The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR China
Kathryn Cheah is a developmental geneticist and Jimmy & Emily Tang Professor in Molecular Genetics and Chair Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Hong Kong. She received her BSc Hons degree in Biology from the University of London and PhD in Molecular Biology from Cambridge University, U.K. After postdoctoral training at the University of Manchester and Imperial Cancer Research Fund in the UK, she joined the University of Hong Kong. Her research focuses on using functional genomics and mouse models to understand gene function and regulation, the associated gene regulatory networks and mechanisms of disease, with a focus on skeletal and inner ear development, congenital and common skeletal disorders. Notable contributions are the identification of SOX2 as essential for prosensory development in the inner ear, SOX9 as a key regulator of COL2A1 and the cartilage gene regulatory network, a lineage continuum for cartilage and bone cells and a causative mechanistic link between endoplasmic reticulum stress and skeletal disorders. She is an elected Fellow of the Global Science Academy, The World Academy Sciences (TWAS).
She was the founding President of the Hong Kong Society for Developmental Biology and the Hong Kong representative for the Asia-Pacific Developmental Biology Network and the International Society of Developmental Biology (2004-2013), elected President of the International Society for Matrix Biology (2006-2008), Senior External Fellow of the University of Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies (2011-2012) and elected member of the Board of Directors of the International Society of Differentiation (2012-2018).
She brings editorial expertise to eLife having previously served as Associate Editor for Genesis, guest Associate Editor for PLOS Genetics, Asian Editor for Development Growth & Differentiation (2015-2016), editorial board member of Matrix Biology, BioEssays, Annual Reviews of Genomics & Human Genetics, and as Reviewing Editor of eLife.
Seoul National University College of Medicine, South Korea
Murim Choi’s main scientific question is to elucidate the genetic mechanisms of human diseases. To address this, his expertise lies in the functional interpretation of human genetic variants using genomic and bioinformatic methodologies. He graduated from Seoul National University (SNU), Seoul, Korea, majoring in Molecular Biology (BS and MS). During the Ph.D course at Duke University, he studied cardiovascular system development in mice. In his postdoctoral training at Yale University, he studied human genetics, setting up a whole exome sequencing pipeline and applying it to various human diseases to identify causal genes. He received a K99/R00 grant for the postdoctoral works and was a recipient of SNU Invitation Program for Distinguished Scholar grant.
Establishing his independent lab at SNU, he has been studying the genetic mechanisms of rare disease pathogenesis, focusing on cases with neurodevelopmental defects. His current approach combines developmental biology and genetics, shaped by the fact that most pediatric rare disease patients experience congenital problems. More recently, his group has undertaken common disease research. His group recently established a bioinformatic pipeline that allows screening of eQTL signals only functioning in the non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) status and validated its utility. At SNU, he has been instrumental in establishing genetics and genomics methodologies by collaborating with clinicians in SNU Hospital. His lab has recently established protocols in advanced functional genomics approaches, including single-cell sequencing, saturation mutagenesis, modifier screening, and cell tracing technique to understand the genetic mechanisms underlying disease progression.
He has a strong interest in clinical and translational research, especially in elucidating genotype-phenotype relationships that may lead to human diseases. In 2018, he was selected as a member of the Young Korean Academy of Science and Technology.
National Cancer Institute, United States
Yamini Dalal did her graduate work on chromatin structure with Arnie Stein and Minou Bina at Purdue University (PhD, 2003), and her postdoctoral research on centromeres with Steve Henikoff at the Fred Hutch Cancer Research Center (2007). She is currently a Senior Investigator leading the Chromosome Structure and Epigenetics Mechanism Unit within the Laboratory of Receptor Biology and Gene Expression at the Center for Cancer Research of the NCI/NIH in Bethesda. Her lab focuses on histones, which package the entirety of the human genome into chromatin. Using a combination of chromatin biochemistry, computational modelling, atomic force microscopy (AFM), genetics, genomics and cell biology, Dr. Dalal and colleagues are investigating whether chromatin adopts alternate structural conformations in cancer cells, the functional consequences of large-scale chromosomal alterations upon the cancer epigenome, and identifying small molecules which can target these structures or processes.
