Speakers

Nobutaka Hirokawa (The University of Tokyo, Japan)

Professor Hirokawa graduated from the School of Medicine at the University of Tokyo in 1971. He received Ph.D. degree from the University's Faculty of Medicine in 1978. He did postdoctoral work at the UCSF (1979-1980) and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louise (1980-1981) and became a Research Assistant Professor of Physiology and Biophysics there (1981-83), and then an Associate Professor of Neurobiology and Anatomy (1983). From 1983 until 2009 he has served at the Graduate School of Medicine at the University of Tokyo as a Professor and Chairman of the Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy. From 2003 to 2007 he was also appointed as the dean of Graduate School of Medicine, University of Tokyo. He is now a distinguished project professor in University of Tokyo. He has been also serving as the president of Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) from 2012 to 2018 and the president of International Federation for Cell Biology from 2012.

He has published 269 high quality papers in top journals including 17 in Cell, 9 in Nature, 8 in Science, 60 in J Cell Biol 13 in Neuron, 11 in EMBO J. and 8 in PNAS, most of which he is the corresponding author or the first author. He is an ISI Highly Cited Researcher. His citation record (Aug 16, 2022, Google Scholar) is following; total citation: 58100; h-index: 124.

He has been an elected Associate Member of EMBO from 2003, Member of the Japan Academy from 2004, and AAAS Fellow from 2013. He has been on the editorial boards of many international journals including Cell, Science, Neuron, Developmental Cell, Journal of Cell Biology, EMBO Journal, and so on.

Cliff Tabin (Harvard Medical School, USA)

Cliff Tabin received his A.B. in Physics from the University of Chicago in 1976. He obtained his Ph.D. in Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1984, where he made one of the first retroviral vectors and also first identified the activating mutation in the ras oncogene, in the laboratory of Robert Weinberg. Dr. Tabin began his work in developmental biology during a brief postdoc in the laboratory of Doug Melton at Harvard University, before leaving a year later for a position as an independent Fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital. There he began studying limb regeneration and development in an effort to bring modern molecular tools to classical embryological systems, work he continued when he joined the faculty of the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School in 1989. His lab is responsible for the first use of retroviral vectors for gene transfer into developing chick embryos, opening that system for genetic manipulations. Focusing on the genetic basis of pattern formation and morphogenesis, his lab has worked on a range of developmental problems, including contributions to our understanding of limb development, the isolation of Sonic hedgehog as a key developmental morphogen, the discovery of the first genes involved in regulating left-right asymmetry in the embryo and elucidation of the role of physical forces in shaping the gut. He has also examined the way developmental pathways are modulated through evolution to produce different morphologies such as in the generation of distinct beaks in different species of Darwin’s Finches, enlarged legs in hopping rodents called jerboas, and in the physical, behavioral and metabolic adaptation of cave fish. In addition to his research program, Dr. Tabin heads an international effort to establish a medical school in Kathmandu geared towards training physicians to serve the needs of the rural poor of Nepal. Dr. Tabin is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and is an elected foreign member of EMBO and the Royal Society of London. He has won a number of scientific awards including the National Academy of Sciences Prize in Molecular Biology, the March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology and the Conklin Medal from the Society for Developmental Biology. Dr. Tabin is the George Jacob and Jacqueline Hazel Leder Professor, and Chairman of the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School.

Martina Brueckner (Yale School of Medicine, USA)

Martina Brueckner received her undergraduate and medical degrees from the University of Virginia, then trained in Pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh and completed her Pediatric Cardiology fellowship at Yale. She has been on the faculty at Yale since 1991, where she is currently Professor of Pediatrics and Genetics. She provides clinical pediatric cardiology care and founded the Yale Pediatric Cardiac Genetics clinic. Her laboratory studies the mechanism by which cilia establish organismal LR asymmetry, identified cilia genes that are central to mouse left-right development and demonstrated that cilia are required to generate and sense flow at the left-right organizer. As part of the Pediatric Cardiac Genomics Consortium, the lab investigates the molecular and genetic causes of human congenital heart disease, with a special focus on the role of cilia in human heart development and disease.

