Dr. Nenad Bursac is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Medicine, and Cell Biology at Duke University. As a PhD student in Robert Langer’s group at MIT, he demonstrated the first engineering of functional heart tissues using mammalian cells. As a postdoctoral fellow in Leslie Tung’s group at Johns Hopkins University, he developed novel methods to control architecture and function of cardiomyocyte cultures for studies of cardiac arrhythmias. Currently, Dr. Bursac's research involves development of novel cell, tissue, and genetic engineering therapies for heart and skeletal muscle disease. Examples of this work include engineering of first human contractile skeletal muscle tissues from primary and induced pluripotent stem cells, first fabrication of human cardiac tissue patches with clinically relevant dimensions, and use of engineered prokaryotic sodium channels as a platform for control of tissue excitability. Dr. Bursac has authored more than 90 scientific articles and has mentored more than 30 PhD students and postdoctoral and medical fellows. He co-directs Regeneration Next Initiative at Duke University. He is a recipient of the Stansell Family Distinguished Research Award and Stem Cell Innovation Award. In 2014, Dr. Bursac was the president of the North Carolina Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine Society. Since 2015, Dr. Bursac has been a Fellow of American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.

Dr. Eisch is a tenured Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Department of Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine (CHOP/PennMed). Dr. Eisch grew up in upstate NY (Vestal, NY), and received her undergraduate degree in Psychology (Biology Track) from Yale University. She earned her PhD in Biology from the University of California at Irvine where she worked with Dr. John Marshall in the Department of Psychobiology to probe the neural underpinnings of psychostimulated-induced neurotoxicity of dopaminergic neurons. During her postdoctoral studies at Yale University Medical School in the lab of Dr. Eric Nestler, Dr. Eisch first identified the negative consequences of drugs of abuse for the birth of new neurons in the adult brain. This finding opened the possibility that new neurons in the adult brain were involved in addiction, and that harnessing the regenerative power of adult neurogenesis may be helpful in treating addiction. Since starting her independent lab in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas in 2000 through her move to CHOP/PennMed in 2016, Dr. Eisch and her team have probed the relationship between adult neurogenesis and psychiatric disorders – like addiction, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder – with the ultimate goal being to translate these findings into clinical relevance. She has generated new tools, like inducible transgenic mouse lines that allow fate tracking and genetic manipulation of adult neural stem cells in vivo. She has used these tools to define the cell autonomous regulation of adult stem cells by a variety of molecules, including Cdk5, FMRP, Reelin, Ascl1, NeuroD1, Notch1, and Mef2. More recently, she has used behavioral, FACS, microarray, and neurosphere approaches to identify how a novel small molecule promotes neurogenesis and memory in mice, and used a circuit-based approach to uncover a novel pathway in mice to regulate mood. Dr. Eisch has received numerous honors, including being named the inaugural Seymour Benzer Lecturer by the US National Academy of Sciences, and many teaching and mentoring awards.

Dr. Feng received his B.Sc. in biochemistry from Nanjing University in China and Ph.D. in biochemistry from University of Tennessee in the laboratory of Dr. James Ihle at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. His postdoctoral research was performed at the Rockefeller University with Dr. Paul Greengard, who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2000. Dr. Feng joined the faculty of the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2000 and became a full professor in 2010. He is the Director of the Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Facility at the University since 2010. Dr. Feng has been studying the molecular and cellular mechanisms of Parkinson’s disease for over 20 years. He is an expert on using stem cells to study Parkinson’s disease. Dr. Feng has published 75 papers with an h-index of 47. His laboratory was the first to generate induced pluripotent stem cells from Parkinson’s disease patients with parkin mutations. He has discovered critical functions of the Parkinson’s disease gene parkin in human midbrain dopaminergic neurons. Dr. Feng is a member of Faculty of 1000 and serves as the Associate Editor in the Stem Cell Biology section of Experimental Biology and Medicine.

