Prof. Martin Schwemmle is Professor of Molecular Virology at the University of Freiburg, Germany. He has conducted research in several renowned laboratories in the USA and Switzerland, including UC Irvine, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the University of Zurich. His research focuses on antiviral responses of the innate immune system and host adaptation mechanisms that allow viruses to cross species barriers

Raphael Mechoulam was born in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1930. His father was a physician and head of the Jewish hospital in Sofia. RM went to an American Grade School in Sofia for 4 years until it was closed by the pro-German government. From 1942, for over 2 years – during the 2nd world war - his family lived in small villages in the Balkans. His parents believed that the family is safer there. Nevertheless his father was taken to a concentration camp for part of this time. RM immigrated to Israel in 1949. He studied biochemistry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (M.Sc.) and the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot (Ph.D.) He spent a year in New York, at the Rockefeller Institute and returned to the Weizmann Institute in 1960. He worked on the chemistry of various natural products. He initiated his work on hashish, which he received from the Police. In 1966 he moved to the Hebrew University, where he became a full professor in 1972. From 1979 to 1982 he was Rector (Academic Head) of the Hebrew University. He retired in 2000 but continued his research. He still has a lab with 3-4 post- doctoral researchers. His work has been mostly on the chemistry of natural products, the best known being on cannabinoids. In collaboration with numerous colleagues in Israel and abroad he has also published in pharmacology and on clinical trials. He has published about 470 scientific papers and has received numerous national and international prizes, including the Israel Prize – the most prestigious Israeli Prize – as well as a prize from the US National Institutes of Health. He is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences, where he headed the Natural Sciences section from 2007 to 2013. He married Dalia (born Borovitch) in 1955 and they have 3 children, Roy, a professor of mathematics at the Technion in Haifa, Hadas, an M.D. ophtalmologist and Dafna, an M.D. pediatric neurologist. He has 7 grandchildren.

Dr. Yufang Shi received his Ph.D. in Immunology from the University of Alberta. He held a University Professor title at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Rutgers University, and was a faculty member at the American Red Cross Holland Laboratory, and George Washington University. Dr. Shi has been studying apoptosis, especially in T cells since 1988. His findings on activation-induced cell death (AICD), the role of c-myc in apoptosis, opioid, and stress-induced lymphocyte apoptosis are well-recognized. His laboratory now focuses on immune modulation and tissue repair by mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs). Based on their licensing concept of inflammation on MSC for immunosuppression, his lab determined the influence of varying amounts and kinds of inflammatory cytokines on the immunosuppression of MSCs and established the "cell empowerment" model for MSC-based therapy and the concept of the plasticity of MSC in immunomodulation. Recent studies from his group have shown that (1) The plasticity of MSC in immunomodulation is decided by the presence of different amounts and kinds of inflammatory cytokines which are in dynamic changes during the initiation and progression of inflammatory diseases; (2) Distinct key factor, nitric oxide (in mouse, rat, rabbit) or indoleamine-pyrrole 2,3-dioxygenase (in human, monkey, swine) mediates the immunosuppression of mesenchymal stem cells derived from various species; (3) MSC exhibit immunomodulatory activities in various immune disorders, including liver injury, restraint stress, and tumors. Dr. Shi’s team is actively pursuing translating their findings to the clinic to treat patients suffering from immune disorders Dr. Shi’s more than 280 publications appeared in Nature, Science, Nature Medicine, Nature Immunology, Cell Stem Cell, Immunity, Cell Metabolism, and other journals with more than 43,000 citations with an h-index of 88. Dr. Shi is an Editor-in-Chief of Cell Death and Diseases, an Associate Editor of Oncogene, a Receiving Editor of Cell Death & Differentiation, Board of Executive Advisors, Advanced Science. He is associated with several other journals.

Dr. Annie FRELET-BARRAND studied biochemistry at the University of Franche-Comté (France) and was graduated as MS in 1998. In 2006, she received her PhD degree on MPs characterization at the Institute of Plant Biology, Zurich. During her postdoctoral fellowship (CEA Grenoble, France), she developed L. lactis system for functional characterization of MPs. In 2009, she became CNRS Researcher at CEA Saclay, studying MPs involved in liver detoxification. In 2015, she joined the Institute FEMTO-ST and is now studying on biochemical and biophysical ways to study proteins and other biological elements. She published 20 research articles and 4 book chapters (h=16).

Professor Raman Singh’s primary research interests are in the relationship of Nano-/microstructure and Environment-assisted degradation and fracture of metallic and composite materials, and Nanotechnology for Advanced Mitigation of such Degradations. He has also worked extensively on use of advanced materials (e.g., graphene) for corrosion mitigation, and stress corrosion cracking, and corrosion and corrosion-mitigation of magnesium alloys (including for the use of magnesium alloys for aerospace, defense and bioimplant applications). Prof Singh’s professional distinctions and recognitions include: editor of a unique book on non-destructive evaluation (NDE) of corrosion, editor of a book on cracking of welds, editor-in-chief of two journals, member the Editorial Boards of a few journals, leader/chairperson of a few international conferences and regular plenary/keynote lectures at international conferences, over 235 peer-reviewed international journal publications, 15 book chapters/books and over 100 reviewed conference publications, and several competitive research grants (that includes 4 Discovery, 7 Linkage and one ITRH grants of Australian Research Council). Prof Singh has supervised 50 PhD students. His vibrant research group at Monash University comprised/comproses of PhD students from different disciplines (Mechanical, Chemical, Materials and Civil Engineering, and Science) as well as from different cultural backgrounds (Australian, Middle-eastern, Chinese, Malaysian, Indian, African, American and Israeli).

