PLENARY SPEAKERS

Alberto Bardelli is Professor at the Dept. of Oncology at the University of Torino School of Medicine and Director of the Laboratory of Molecular Oncology at the Candiolo Cancer Institute in Italy. He holds a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular biology from the University College London (UCL) followed by a post-doctoral fellowship in the laboratory directed by Bert Vogelstein at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Prof Bardelli and his laboratory at the Candiolo Cancer Institute have pioneered the combined use of genomics, patients’ avatars and liquid biopsies to accurately predict tumor’s response and resistance to targeted agents. Discoveries from his group led to the development of innovative diagnostic tests, and therapeutic regimens currently in clinical use for colorectal cancer patients. Prof Bardelli has authored more than 200 scientific articles of which 100 as an independent investigator (H factor 94). Prof Bardelli has been President of the European Association for Cancer Research (EACR) and received several awards, including the 2017 ESMO Translational Research Award. Alberto Bardelli is scientific founder of Horizon Discovery, Kither and Neophore. 

Speech Title: Inactivation of DNA repair and high dose Vitamin C boost cancer immunotherapy

MD-PhD Student, in pediatrics and immunology. Currently working in the laboratory of Jean-Laurent Casanova on the genetic and immunological predisposition to life-threatening COVID-19 and other severe viral infections. 

Speech Title: Auto-antibodies against type I interferons in patients with life-threatening COVID-19.

Julià Blanco, IGTP Researcher since 1999 and leader of the Cell Virology and Immunology (VIC) group at The AIDS Research Institute, IrsiCaixa in Badalona (Barcelona).
PhD in Biochemistry (University of Barcelona, 1994), during his post-doctoral training at Institut Pasteur in Paris, Dr Blanco studied the role of the HIV envelope glycoprotein (Env) in viral pathogenesis. Then he moved to its current position to develop research on HIV Env in a translational environment, analyzing the mechanisms involved in CD4 T-cell depletion in vivo and developing experimental models for the analysis of cell-to-cell HIV transmission and Env-induced cell death. The knowledge generated on HIV Env function prompted Dr. Blanco to approach HIV vaccine research by developing new immunogens based in HIV Env and a novel and highly immunogenic vaccine platform. Dr Blanco recently co-founded AlbaJuna Therapeutics SL a spin-off whose main activity is the development of synthetic antibodies against HIV. All this knowledge has been recently extended to other pathogens, including SARS-CoV-2 and cancer immunology.

Speech Title: A new standard for science

Dr. Anne-Marie Caminade is Director of Research Exceptional Class at the CNRS (equivalent to Full Professor of Research), and the Head of the “Dendrimers and Heterochemistry” group (ca 20 researchers) at the Laboratoire de Chimie de Coordination (LCC) in Toulouse France. Starting from January 1^st 2021, she is the Deputy Director of the LCC (ca 250 persons), particularly in charge of the supervision of the biology and health researches in the LCC. She is author and co-author of 488 publications in journals, 1st rank in the world for the number of publications about dendrimers (source SciFinder). She is editor of two books and co-author of 53 book chapters, co-inventor of 18 priority patents + 16 World extensions (WO), her h index is 71 (over 16,000 citations in WOS). She was the Chair of numerous international conferences, including PEMED 2018 in Paris. She was Invited Editor for several special issues in Molecules (MDPI), Coordination Chemistry Reviews, and Chemical Society Reviews (IF2019 = 42.846), where she is Advisory Editor since 2010. Her current research interest is on dendrimers (hyperbranched and perfectly defined nanometric molecules) (1993- ) and to the chemical approach of nanosciences, in particular concerning: i) Materials, nanometric modifications on the surface of materials (electrodes, nanolatexes, metallic surfaces, silica, alumina), elaboration of ultra-sensitive DNA Chips, chemical sensors; materials incorporating dendrimers (nanotubes, microcapsules, hydrogels, fibers, organic-inorganic materials, etc.), ii) Biology/nanomedicine/health (dendrimers as anti-prion, anti-HIV, anti-cancer, antibacterial and anti-inflammatory agents, for immunology, medical imaging and genetic transfection, against Uveitis, Multiple Sclerosis, psoriasis, Rheumatoid Arthritis, tuberculosis, etc.), in collaboration with biologists and medical doctors.