Hiroshi Hamada (RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research, Japan)

Hiroshi Hamada received his M.D. and Ph.D. from Okayama University in 1979, and worked at the National Institutes of Health (USA) and Memorial University of Newfoundland (Canada) for nine years before returning to Japan. After he returned to Japan, he served as a professor in Osaka University until he was appointed director of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in April 2015. He is now a team leader at the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research. His interest in development stems from earlier work on embryonal carcinoma cells, which he performed in Canada. His current interests are the mechanisms underlying symmetry-breaking and the origins of body axes. Hiroshi was elected to Associate Member of European Molecular Biology Organization in 2016, and was awarded the Keio Medical Science Prize in 2014. He was elected Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 2022.

Susana Santos Lopes (NOVA Medical School, Portugal)

Dominic Norris

Dominic Norris studied X-Inactivation and imprinting for his PhD at the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre, London. Post-doctoral work in Harvard, USA followed, studying the Nodal locus and axis determination in mouse. This ignited his interest in left-right (L-R) patterning, which as an MRC Career Development Award holder, then MRC Senior Non-Clinical Fellow he followed up in his own lab at MRC Harwell, UK. Here he set up genetic screens in mouse which identified both novel L-R patterning loci and ciliogenesis mutants. His current interests centre on L-R determination, cilia motility and the function of the polycystin loci.

Tim Ott (University of Hohenheim, Germany)

Tim Ott received his Dr. rer. nat. (Ph.D.) from the University of Hohenheim, Germany in 2020, where he mainly studied disease genes of ciliopathies in the group of Martin Blum. This work was recognized with the Unibund Science Price in 2021. He stayed in the group as a postdoc and focused primarily on the nature of events leading to symmetry breakage in vertebrates with a fluid-flow generating left-right organizer.

Julien Vermot (Imperial College London, UK)

Julien Vermot leads the biomechanics and signaling lab focusing on the understanding on the impact of mechanical stresses during morphogenetic and regenerative processes. He obtained his PhD in developmental biology from the University of Strasbourg, where he worked on the role of retinoic acid during embryonic development. He then worked as a visiting scientist the Stowers Institute for Biomedical Research in Kansas City, USA, followed by a post-doctoral position at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena where he developed new tools to study the role of mechanical forces during development. He was Research Director at the French INSERM before joining the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial College London in 2019.

Marnie Halpern (Dartmouth University, USA)

A native of Canada, Marnie Halpern received a B.Sc. in biology from McMaster University and a M.Sc. at the McMaster University Medical Center, working on gene regulation of Herpes virus. She obtained her Ph.D. from Yale University, where she characterized the neuromuscular system of Drosophila. In post-doctoral work at the Institute of Neuroscience at the University of Oregon she identified some of the first mutations that affect early development of the zebrafish. Dr. Halpern’s laboratory currently studies left-right differences in the zebrafish brain and the behavioral consequences of altering this asymmetry.

For over 25 years, Dr. Halpern was a staff member at the Carnegie Institution for Science Department of Embryology and Adjunct Professor at the Johns Hopkins University. In 2020, she was appointed Chair of the Molecular and Systems Biology Department at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and in 2021 was named the Andrew Thomson, Jr., MD 1946 Professor.

Dr. Halpern was recognized as a Pew Scholar, received the Mossman Developmental Biologist Award from the American Association of Anatomists, and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She has served on the board of directors for the Society for Developmental Biology and Genetics Society of America and on committees for the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.

Natasza A. Kurpios (Cornell University College, USA)

I grew up in Poland and moved to Canada when I was fourteen. English was my second language, and so I chose to study math and biochemistry and quickly became captivated by natural sciences. I completed my PhD in Biochemistry at McMaster University, in Ontario, Canada where I studied mammary epithelial stem cells using genetically engineered mice and cell culture. I then moved to Boston where I completed my postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School with Dr. Cliff Tabin - that’s where I became fully invested in developmental biology. I joined the Cornell faculty in 2009 and since that time have led a research lab where we study how organs, including the lymphatic vasculature, are shaped during embryogenesis. In the Kurpios lab, we are most fascinated by left-right organ asymmetry, as errors of organ laterality are fundamentally linked to life-threatening birth defects. Since laterality pathways are largely conserved through evolution, we use the chicken embryo and mouse genetics to gain insight into the critical symmetry-breaking events that dictate organ shape and function.