Professor Vladimir G. Chigrinov is Professor of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology since 1999. He is an Expert in Flat Panel Technology in Russia, recognized by the World Technology Evaluation Centre, 1994, and SID Fellow since 2008. He is an author of 6 books, 31 reviews and book chapters, about 317 journal papers, more than 668 Conference presentations, and 121 patents and patent applications including 36 US patents in the field of liquid crystals since 1974. He got Excellent Research Award of HKUST School of Engineering in 2012. He obtained Gold Medal and The Best Award in the Invention & Innovation Awards 2014 held at the Malaysia Technology Expo (MTE) 2014, which was hosted in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on 20-22 Feb 2014. He is a Member of EU Academy of Sciences (EUAS) since July 2017. He got A Slottow Owaki Prize of SID in 2018 http://www.ee.ust.hk/ece.php/enews/detail/660. He is 2019 Distinguished Fellow of IETI (International Engineering and Technology Institute). http://www.ieti.net/news/detail.aspx?id=184 http://www.ieti.net/memberships/Fellows.aspx Since 2018 he works as Professor in the School of Physics and Optoelectronics Engineering in Foshan University, Foshan, China. 2020-2024 Vice President of Fellow of Institute of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (IDSAI) Since 2021 distinguished Fellow of Institute of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence

Anastasia-Maria Dr. Leventi-Peetz Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) Germany Diploma and PhD in Physics. Dr. Leventi-Peetz works as a Referent (scientific staff member) at the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) in Bonn Germany. She plans and leads projects concerning complexity theory, provable security, dependable systems, SAT-Solvers, explainable artificial intelligence, adaptive machine learning models, algorithmic criteria and metrics for trustworthy artificial intelligence, ML under strict latency requirements, energy efficient ML, innovations in adaptive learning systems and systems self-organization.

Prof. Igor Pantić is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Belgrade with more than 13 years of experience in scientific research in the fields of physiology, neurosciences and biotechnology. He received his MD and PhD degrees at the University of Belgrade in 2008 and 2013, respectively. Prof. Pantić is also an Affiliated Professor of the University of Haifa in Israel (from 2017 to the present) as well as an Adjunct Clinical Professor at Khalifa University of Science and Technology, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (from 2022). During his career, he served as a visiting professor at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheba, Israel, as well as an external research associate at the Centre for advanced knowledge enablement of the National Science Foundation, Miami, USA. Previously, he was a participant in a number of national and international scientific projects. During his career, Dr. Pantić published a large number of papers in international scientific literature, of which over 20 in top international journals as the first or the corresponding author.

Dr. Kiryl Piatkevich is a Principle Investigator of the Molecular Bioengineering Group in the School of Life Sciences at Westlake University ( www.piatkevich-lab.com). Dr. Piatkevich obtained his Ph.D. degree in Chemistry in a joint program between Moscow State University and Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, during which he worked on the development of the innovative approaches for intravital imaging of small mammals. Afterwards, Dr. Piatkevich joined Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a Postdoctoral Associate to do research in the Synthetic Neurobiology group led by Dr. Edward Boyden, a world-recognized pioneer in optogenetics and neuro-engineering. During postdoctoral training, he worked on novel methods of neural interfacing using synthetic biology and developed several new molecular technologies for observing neuronal activity in live behaving animals. Dr. Piatkevich was one of the first to perform the optical recording of neuronal activity with high temporal precision in major neuroscience model organism, including worms, fish, and mice. He was co-inventor of the first protein-retention expansion microscopy (ExM) optimized for fluorescent proteins at MIT. Since joining Westlake University in 2019, one of his research inventions was the new generation ExM technology, i.e. Octa-ExM, and newly-developed fluorescent dyes compatible with it. He has published over 40 papers in peer-reviewed journals with more than half of them as the first author or last author including publications in high-profile journals such as Nature, Nature Methods, Nature Chemical Biology, Neuron, Nature Communication, PNAS, Journal of the American Chemical Society, etc. He filed over 10 Chinese and international patents based on developed technologies. He has been serving as a topic editor at the International Journal of Molecular Sciences and Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology. He was the only recipient in China for the prestigious 2020 BBRF Young Investigator Grant in recognition of his research on Alzheimer’s Disease. He was recognized as the Hangzhou Qianjiang Friendship Ambassador for Foreign Experts in 2021. He was also recognized by numerous leading talent programs at national, provincial, and city levels in China.

Abraham Addo-Bediako holds a PhD in Entomology/Ecology from University of Pretoria, South Africa. He has more than 20 years of experience in the research environment. He has supervised a number of Master and PhD students in areas of Ecology, Entomology and Aquatic Ecology. He is interested in understanding the processes underlying patterns in the distribution and diversity of living organisms, especially insects. His current research focuses on land use changes and global climate change, which are likely to present profound challenges to many organisms and may alter their distribution pattern.

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