University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Adèle Marston is Professor of Cell Biology at the University of Edinburgh, a Wellcome Investigator and Director of the Wellcome Discovery Research Platform for Hidden Cell Biology. Adèle investigates the fundamental mechanisms by which cells reproduce themselves and transmit their genome to the next generation. She has a particular interest in meiosis, the cell division that generates eggs and sperm. Her laboratory takes a multi-disciplinary approach to identify the fundamental mechanisms of chromosome segregation in model organisms, including yeast, frogs and mice. To understand the relevance of these discoveries for human fertility, she also works with clinicians to investigate the origins of chromosome segregation errors in human oocytes.
University of Toronto, Canada
Alan M Moses is currently Professor and Canada Research Chair in Computational Biology in the Departments of Cell & Systems Biology and Computer Science at the University of Toronto. His research touches on many of the major areas in computational biology, including DNA and protein sequence analysis, phylogenetic models, population genetics, expression profiles, regulatory network simulations and image analysis. Recent areas of focus include machine learning applied to microscope images, protein and genome sequences, to better understand subcellular localization, intrinsically disordered regions and regulatory sequences in non-coding DNA.
Brandeis University, United States
Sacha Nelson is the Tauber Professor of Biology and Chair of the Program in Neuroscience at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. He received his MDPhD (Biology) from UCSD in 1991, did postdoctoral work at MIT and has been at Brandeis University since 1994. He has received awards from the Sloan, McKnight and Rett Syndrome Research Foundations. His current research focuses on transcriptional networks underlying neuronal plasticity and excitability in the mammalian neocortex.
University of Geneva, Switzerland
Dr Dominique Soldati-Favre studied biochemistry and earned her PhD degree in molecular biology from the University of Zürich (Switzerland). She is full Professor at the department of Microbiology and Molecular Medicine at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Geneva. Her laboratory is studying obligate intracellular parasitism using Toxoplasma gondii. The main line of research focuses on the cell biology underlying parasite active invasion into mammalian cells. Her group is also aiming at defining the metabolic needs and capabilities of the parasites as well as how they subvert host cellular functions notably to access nutrients.
Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Germany
Detlef Weigel received his PhD in 1988 from the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology. After postdoctoral work at the California Institute of Technology, he joined the faculty of the Salk Institute in 1993. Since 2002, he has been director of the Department of Molecular Biology at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology. His current research interests focus on natural genetic variation and evolutionary genomics of plants. Examples of recent important projects are the 1001 Genomes project for Arabidopsis thaliana, and the systematic dissection of deleterious epistasis between Arabidopsis strains due to autoimmunity. Among the awards he has received are the Young Investigator Award of the National Science Foundation, the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Award of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and the Otto Bayer Award. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the Royal Society.
Washington State University, United States
Wei Yan obtained his MD from China Medical University and PhD from University of Turku, Finland. After finishing his post-doc training at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, he started his own lab at the University of Nevada School of Medicine, where he rose through the ranks and eventually named University Foundation Professor, the highest honor the University bestows upon its faculty. In 2020, he joined The Lundquist Institute at Harbor-UCLA to direct the newly established National Center for Male Reproductive Epigenomics, one of the seven National Centers for Translational Research in Reproduction and Infertility (NCTRI) supported by the NICDH. The Yan lab works on genetic and epigenetic control of fertility and the epigenetic contribution of gametes to fertilization, early embryonic development, and adulthood health. He has so far published over 160 peer-reviewed research articles and book chapters with over 12,00 citations.
His lab first put forward a novel idea for the development of non-hormonal male contraceptives: “Do not kill, but disable sperm”, which led to the discovery of TRIPTONIDE, a natural compound, as a reversible non-hormonal contraceptive agent in mice and monkeys, and established it as a drug candidate for “The Pill” for men. His lab also discovered the function of motile cilia in the reproductive tracts. In the male, motile ciliary beating function as an agitator to maintain the constant suspension of immotile testicular sperm during their transit through the efferent ductules in men. In the female, motile cilia in the oviduct/Fallopian tube are essential for oocyte pickup and fertility, but dispensable for embryo and sperm transport, which are mostly achieved through smooth muscle contraction. This discovery solved the long-standing controversy about the role of cilia beating vs. muscle contraction in gamete/embryo transport. His lab elucidated several novel mechanisms underlying the unique regulation of gene expression during the haploid phase of spermatogenesis, including global shortening of transcripts, delayed translation/uncoupling of transcription and translation, and dynamic changes in poly(A) length and non-A contents. His lab first discovered mitochondrial genome-encoded small RNAs (mitosRNAs), endo-siRNAs in the male germline and MSCI-escaping X-linked miRNAs. His lab was also among those that suggested critical functions of sperm-borne RNAs in supporting early embryonic development and epigenetic inheritance.