Cecilia Lo (University of Pittsburgh, USA)

Cecilia W. Lo received her B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her PhD from Rockefeller University. After postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School, she moved to the University of Pennsylvania, rose through the ranks from Assistant to full Professor in the Department of Biology. She then relocated to NIH as the NHLBI Chief of the Laboratory of Developmental Biology and Director of the Genetics and Developmental Biology Center. In 2009, she became the founding chair of the Dept of Developmental Biology in the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Her research has focused on the use of large scale systems genetics approach to investigate the genetic etiology of CHD. Such studies have led to the discovery of a central role for cilia and the disturbance of laterality in the pathogenesis of complex CHD.

Sigolène Meilhac (Imagine-Institut Pasteur, INSERM, France)

Sigolène Meilhac was trained at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, received her Ph.D. from the University of Paris in 2003, and worked at the Gurdon Institute of Cambridge (UK).
Back in Paris, she was appointed at the INSERM, then as a group leader at the Institut Pasteur and Institut Imagine and is currently deputy director of the Department of Developmental and Stem Cell Biology of the Institut Pasteur. Her team addresses the mechanisms shaping the heart during development and the embryological origin of structural congenital heart defects. This includes the asymmetric morphogenesis of the embryonic heart tube and of the double cardiac pump using quantitative approaches in the mouse. Sigolène Meilhac was recipient of the Pasteur Vallery-Radot price in 2018.

Sebastian Ocklenburg (University of Bochum, Germany)

Sebastian Ocklenburg received his doctoral degree from Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, in 2011. He then worked as post-doc at the Bergen fMRI Group in Norway, before returning to Germany. After an interim professorship at the University of Duisburg-Essen, he was appointed full professor of research methods at Medical School Hamburg. His current research focusses on left-right asymmetries in the brain of humans and other animals, with a specific focus on cross-species integration. He also has an interest in deepening our understanding of the role of laterality in social processing. He has written several books on hemispheric asymmetries and is an active science communicator with his blog “The Asymmetric Brain” on Psychology Today.

Hitoshi Okamoto (RIKEN Center for Brain Science, Japan)

After taking the MD from the Medical School of Tokyo University, Japan (1983), Hitoshi Okamoto was trained as the molecular geneticist using Drosophila and obtained PhD from Tokyo University (1988), and went abroad to Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA to get training on the developmental neurobiology using fish. There, he studied the mechanisms for the axonal pathfinding by the spinal motor neurons toward the pectoral fin in the Japanese Medaka embryo. Back in Japan (1988) at the National Institute for Basic Biology and Keio University, he initiated the study using zebrafish as an independent researcher, and elucidated that a family of transcription factors (Isl1 family) play important roles in the specification of spinal motor neurons. After moving to the Brain Science Institute (BSI) of RIKEN (1997), he performed the large-scale forward mutant screening, and elucidated the mechanisms for the differentiation of the hindbrain motor neurons by analyzing the isolated mutants. In the past 15 years, he has been interested in using zebrafish for the study of the neural circuit mechanisms for emotion and decision making by taking advantage of the evolutionary conservation of the brain structures between fish and mammals. Especially, he has elucidated the mechanisms for the asymmetric development of the subregions of the habenula and revealed their critical roles in controlling fear behaviors and in the social conflict resolution for dominance or submission by using various genetic or optogenetic manipulations. He was a deputy director and a senior team leader of BSI till 2018. Since BSI was reformed into the RIKEN Center for Brain Science (CBS) in April 2018, he has been developing his research to elucidate the neural circuit mechanisms for decision making in various contexts. He has been an adjunct professor at Tokyo University, Waseda University and Keio University, and served as the chair of the Asia-Pacific Regional Committee of the International Brain Research Organization (APRC-IBRO) and the treasurer of the Federation of the Asia-Oceania Neuroscience Societies (FAONS). He was awarded the Tokizane prize by Japanese Neuroscience Society (2014).