Speech Title: Coming soon

Professor of Genetics, University of Geneva

Director, Health 2030 Genome Center

Director, the Institute of Genetics and Genomics in Geneva

Emmanouil (Manolis) Dermitzakis is Professor of Genetics in the Department of Genetic Medicine and Development, University of Geneva Medical School, Director of the Health2030 Genome Center and Director of the Institute of Genetics and Genomics in Geneva. He is vice-chair of the Swiss Personalized Health Network Genomics Task Force, and also member of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. He is former Chairman of the National Council for Research, Technology and Innovation in Greece He obtained his B.Sc. (1995) and M.Sc. (1997) from the University of Crete (Greece) and his PhD in 2001 from the Pennsylvania State University in the USA. His post-doctoral work was at the University of Geneva Medical School. He previously was a Senior Investigator at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge. He was elected EMBO member in 2014, recipient of the 2017 Bodossakis science award and has been named Highly Cited Researcher by ISI every year from 2014 onwards. He also served as president of the World Hellenic Biomedical Association (2014-2015). His research focuses on the genetic causes of human disease. He has had leading roles in the ENCODE, Mouse Genome Sequencing, the International HapMap, the 1000 genomes and GTEx projects. He has served in the Board of scientific journals such as Science, eLIFE, PLoS Genetics and he is currently the Chief Editor of Frontiers in Genetics.

Speech Title: Dissecting disease mechanisms with genetically perturbed regulatory networks

Dr. Elemento is a tenured full professor at Weill Cornell Medicine and the Director of the Caryl and Israel Englander Institute for Precision Medicine (EIPM; https://eipm.weill.cornell.edu/) since 2017. The EIPM is fundamentally multidisciplinary and draws its ~60 faculty members from nearly all basic and clinical departments at WCM. The Englander Institute’s mission is to use genomics, AI and other technologies to bring highly personalized medicine to patients at NewYork Presbyterian Hospital and foster patient-centered basic and clinical research in the areas of genomics, systems biology, AI and data science. Dr. Elemento is funded by numerous NIH grants, Foundation grants, NIH contracts and industry alliances (Eli Lilly, Janssen). He has published over 280 papers in the area of precision medicine, genomics, computational biology, systems biology and drug discovery. He has led the development of novel clinical (CLIA) genomics assays including whole-exome sequencing offered to patients at WCM/NYPH and is currently leading a large multi-disease effort to bring WGS into clinical practice at WCM/NYP. He has received several external and internal awards and recognition e.g., NSF CAREER award and Opening Plenary Speaker at AACR in 2020. Dr. Elemento has mentored numerous graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who went on to have successful careers in academia and industry. Two of his students were named “Forbes 30 under 30” while in his lab. Dr. Elemento co-founded two venture capital-funded companies: Volastra Therapeutics (with Lew Cantley, Sam Bakhoum) and OneThree Biotech (with Neel Madhukar). He serves on the scientific advisory board of Volastra, OneThree Biotech as well as of Owkin, Freenome, and several other companies.