Wei Yan’s contributions to science have been recognized by several academic awards, including the 2009 Society for the Study of Reproduction (SSR) Young Investigator Award, the 2012 American Society of Andrology (ASA) Young Andrologist Award, the 2013 Nevada Healthcare Hero Award for Research and Technology, the 2017 University of Nevada, Reno Outstanding Researcher Award, the 2018 SSR Research Award and the 2020 Nevada System of Higher Education Research Award. Dr Yan was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2017 and SSR Distinguished Fellow in 2023.
Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Argentina
Hawassa University, Ethiopia
University of Kashmir, India
Stanford University, United States
University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States
Korea University, South Korea
St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, United States
University of Kansas, United States
Northwestern University, United States
National Cancer Institute, United States
Indian Institute of Science Bangalore, India
Iowa State University, United States
The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, United States
Universidad de Buenos Aires - CONICET, Argentina
Baylor College of Medicine, United States
Columbia University, United States
University of Southern California, United States
University of California, Berkeley, United States
University of Michigan, United States
Justus-Liebig University Giessen, Germany
University of Montreal, Canada
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Université de Lille, France
Groningen Institute for Evolutionary Life Sciences, University of Groningen, Netherlands
University of Pennsylvania, United States
University of Southern California, United States
Korea University College of Medicine, South Korea
University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, United States
Université Paris-Diderot CNRS, France
Federal University of São Paulo, Brazil
Baylor College of Medicine, United States
University of Alabama at Birmingham, United States
Leiden University Medical Center, Netherlands
Institut de la Vision, France
Altos Labs, Cambridge Institute of Science, United Kingdom
University of California, Davis, United States
Leibniz Institute on Aging - Fritz Lipmann Institute, Germany
University of California, San Francisco, United States
Imperial College London, United States
Max Planck Institute of Experimental Medicine, Germany
Lund University, Sweden
University of Arizona, United States
Universidad de Valparaiso, Chile
Australian National University, Australia
INTA, Argentina
University of California, Los Angeles, United States
Van Andel Institute, United States
The University of Melbourne, Australia
University of Pennsylvania, United States
Pennsylvania State University, United States
National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, United States
University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, United States
Attikon University Hospital, Greece
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, United States
University of Michigan, United States
Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
University of Sidney, Australia
Universidade de Sao Paulo, Brazil
Boston University, United States
University of Maryland, United States
Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, National Centre for Biological Sciences, India
Institute for Biology Free University Berlin, Germany
Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, United States
Brown University, United States
University of Exeter, United Kingdom
National Institute of Genetics, Japan
Yale School of Medicine, United States
The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, United States
University of Chicago, United States
National Institute of Genetics, Japan
National Institutes of Health, United States
Uppsala University, Sweden
University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
Gachon University College of Medicine, South Korea
Cornell University, United States
University of Michigan, United States
Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
University at Buffalo, State University of New York, United States
Yale University School of Medicine, United States
Zagazig University, Egypt
Loma Linda University, United States
State University of Campinas, Brazil
Centre for Research and Advanced Studies, Mexico
University of Michigan, United States
Laboratório Nacional de Computação Científica, Brazil
University of Groningen, Netherlands
National Centre for Biological Sciences, India
Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Nigeria
University of Michigan, United States
Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas del Noroeste (CIBNOR), Mexico
Institut Pasteur de Montevideo, Uruguay
Massachusetts General Hospital, United States
Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
University of Illinois at Chicago, United States
University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, United States
University of Colorado School of Medicine, United States
National Cancer Institute, NIH, United States
University of California, Los Angeles, United States
University of California, Irvine, United States
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Israel
Tsinghua University, China
Seoul National University of Science and Technology, South Korea
University College London, United Kingdom
Indian Institute of Science Bangalore, India
Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Tirupati, India
University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States
University of Vienna, Austria
Huazhong Agricultural University, China
Duke University, United States
Buck Institute for Research on Aging, United States
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, United Kingdom
St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, United States
National University of Singapore & Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory, Singapore
CorpoGen, Colombia
University of Nevada, Reno, United States
Dartmouth College, United States
Institute of Radiation Medicine, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College, China
University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, United States
Wuhan University, China
John Innes Centre, United Kingdom
University of Utah, United States