Heymut Omran (University of Münster, Germany)

Heymut Omran obtained his medical degree from the Albert-Ludwigs-University in 1994 and subsequently completed his habilitation in 1980 on kidney failure in children, which laid the foundation for his interest in ciliopathies. Since 2010 he is Prof. of Pediatrics and Chief Medical Director of the Department of General Pediatrics of the University Hospital Münster, Germany.

In his scientific quest to understand rare hereditary diseases, his group was able to decipher many genetic defects of ciliopathies and characterize the importance and molecular mechanisms of action of motile cilia / flagella. His research has significantly contributed to clarifying the aetiology of cystic kidney disease, chronic respiratory disease, retinal degeneration, infertility and hydrocephalus. Using molecular genetics and cell biological techniques he characterized evolutionarily conserved biological mechanisms involved in the setting of left & right body asymmetry and mucociliary clearing of the airways.

Heymut Omran has won numerous awards for his research activities, most recently in 2016 the Care-for-Rare Science award and 2015 the Eva Luise Köhler Research Prize for Rare Diseases. He is elected fellow of the Leopoldina National Academy of Sciences, North-Rhine Westfalian Academy of Science and Arts and Fellow of the European Respiratory Scociety.

Max Fürthauer (iBV – Institut de Biologie Valrose, France)

My longstanding interest is to understand the cellular regulation of the signaling pathways that govern developmental cell fate specification and early axogenesis. I received my PhD in 2000 for studies of zebrafish dorso-ventral patterning in the lab of Christine and Bernard Thisse at the IGBMC in Illkirch/France. As a postdoc in the lab of Marcos Gonzalez-Gaitàn at the Max Planck Institute of Cell Biology in Dresden/Germany and the University of Geneva/Switzerland I then studied the importance of membrane trafficking for the endocytic regulation of developmental signaling pathways in fish and flies. My current research group at the Institut de Biologie Valrose in Nice/France aims to understand the links between cell polarity, membrane trafficking and developmental signaling with a particular interest in the establishment of Left-Right asymmetry. Our previous work contributed to show that the unconventional type 1 Myosin Myo1D, which was initially identified as a master regulator of Left-Right asymmetry, is essential for symmetry breaking in the early zebrafish and represents therefore an evolutionarily conserved regulator of chiral morphogenesis. Our current research aims to further characterize the evolutionary conservation of the mechanisms that control the animal Left-Right asymmetry. In this context we are currently investigating both flow-dependent and flow-independent functions of unconventional type 1 Myosins in Left-Right asymmetry.

William R. Jeffery (University of Maryland, USA)

William Jeffery received his PhD from the University of Iowa in 1972, has been Regents Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of Texas at Austin, Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at The University of California, Davis, Head of Biology at The Pennsylvania State University, and is currently Distinguished University Professor of Biology at The University of Maryland, College, Park. His current interests are in evolutionary developmental biology, including the control of heart asymmetry, in the Astyanax cavefish system and in stem cells and regenerative biology in the tunicate Ciona. He has been Director of the Embryology Course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole and is a recipient of 2012 the Alexander Kowalevsky Medal and other awards.

Reiko Kuroda (Chubu University, Japan)

Reiko Kuroda received her Ph.D. in Chemistry from The University of Tokyo, and worked in the Department of Chemistry/Biophysics at King’s College London, and as a staff member at the Institute of Cancer Research UK. She returned to Japan to take up a position at The University of Tokyo, in the Department of Chemistry/Life Sciences, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, as well as in the Department of Biophysics and Biochemistry, Graduate School of Sciences. She became a Professor Emeritus at her retirement, and moved as Professor to Tokyo University of Science, and then to Chubu University to continue her research. Reiko’s research focus is on chirality and she directed the JST ERATO Kuroda Chiromorphology group to reveal the missing links between molecules and macroscopic objects using chirality both in chemistry and biology. She is known to have identified the single gene that determines snail coiling direction. She was a L’Oréal UNESCO Women in Science Laureate, one of 175 past/current chemists featured by the Royal Society of Chemistry UK for its 175th anniversary, and is a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Guang Li (Xiamen University, China)

Guang Li received his Ph.D. from Xiamen University, China in 2010. He studied in Peter Holland’s lab at University of Oxford in 2009, as a visiting student. He worked at Schools of Life Sciences, Xiamen University since 2010, and served as a professor there in 2021. Since his Ph.D. study (2006), Guang Li’s research interests have always focused on two main topics: 1) developing amphioxus as a model organism; 2) using amphioxus and the methods (like genome editing and transgene) developing on it to investigate the mechanisms driving the origins of chordate body plan and vertebrate complexity.