Speech Title: Coming soon

Manel Esteller (Sant Boi de Llobregat, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, 1968) graduated in Medicine from the Universidad de Barcelona in 1992, where he also obtained his Ph.D. degree specialising in molecular genetics of endometrial carcinoma, in 1996. He was an Invited Researcher at the School of Biological and Medical Sciences at the University of St. Andrews, (Scotland, UK) during which time his research interests focused on the molecular genetics of inherited breast cancer. From 1997 to 2001, Esteller was a Postdoctoral Fellow and a Research Associate at the Johns Hopkins University and School of Medicine, (Baltimore, USA) where he studied DNA methylation and human cancer. His work was decisive in establishing promoter hypermethylation of tumour suppressor genes as a common hallmark of all human tumours.
From October 2001 to September 2008 Manel Esteller was the Leader of the CNIO Cancer Epigenetics Laboratory, where his principal area of research were the alterations in DNA methylation, histone modifications and chromatin in human cancer. Since October 2008 untill May 2019, Dr Esteller has been the Director of the Cancer Epigenetics and Biology Program (PEBC) of the Bellvitge Institute for Biomedical Research (IDIBELL) in Barcelona. He is currently Director of the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute (IJC), Chairman of Genetics in the School of Medicine of the University of Barcelona, and an ICREA Research Professor. His current research is devoted to the establishment of the epigenome and epitranscriptome maps of normal and transformed cells, the study of the interactions between epigenetic modifications and non-coding RNAs, and the development of new epigenetic drugs for cancer therapy.
Author of 536 original publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals, 24 of them categorized as “Highly Cited Paper”. Dr Esteller has a Total Impact Factor of 5,102.677 and a Total Number of Citations of 67,375, having an h-Index of 124 by Web of Science – Clarivate Analytics. Dr. Esteller is considered among the Top 0.01% of World Scientists based on Impact by Stanford University (METRICS). He is also a Member of numerous international scientific societies, Editorial Boards and reviewer for many journals and funding agencies. Dr Esteller is also Associate Editor for Cancer Research, The Lancet Oncology, Carcinogenesis, Genome Research and The Journal of The National Cancer Institute. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Epigenetics.
His work has received, among other, the Carcinogenesis Award (2005), Beckman-Coulter Award (2006), Fondazione Piemontese per la Ricerca sul Cancro (FPRC) Award (2006), Swiss Bridge Award (2006), Innovation Award from the Commonwealth of Massachussets (2007), Human Frontier Science Program Award (2007), DEbiopharm-EPFL Award (2009), Dr. Josef Steiner Cancer Research Award (2009), Lilly Foundation Preclinical Biomedical Research Award (2009), World Health Summit Award (2010), the European Research Council Advanced Grant (2011), “Rey Jaime I” Research Award (2013), Severo Ochoa Award in Biomedicine (2014), National Award in Oncology (2014), “Dr Josep Trueta Medal” Generalitat de Catalunya, Catalan Goverment (2015), National Research Award of the Catalan Goverment (2015), Gold Medal, Parlament of Catalonia (2016), International Award of Catalonia (2016), Falcó Carlemany Award (2017), Innovation in Healthcare Oncology Award (2018), Lansdowne Lecture Award, University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada (2019).

Talk title: Coming soon

Mingzhou Guo received his M.D. Degree from Henan Medical University in 1986, he received his Master Degree of Medical Science from Henan Medical University in 1992, he received his Ph.D. degree from Tongji Medical University in 1995. He was a postdoc and later became a faculty worked in Johns Hopkins Oncology Center from 1999 to 2008. From 2008 to present, He was assigned as professor at the Department of Gastroenterology & Hepatology, Chinese PLA General Hospital, Beijing China. His research interests are early cancer detection, targeting therapy, cancer epigenetics and long non-coding RNA, DNA damage repair and synthetic lethality. He has published over 170 peer review papers in many journals, including New English Journal of Medicine, Cancer Research, Clinical Cancer Research, Hepatology, Gut, Gastric Cancer, Cancer Science, International Journal of Cancer, Epigenetics and Epigenomics. He is the editor in Chief of the journal of Chinese Gastroenterology & Hepatology, and the associate editors of Gastric Cancer, Cancer Science, Epigenetics, BMC pulmonary medicine and Japanese Gastroenterology & Hepatology.

Speech Title: A novel synthetic lethal strategy: targeting DNA damage repair based on epigenetic defects

Åslaug Helland, MD PhD is head of research in the OECI accredited Comprehensive Cancer Center (CCC). She works as an oncologist specialized in lung cancer, and leads several clinical studies in lung cancer, including both investigator initiated clinical studies and studies initiated by the pharmaceutical industry. She has initiated two large international investigator initiated studies in lung and mesothelioma this year, and leads the lung cancer research group at Dept of Oncology.
She is heading a research group at the Institute of Cancer Research. This group, Translational Research in Solid Tumours, with 16 members, works on biomarker and biological research in lung, mesothelioma and pancreatic cancer. Focus are studies involving biomarker work and biological mechanisms underlying response. Studies are done on both tumour material and on blood samples from patients included in clinical studies.
She has supervised 9 previous PhD-candidates , in addition to 10 current PhD-students. Helland is author of 136 papers (clinical, translational, epigenetics, epidemiologic), with 5856 citations and h-index 40 (Researchgate Nov. 2020).
Helland is also board member of the patient organization (Lungekreftforeningen), in the Norwegian Oncology Society (NOF) and in the Norwegian Lung Cancer Group (NLCG).

