Analysis, Spain

Holger Heyn is the team Leader of the "Single Cell Genomics Group" at the Spain National Centre for Genomic Analysis (CNAG-CRG) . He focuses on the systematic integration of genomic data, to elucidate causalities underlying phenotype formation. The mission of the group is the development of novel genomics technologies and their application in a research context. Dr. Heyn published 61 peer-reviewed scientific papers (24 as first author or senior author), including 51 original research articles, 6 Reviews and 3 book chapters. These include publications in high-ranked scientific journals, such as Science, Cell, Nature Reviews Genetics, etc. The publications have been 4,872x cited, resulting in an h-index of 31 (Google Scholar). In 2014, he was awarded with the prestigious Miguel Servet fellowship to establish an independent research group. Since then, he obtained further competitive funding to support his work on Systems Genomics at the CNAG-CRG. He is participating in several national and international research consortia, including the Human Cell Atlas (HCA) Project, European Epigenome Project BLUEPRINT (IHEC) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA).

Sarion Bowers

Wellcome Sanger Institute, UK

Sarion Bowers is the Head of Policy at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. She completed her PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge before continuing her research in DNA packaging and gene regulation in the UK and the US. She changed careers and now specialises in science and technology policy relating to genomics. Sarion has a particular interest UK science policy, data protection and the ethical, legal and societal issues that arise from the use of genomics, including genome editing.

Tao Dai

NHC, China

Tao Dai is in charge of PMI research projects, and translational medicine and he is researcher and research supervisor, actively involved in China health and medical system reform. His major research areas including health policy and administration, knowledge management and health informatics. He had been the Director of Health Informatics Institute of Chinese Academy of Medical Science, the Executive Deputy Director of the Center for Health Policy and Management Studies, and the Director of the Social Medicine and Health Administration Department of the Peking Union Medical College, etc.

Chen Dong

Tsinghua University, China

Chen Dong is Professor and Director of the Institute for Immunology and also Dean of the School of Medicine at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. Dr. Dong served as a Professor of Immunology and the Director of the Center for inflammation and Cancer at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center before his move to Tsinghua University. Dr. Dong's research is to understand the molecular mechanisms whereby immune and inflammatory responses are normally regulated, and to apply this knowledge to the understanding and treatment of autoimmunity and allergy disorders as well as cancer. The work from Dr. Dong's group has led to the discoveries of Th17 and T follicular helper (Tfh) cell subsets in the immune system and elucidation of their biological and pathological functions. Dr. Dong has over 200 publications and was rated highly cited researcher for five years from 2014 to 2018. The honors he has received include the 2009 American Association of Immunologists BD Bioscience Investigator Award and election of fellow, the American Association for the advancement of Science in 2011. He is currently an Editor for Immunity, Editor-in-chief for Frontiers in Immunology- T Cell Biology and Associate Editor for China Sciences-Life Sciences.

Michael Q. Zhang

Tsinghua University, China

Michael Q. Zhang got his B.S. in Mech. Eng. from USTC and joined the first CUSPEA (initiated by T.D. Lee) group studying physics in USA in 1981. After getting Statistical Physics PhD from Rutgers University in 1987, he became a postdoc at the Courant Institute of Mathematics at NYU until he became a Genome Research fellow at CSHL in 1991. He started my Computational Genomics Lab there in 1996 and became full professor in 2002. He became 1000-Talent guest professor of Tsinghua University in 2009 and moved to The University of Texas at Dallas as the Cecil H. and Ida Green Distinguished endowed chair Professor in 2010. He is currently the director of Center for Systems Biology at UT Dallas and the co-director of Center for Synthetic and Systems Biology at Tsinghua U.

Mayumi Kusunose

RIKEN, Japan

Mayumi Kusunose is a senior technical scientist at RIKEN. Her role entails providing ethical support for projects. She holds a master's degree in Bioethics from the University of Pennsylvania and a master's degree in Humanities and Social Sciences from Kochi University. Her professional interests include research ethics, clinical ethics and data ethics, with a particular focus on regenerative medicine, stem cell research, informed consent and benefit sharing. 

Kevin Taylor

Illumina, USA

Kevin Taylor earned his Ph.D. in Pathobiology and Molecular Medicine from the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine.  He has held research positions at University of California - Irvine and the Cleveland Clinic's Learner Research Institute focusing on the underlying signaling mechanisms that drive angiogenesis in development, tumor progression, and metastasis.  Now, at Illumina, Kevin's focus is on leveraging next generation sequencing methods for cell biology applications including single cell analysis.

Jenny Xiao is Associate Director, Global Market Development, for NGS genomic applications at Illumina. She currently focuses on developing KOL relationships and scientific society engagements in the field of Single cell and genome editing. Examples include participating NIST (National institute of standard and technology) genome editing consortium to develop standard control samples and off-target validation procedure and other government and society collaborations to address FDA's safety concerns in genome editing based therapeutic solutions. Jenny completed her BS in Biology at Peking University, MBA at Santa Clara University and Ph.D. in Entomology at University of Hawaii at Manoa. After her postdoctoral training at Stanford Medical School, Jenny held different technical and commercial roles at Agilent Technologies, Agena, and Thermo Fisher Scientific with leading genomic technologies, including microarray, Mass-spec, real-time PCR, Sanger Sequencing, and NGS. She has worked with researchers in the field of molecular diagnostics, agricultural biotechnologies, and various research fields.

Jens Durruthy-Durruthy

10x Genomics, USA

Jens Durruthy Durruthy is the Product Manager for Single Cell at 10x Genomics. He oversees the various activities associated with managing the Single Cell Gene Expression Solution including the execution, development, and promotion of on-market and future single cell products. With over 8 years of experience working with various single cell technologies on and off the bench he is striving to deliver high quality single cell products. Jens holds a PhD in biomedical engineering from Stanford University. In his spare time, he enjoys running and traveling.