Kenji Matsuno (Osaka University, Japan)

Kenji Matsuno received his Ph.D. from Waseda University in 1990, which was based on his study conducted in National Institute for Basic Biology (Professor Yoshiaki Suzuki). He then studied at Yale University for six years as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Professor Spyros Altavanis-Tsakonas. After he returned to Japan, he worked as a researcher in the laboratory of Professor Hideyuki Okano in Osaka University from 1997-1999. From 1999 to 2012, he served as a professor in Department of Biological Science and Technology, Tokyo University of Science. Form 2012, he is professor in Department of Biological Sciences, Osaka University. His current interests are mechanisms underlying left-right asymmetry of Drosophila, especially contributions of cell chirality to it. He is also interested in molecular mechanisms of Notch signaling pathway. He was awarded the 2019-20 Osaka University Prize in 2019.

Masayoshi Nakamura (Nagoya University, Japan)

Dr. Masayoshi Nakamura is a designated associated professor in the Institute of Transformative Bio-Molecules (WPI-ITbM), Nagoya University. His research focuses on addressing questions in plant biology using multidisciplinary approaches. His scientific goal is to explain how plants perceive and react against environmental and developmental cues.

He studied genetics and molecular biology of plants and completed his Ph.D. at Nara Institute of Science and Technology. Before moving to Nagoya, as a TOYOBO biotechnology foundation postdoctoral fellow and a Human Frontier Science Program postdoctoral fellow, he advanced cell biological knowledge and skills at Carnegie Institution for Science (USA). His current interests are the molecular mechanism that cause chiral growth in plants and that determine the left-right handedness of twist.

Hiroki Nishida (Osaka University, Japan)

Hiroki Nishida completed his undergraduate work at Tohoku University, then he received his PhD from Kyoto University in 1987 for his studies on cell lineage during ascidian embryogenesis. He served as assistant professor at Kobe University in 1988 and then associate processor of a laboratory at Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1991. Since 2003, he has been professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, Osaka University. Dr. Nishida’s scientific accomplishments have been recognized by several awards such as the Zoological Society Prize (2003), Osaka Science Prize (2004), Inoue Prize for Science (2005). Nishida also acts on the editorial board of a number of journals and is a section editor for Development Genes, and Evolution. The main focus of his current studies is to understand mechanisms of establishment　of embryonic axes, cell fate specification, and morphogenesis during ascidian and appendicularian embryogenesis.

Stéphane Noselli (iBV - Institut de Biologie Valrose, France)

Stéphane Noselli received his Ph.D from Toulouse University in 1992, and worked at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, France) since 1992, where he is currently a Research Director of Exceptional Class. He moved to Harvard Medical School (Boston, USA) in 1998 and returned to France to set up an ATIP/CNRS and EMBO Young Investigator group in Nice in 2000. He is the founder and Director of the institut de Biologie Valrose (iBV) since 2008 (CNRS, Inserm and University of Nice), and was the Director of the Laboratory of Excellence (Labex Signalife, 2012-2020). His lab uses Drosophila to study signalling pathways controlling development and symmetry-breaking. His current interests deal with the molecular genetic pathways underlying body and brain left-right asymmetry. Stéphane was awarded the Bronze (2001) and Silver (2008) Medals of CNRS, and the Grand Prize Mottard (French Academy of Sciences, 2013). He was elected Member of European Molecular Biology Organization (2014) and Member of Academia Europaea (2018).