Speech Title: Implementing precision cancer medicine in Norway – IMPRESS-Norway

María José Alonso’s lab has pioneered numerous discoveries in the field of Pharmaceutical Nanotechnology and nanomedicine. She has coordinated several research consortia financed by the WHO, the Gates Foundation and the European Commission. She is the author of 290 scientific contributions with more than 30,000 cites (H factor 75/93). Because of the quality of her scientific articles she has been among the TOP TEN in Pharmacology (Times Higher Education international ranking, 2010). Recently, she become part of the “Power List” of the most influential researchers in the field of Biopharmaceuticals (The Medicine Maker, 2020)

She has also been very active transferring her knowledge and discoveries to industry. She is the inventor of 22 patent families, most of them licensed to industry and she has been part of 3 start-up ventures.

She has served to the Release Society (CRS) for 15 years and she has been President of the CRS (2017-19). She is also Editor-in-Chief of the Drug Delivery and Translational Research, an official journal of the CRS, and she is part of the editorial board of 12 journals. 

She has received 33 awards, among them the ”Research and Education Excellence Medal” granted by the Spanish Government, the “Jaime I Award”, the General Council of Pharmacy Medal, and other awards granted by scientific organizations, such as the ”Marie Junot Award” of the APGI, the “Founders Award”, the “Outstanding Service Award” and the “Women in Sciences Award” of the CRS. She was also recently awarded by the AIM-HI Women’s Venture Competition program born out of the National Foundation for Cancer Research (NFCR). 

She is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and a Fellow of the Controlled Release Society, a member of the Royal Academy of Pharmacy of Spain (RANF), the Royal Academy of Sciences of Galicia, the Royal Academy of Pharmacy in Galicia and a member of the Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium and also a member of the US National Academy of Medicine (NAM).

She was the Vice-rector of Research and Innovation of the USC (2006-10).

Speech Title: Pharmaceutical Nanotechnology and Precision Nanomedicine: New Oncological Treatments

Ann Daly is Professor of Pharmacogenetics at the Faculty of Medical Sciences, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. She holds BA and PhD degrees in Biochemistry from the University of Dublin (Trinity College), Ireland. After several years as a postdoc at the University of Geneva, Switzerland she moved to Newcastle University where she was a founder member of the Newcastle Pharmacogenetics Research Group. Her current research is focused on the genetic susceptibility to idiosyncratic adverse drug reactions, pharmacogenetics of the human cytochromes P450 and the genetics of complex diseases, particularly liver disease. She is currently President of the International Society for the Study of Xenobiotics (ISSX). She is also on the editorial board of a number of journals and a Senior Editor of British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology. She has published over 200 peer reviewed articles and has a H-index of 91.

Speech Title: Genetics of drug-induced liver injury: relevance of non-HLA risk factors

Ari M. Melnick, MD, is Gebroe Family Professor of Hematology/Oncology in the Departments of Medicine and Pharmacology at the Weill Cornell Medical College in NewYork City. He is chair of the Hematologic Malignancies Program of the Weill Cornell Cancer Center, Director of the Sackler Center for Biomedical and Physical Sciences at Weill Cornell. He has chaired a number of international meetings in hematology, cancer and epigenetics. He has authored or co-authored more than 250 manuscripts in journals such as Nature, Science, Cell, Cancer Cell, Nature Medicine, Nature Immunology and
the New England Journal of Medicine. Dr. Melnick’s research is focused on discovering transcriptional and epigenomic mechanisms that drive lymphoid and myeloid neoplasms and harnessing these mechanisms for development of novel drugs and therapeutic regimens for cancer patients. This has led him to early on apply methodologies such as HiC, etc to explore how sets of genes become coordinated during the immune response and disrupted in cancer. Dr. Melnick uses two general approaches to study these mechanisms. On the one hand his group performs focused biochemical and biological mechanistic research on specific transcriptional and epigenetic modifiers that play key roles in normal and malignant tissues. He has used this work to design novel kinds of therapeutic agents including the first rationally designed transcription factor inhibitor as well as to translate to the clinic specific targeted therapies in a more precise manner. In the second approach Dr. Melnick uses the tools of systems biology and high throughout genomics to explore how the epigenome is perturbed in human patients with disease. Along these lines he performed the first organized and comprehensive epigenome mapping in human disease. These studies have expanded to include an international network and over 3000 patients enrolled in various large-scale clinical trials.

