Wanjin Hong graduated from Xiamen University and was one of a few hundred Chinese students chosen for further graduate training in USA via the CUSBEA program. He received his PhD from the State University of New York (SUNY Buffalo),and was a postdoctoral fellow there before joining Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB), Singapore as a PrincipaI Investigator. Presently, he isa Professor and Executive Director of IMCB, A*STAR. Prof Hong contributed significantly to the understanding of membrane trafficking and Hippo pathway in cancer. His publications have over 28,000 citations with h-index of 91 according to Google Scholar. His Singapore awards include The President’s Science and Technology Medal, National Science Award (now President’s Science Award) and Public Administration Medal (Silver). He is a Fellow of Singapore National Academy of Science. He is on Science Signaling’sBoard of Reviewing Editors, and the Editorial Boards of Cell & Bioscience and TRAFFIC.

Dr. Bolshoy is an Associated Professor Emeritus in the Department of Evolutionary and Environmental Biology at the Universityof Haifa, Israel and a Research Professor atthe Department of General Linguistics, the Faculty of Philosophy, Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic. He completed his PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Computational Structural Biology in 1993.He is the author of the book "Genome Clustering: from linguistics models to classification of genetic texts", Springer-Verlag, 2010, and many scientific articles.His research has includedDNA Linguistics, Molecular Evolution, Comparative Genomics, DNA Curvature and Nucleosome Positioning.

Dr. Simone Patergnani received his Ph.D. in biochemistry, molecular biology and biotechnology at the University of Ferrara, Italy. To date, he works at the University of Ferrara, Italy (Department of Medical Sciences, Experimental Medicine section) and the University Hospital of Ferrara, Italy, as a post-doctoral researcher. His research is mainly focused on investigating the contribution of different intracellular organelles to regulating different cell signaling pathways, actively collaborating with several international research groups. In parallel, his work also involves testing and verifying whether new next-generation molecules or drugs already used in the clinical field have beneficial effects in the transmission of various intracellular signals, in regulating cellular metabolism, and in activating/silencing various proteins responsible for specific cell functions. In particular, his research in recent years has focused on analyzing the contribution of these cellular mechanisms in cancer, neurodegeneration, mitochondrial diseases, genetic diseases and cardiovascular diseases.

Along the past years, my research activities have been focused mostly on the field of cell membrane biophysics and cell trafficking. During my PhD thesis under Dr. Scheuring (Institut Curie and Aix-Marseille University in France), I succeeded in developing one of the first HS-AFM with an optical setup to study membrane processes, which provided the first molecular movies of membrane proteins in living cells. Later, during my postdoc with Dr.Roux in the University of Geneva (Switzerland), I developed new methods for the study of cell trafficking and membrane mechanics in cells and in vitro. The most remarkable achievement during my postdoctoral period was the new methodology I developed, which shows a probe that can monitor changes in membrane tension and measured by FLIM. Starting from 2020, I established my own laboratory at the Biofisika Institute, in Bilbao, Spain. In our lab, we undertake the study of membrane mechanics and the interaction between protein and lipids from various perspectives.

Clementina Sansone is a cell Biologist. She got her PhD in 2010 at the University Vanvitelli (Caserta, Italy). She is the author of fifty papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals and inventor of two patents. Her research aims to exploit microalgae as an eco-sustainable bioresource for biotechnological applications, mainly regarding nutraceutical, cosmeceutical or pharmacological field. She is interested in bioactive compounds produced by marine microalgae endowing human health benefits. She develops an in vitro bioactivity assessment platform together with a biochemical platform analysis such as for carotenoids, vitamins, or polyphenols determination. In vitro bioactivity investigation regards phenotypic and functional analysis of the effects of microalga extracts/compounds in different human cell lines and 3D tissue models, in which she studies the cell signaling pathways using biochemical and molecular approach. She was also involved in the launching of a new Spin-Off BioSearch S.r.l. with the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn, ICB-CNR Institute and Italbiotech (Non profit organization).

Dr. Jungjoon K. Lee received his Ph.D. in chemistry from Stanford University in 2011 under the theme of Directed Evolution, and BA/MSci degrees in Natural Science (Chemistry) from the University of Cambridge in 2005. After that, he worked in the Future Biotherapeutics department of Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology for three years and worked as a research scientist at Seoul National University's The Institute of Molecular Biology & Genetics for two years to conduct research in CRISPR-Cas9. After that, he joined Toolgen in 2016 and worked at the Platform development team and published a number of papers and patents related to the CRISPR platform. His representative achievements include the development of several groundbreaking tools, such as the first Genome-wide off-target detection method for Prime Editor TAPE-seq (Nature Communications 2022), the standardized Genome-wide off-target detection method Extru-seq (Genome Biology 2023), and the high-fidelity Cas9 with high activity, Sniper2L (Nature Chemical Biology 2023).

Dr. M.EduvigesBurrola-Barraza is a Professor-Research atthe Autonomous University of Chihuahua in Mexico. She has a Master of Science in experimental pathology. She also obtained a Ph.D. in the field of animal reproduction and genetics. She has worked for over 13 years in the mammals' cellular process of oocyte maturation, specifically in bidirectional communication of the cumulus-oocyte-complex (COC), that conduce to acquire the oocyte's competenceto be fertilized by a sperm and to develop a new healthy organism. One of the principal interests of Dr. Burrola-Barraza is to translate the environment of follicular conditions present in a femalein vivo to an in vitro platform, with the finality of producing embryos capable of implantation with success in a receptor dam. In addition, she has worked on improving the culture formulation to enhance the bidirectional communication of COCs in vitro. For this goal, she is researching the action of proteins that acts as growth factors stimulating the interaction of the oocyte and its surrounding cumulus cells. Those proteins can bind to the COC and trigger signaling pathways to activate the oocyte's cell cycle to resume meiosis and arrest it to a metaphase II state, which is the competent state.