Alexander Bershadsky (National University of Singapore, Singapore)

Alexander Bershadsky obtained his PhD in Cell Biology at the Cancer Research Center of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, where he continued to work until 1992. His book “Cytoskeleton” (1988) with J.M. Vasiliev was one of the first monographs in this field. In 1992, Bershadsky moved to Israel and joined the Weizmann Institute of Science, where he held the Joseph Moss Professorial Chair in Biomedical Research and is now a Professor Emeritus. Whilst at the Weizmann Institute, the Bershadsky’s laboratory was among the first to study mechanobiology, particularly adhesion-dependent cell mechanosensitivity and microtubule-driven control of integrin-mediated adhesions. In 2009, upon the founding of the Mechanobiology Institute at the National University of Singapore, Bershadsky joined the Institute where he headed the Programme in Cell Mechanobiology. Bershadsky studied the crosstalk between the cytoskeleton and the integrin-mediated cell adhesion during his entire career. Other studies from Bershadsky’s lab address the self-organization of the actomyosin cytoskeleton and its role in establishing of cell polarity and left-right asymmetry. His sphere of interest also includes the processes of formation of myosin II filaments and their assembly into ordered superstructures, as well as the functions of formin family proteins as potent regulators of the actin cytoskeleton.

Kohji Ito (Chiba University, Japan)

Kohji Ito received his Ph.D. from Nagoya University in 1995 for his studies on mitosis using sea urchin embryos. Then he studied Dictyostelium myosin at National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Tsukuba. He served as an assistant professor in 1998 and an associate professor in 2010 at Chiba University. Since 2016, he has been a professor in Department of Biology, Graduate School of Science, Chiba University. His current interests are the molecular mechanism of myosin that induces actin chiral movements.

Jumpei Sasabe (Keio University, Japan)

Jumpei Sasabe received his M.D. in 2002. After an internal medicine residency, he carried out his doctoral work on ‘Pathological roles of D-amino acids in neurodegenerative diseases’ and received Ph.D. from Keio University in 2008. He did his postdoctoral research on ‘Roles of amino acid chirality in the microbe-mammal interplay’ at Harvard Medical School / Brigham and Women’s Hospital (USA). After he returned to Japan, he serves as an assistant professor at Department of Pharmacology in Keio University School of Medicine. His current interests are the health and diseases maintained by chiral homeostasis of amino acids. Jumpei was awarded the Keio President Prize in 2008, the D-Amino Acid Research Award in 2012, and the Keio Medical Science Rising Star Award in 2017.

Tatsuo Shibata (RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research, Japan)

Tatsuo Shibata is a team leader of Laboratory for Physical Biology at RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research (BDR), Kobe. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo in 1999 for works in physics of complex systems. During his postdoctoral work at Kyoto University and Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin, Germany, he conducted theoretical studies on stochastic processes of molecular motors and gene expressions. From 2002, he became a lecturer and then associate professor at Hiroshima university, where he studied stochastic process and self-organization of cellular signal transduction systems. From 2010, he joined RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CDB) as a unit leader. His lab has been working on how cellular functions such as chemotaxis emerge from the self-organization of molecules and how tissue properties such as left-right asymmetry emerge from cellular and molecular properties, from both theoretical and experimental point of view.

Leo Q. Wan (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA)

Dr. Leo Q. Wan is a professor in the Departments of Biomedical Engineering of Biological Sciences at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. He also holds an adjunct professor position in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at the Albany Medical College. His research focuses on understanding physical biology in tissue development and regeneration and includes Tissue Morphogenesis, Stem Cell Mechanobiology, and Functional Tissue Engineering. He is a pioneer in cell chirality research with bioengineering platforms. His lecture titled “Why are human bodies asymmetrical?”, collaborated with TED-Ed, has over 1 million views. Dr. Wan received his Bachelor’s degree in Mechanics and Mechanical Engineering and his Master degree in Fluid Mechanics from the University of Science and Technology of China. After completing his PhD in Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University in 2007, he became a postdoctoral scientist in the area of Stem Cells and Tissue Engineering. Leo is a Pew scholar (Class 2013), and a recipient of the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, National Science Foundation Early Career Award, American Heart Association Scientist Development Grant, and the March of Dimes Basil O’Connor Starter Scholar Research Award. He is a fellow of American Heart Association (FAHA).