Speech Title: Coming soon

Director Preclinical Program, Hopp-Children’s Cancer Center Heidelberg (KiTZ) 

Head of Division of Pediatric Neurooncology German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) 

Deputy Head, KiTZ Clinical Trial Unit (ZIPO) and Pediatric Brain Tumors, Department of Pediatric Hermatology and Oncology, University Hospital Heidelberg.

Speech Title: Personalized Pediatric Oncology – Promises and Challenges

Dr. Eduard Porta-Pardo obtained his degree in Biotechnology from Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona in 2008 and his PhD in Biomedicine from Universitat de Barcelona in 2013. Between 2013 and 2017 he was a postdoctoral associated at SBP Medical Discovery Institute (La Jolla, USA) where he worked on how to use of protein structure data to identify cancer driver genes and drug biomarkers. Between 2016 and 2018 he co-led two analysis working groups from The Cancer Genome Atlas PanCanAtlas project, on cancer driver genes and oncogenic mechanisms, and contributed to a third on the immune landscape of cancer. Between 2018 and 2019 he was a La Caixa Junior Leader Fellow at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). There he worked on how germline variants shape the immune response against tumors and on the use of polygenic scores to predict cancer risk. Since 2020 he leads the Cancer Immunogenomics laboratory at the Josep Carreras Leukemia Research Institute. The group uses computational approaches to understand how genetic variants, both germline and somatic, interact with the tumor microenvironment, particularly with immune cells.

Speech Title: Coming soon

Hege G. Russnes is a medical doctor trained in surgical and molecular pathology and has a combined position as pathologist in Oslo University Hospital and as a group leader at Dept. of Cancer Genetics, Institute for Cancer Research, Oslo University Hospital, Norway. Her main research interest has been molecular analyses of breast cancer, focusing on molecular based classifications. From 2010 she had a post doc fellowship (including 18 months at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Harvard Medical School) focusing on intra-tumor heterogeneity in breast cancer.

Her research group has a focus on molecular studies of breast cancer using multidimensional analyses with a special focus on gene expression analyses, DNA sequencing and protein characterization to improve a molecular based classification and thus prognostication, treatment prediction and follow-up, see details at: http://ous-research.no/russnes/.  She is also involved in several clinical trials where molecular diagnostic test are crucial.

She has been head of Laboratory for molecular pathology, Oslo University Hospital, and is now in charge of “Infrastructure for precision diagnostics, cancer” facilitating molecular diagnostics and logistics for clinical precision medicine trials. This transdisciplinary activity is now established as a new section at Dept. of Pathology to bridge research and molecular diagnostics. She is also head of the National network for Personalized Medicine the Molecular Pathology group in the Norwegian Association for Pathologists and the Norwegian Association of Molecular Pathology.

Speech Title: Establishing an infrastructure for precision diagnostics, cancer

Julio Saez-Rodriguez is Professor of Medical Bioinformatics and Data Analysis at the Faculty of Medicine of Heidelberg University, director of the Institute for Computational Biomedicine, group leader of the EMBL-Heidelberg University Molecular Medicine Partnership Unit, a member of the Heidelberg ELLIS Unit, and a co-director of the DREAM challenges. He holds a PhD (2007) in Chemical Engineering. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School and M.I.T (2007- 2010), group leader at EMBL-EBI, Cambridge (2010-2015), and professor of Computational Biomedicine at RWTH Aachen (2015-2018).  He is interested in developing and applying computational methods to acquire a functional understanding of signaling networks and their deregulation in disease, and to apply this knowledge to develop novel therapeutics. The current emphasis in his group is on the use of single-cell technologies, multi-omics integration, and understanding multi-cellular communication. While his previous focus has been on cancer, he is increasingly working on autoimmune, kidney and cardiovascular diseases. More information at www.saezlab.org

Speech Title: Patient-specific network models for personalized medicine

Dr Montse Sanchez-Cespedes graduated in Biology and obtained her PhD in Genetics and Molecular Biology from the Universidad de Barcelona in Spain. From 1997 to 2001 she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (Baltimore-USA). From October 2004 to September 2008 she started her independent career as a junior group leader of the Lung Cancer Group at the Spanish National Cancer Centre (CNIO) in Madrid. Later, she moved to Barcelona to led the Genes and Cancer Group at the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute-IDIBELL in Barcelona. Since 2019, she is the leader of the Cancer Genetics group at the Josep Carreras Research Institute. 

The laboratory of Dr Sanchez-Cespedes laboratory is devoted to the genetic, epigenetic and molecular study of the mechanisms that drive cancer development, specially focusing in lung cancer. Her lab uses the latest high throughput sequencing technologies to create profiles and catalogues of the recurrently altered genes in cancer. Over all these years, her group has pioneered the identification of relevant tumor suppressor such as STK11, SMARCA4 and MAX, among others, in lung cancer. She is also deeply interested in understanding the mechanisms by which the abnormal function of these genes contribute to carcinogenesis. The ultimately purpose of her research is to design novel therapeutic strategies to implement the clinical management of cancer patients. 

Dr Sanchez-Cespedes is a member of international scientific societies, editorial board member of several journal and reviewer for many journals and funding agencies. She has a list of over 100 original publications and reviews in international and peer-reviewed journals of prestige.

Speech Title: Coming soon

Since 2007 Prof. Matthias Schwab is chair of Clinical Pharmacology at the University Tuebingen and director of the Department of Clinical Pharmacology, University Hospital Tuebingen and the Dr. Margarete Fischer-Bosch-Institute of Clinical Pharmacology (IKP) at Robert-Bosch-Hospital in Stuttgart, Germany.  

After the study of  medicine at the University Erlangen-Nuernberg, Germany followed by fellowships in Children’s Medicine and Clinical Pharmacology with board certifications for both disciplines he has held positions at the IKP, Stuttgart, Germany and as visiting professor at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Memphis, US. In 2006 and in 2010 he declined two offers for Full Professorship and Chair for Clinical Pharmacology in Innsbruck, Austria, and Stockholm, Sweden.

Prof. Schwab’s scientific interests focus on personalized medicine and pharmacogenomics (e.g. cancer therapy) particularly related to ADME genes. In addition, his special interest lies in the consideration of the application of novel –omics technologies as well as the implementation of research findings into clinical practice. 

Throughout his career Matthias Schwab received numerous awards such as the Galenus von Pergamon Award, the Robert-Pfleger Research Award or the “Staufer-Medal” conferred by the Prime Minister of Baden-Württemberg. He is also Member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina as well as of the Academy of Sciences and Literature, Mainz, Germany. His scientific accomplishments result in > 400 peer reviewed publications as well as an ISI H-index of 89. Prof. Schwab is listed as Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher 2015/2016/2018/2020 in the rubric “Pharmacology and Toxicology”/”Cross Field” and serves as Editor-in-Chief of Pharmacogenetics & Genomics, and Drug Research as well as Section Editor of Genome Medicine for Pharmacogenomics & Personalized Medicine.

Speech Title: PharmacoOmics and renal cancer

Elaine S Jaffe is a Senior Investigator and named NIH Distinguished Investigator at the National Cancer Institute.  She completed her medical studies at Cornell University Medical College and the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Jaffe is an author of more than 700 peer reviewed articles, 150 chapters and invited reviews and more than 40 Editorials.  She was an Editor for the WHO Classification of Tumors of the Hematopoietic and Lymphoid Tissues. Science Watch named her among the 10 most highly cited researchers in clinical oncology, and she was included among the 400 most highly cited researchers in Biomedical Science worldwide between 1996 and 2011.    Dr. Jaffe has held leadership positions in several major medical societies, including the American Society of Hematology, United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology and the Society for Hematopathology.  Dr. Jaffe was Chair, of the Medical Sciences Section, of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  She was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies in 2008, and in 2013 was awarded the Stratton Medal from the American Society of Hematology.  Dr Jaffe was invited to give the Henry Rappaport Memorial Lecture at the Lugano International Congress on Malignant Lymphoma in 2013.  Dr. Jaffe received the 2016 Rous Whipple Award from the American Society of Investigative Pathology.  Her clinical and investigational studies have been intertwined to enhance our understanding of the malignant lymphomas.

Speech Title: Lymphoma Diagnosis and Discovery as a Basis for Personalized Medicine

Kari Stefansson MD, PhD is a founder and CEO of the Icelandic biotechnology company deCODE genetics. He pioneered the use of population genetics in the study of human diversity, how human diversity is generated through diversity in the sequence of the human genome and how diversity in the sequence of the genome is generated through de novo mutations, recombinations and gene conversions. The population approach he advanced in Iceland has served as a model for large scale genome projects around the world. His work has been published in over 700 scientific papers and includes discoveries of variants in the sequence of the germline genome that affect the risk of a large number of common diseases (ca. 100). Before founding deCODE in 1996 Dr. Stefansson was a professor of neurology, neuropathology and neuroscience at Harvard Medical School and before that he held the same positions at the University of Chicago, Pritzker School of Medicine.

Dr. Stefansson is an International Member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and he is the recipient of the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) William Allan Award, the European Society of Human Genetics Award, the Anders Jahre Award, the Federation of European Biomedical Societies Sir Hans Krebs Medal, the European Heart Association Gold Medal, the World Glaucoma Association Award, the American Alzheimer’s Association’s Inge Grundke-Iqbal Award, the Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Award, International KFJ Award from Rigshospitalet in Denmark, the Jakobus Award, Elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, and rewarded the Societ‘s 2020 Golden Medal from European Society of Cardiology.

Chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential men of the year for 2007 (Time100 list for 2007), chosen 2007 by Newsweek as one of the 10 most important biologists of the 21 century, Chosen by BusinessWeek as one of the stars of Europe in 2000 at the forefront of change, on the Reuter´s/Thompson´s list of the world´s 10 most cited scientists of 2010, Clarivate Analytics 2016, 2017 and 2018 Highly Cited Researcher in molecular biology and genetics, Clarivate Analytics 2019 and 2020 Highly Cited Researcher Cross-Field

Speech Title: Human diversity in the context of health and disease

Amos Tanay is a Professor in the department of Computer Science and the department of Biological Regulation at the Weizmann Institute. Amos’s background is in Mathematics, and he spent several years in the Israeli start-up industry before completing his PhD in Computational Biology in Tel-Aviv university. He then did postdoctoral training at Rockefeller University and later established his own research group at Weizmann. The Tanay group is combining computational and experimental work to study genomic and epigenomic regulation at multiple scales, building single cell genomic strategies for modelling cell fate acquisition and commitment. The group is actively aiming at integration of new computational and single cell genomics strategies for understanding diseases, studying disease dynamics in electronic health records and overlaying these with new single cell maps defining patient’s molecular states in health, ageing and disease.

Speech Title: Modelling health, ageing and disease trajectories in electronic health records

I received my clinical training in the Medical School and Children’s Hospital of Fudan University, during which I practiced in the only clinic specialized in IEIs in Shanghai. I decided to extend my work to research after my clinical training and joined the research team lead by Dr. Helen Su at the NIH as a postdoctoral fellow. With the team, I discovered a new IEI caused by DOCK8 deficiency. More importantly, I discovered a new signaling pathway that controls cell migration and integrity in 3D tissues, which highlights the importance of tissue-specific immunity. In 2018, I join the Casanova lab, where I intend to develop a research team focusing on IEIs that lead to severe respiratory viral infections. Most recently, I focus my research on patients with life-threatening COVID-19, and contributed to the discovery of IEIs and autoantibodies in the type I IFN immunity.

Speech Title: Inborn errors of type I IFN immunity in patients with life-threatening COVID-19