Dr. Mu graduated from Qingdao Medical College with an MD and subsequently from Peking Union Medical College with a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. He then conducted research in developmental biology as a postdoctoral fellow at the NIH with Dr. Alan Kimmel. He joined Dr. Bill Klein’s group at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in 1999 to study cell differentiation in the developing retina. In 2008, he joined the Department of Ophthalmology at University at Buffalo as a tenure track Assistant Professor, and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2015. Dr. Mu is interested in how gene regulation regulates the shift of cellular states from progenitors to fully functional mature cell types along individual cell lineages, particularly the ganglion cell lineage, during retinal development. Major efforts in his lab are on identifying key regulators in this process, uncovering their roles in individual lineages, and understanding how they carry out these roles at epigenetic, transcriptional, and post-transcriptional levels. He has made major contributions to our understanding of retinal cell differentiation as demonstrated by his many publications in the field.

Juliane Nguyen, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University at Buffalo. The Nguyen Lab is developing novel protein-, RNA-, and lipid-based biochemical and delivery platforms for treating myocardial infarction and cancer. One of her research foci is the development of biomaterials equipped with molecular zip codes for the subcellular delivery of macromolecules. Dr. Nguyen’s research has received recognition through the Biomedical Breakthrough Award, the UB Exceptional Scholar Young Investigator Award, and the NSF CAREER Award. Dr. Nguyen received her Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the Philipps-University of Marburg (Germany). She then trained at UCSF under Dr. Frank Szoka, where she was a Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft Postdoctoral Fellow. 

Dr. Spence was born in Chatham, Ontario Canada and attended elementary and high school in Blenheim, Ontario. Dr. Spence moved to the U.S. for his postsecondary education, and attended Canisius College, a small liberal arts school in Buffalo, NY, graduating in 2001. He attended graduate school at Miami University (Ohio) where he earned his Ph.D. in 2006. His Ph.D. work, conducted in the lab of Katia Del Rio-Tsonis, focused on understanding mechanisms that drive regeneration and tissue repair in unique model organisms that maintain regenerative ability throughout life, including Notophthalmus viridescens (Eastern Newt), Ambystoma mexicanum (Axolotl) and the chick.  Following his Ph.D., he performed a research fellowship in the lab of Jim Wells at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, where he turned his focus to understanding mechanisms that regulate embryonic development of endoderm-derived tissue (pancreas, liver, intestine) and utilizing human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) to understand human differentiation and development.  During this time, he pioneered efforts to generate 3-dimensional intestinal organoids from human pluripotent stem cells using an approach know as directed differentiation. In October 2011, Dr. Spence joined the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School. The strengths and focus of the Spence lab include using mouse models to study embryonic development of GI and associated organs, and in using 3-dimensional human models to study human development and disease. The lab is currently pursuing projects aiming to understand intestinal development and function and also studies  lung development, using mice and a new 3-dimensional human lung organoid model the Spence lab has recently described. 

Lorenz P. Studer, MD, is the Director of the Center for Stem Cell Biology and a Member of the Developmental Biology Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering. As a native of Switzerland, he received his MD and doctorate degree from the University of Bern where he co-developed the first cell-based therapy for Parkinson's disease in the country. He subsequently trained as postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Ron McKay at the National Institutes of Health pioneering the therapeutic application of neural stem cell-derived neurons in models of neurodegeneration. In his laboratory, he has led the development of techniques that can turn human pluripotent stem cells into many of the specific cell types that comprise the central and the peripheral nervous system. He has also been among the first to realize the potential of patient-specific stem cell in modeling human disease and in drug discovery, and he described methods to manipulate cellular age in pluripotent stem cell-derived lineages. Furthermore, he is currently leading a multidisciplinary consortium to carry out the first clinical application of human stem cell-derived dopamine neurons for the treatment of Parkinson's disease. Dr. Studer's work has been recognized by numerous awards including the Boyer Young Investigator award, the Annemarie Opprecht Award, a MacArthur fellowship and the Ogawa-Yamanaka Stem Cell Prize.

Sean Wu graduated from Stanford University in 1992 where he completed majors in Biological Sciences and in Mechanical Engineering with Honors and Distinction. He subsequently completed an MD-PhD training at Duke University School of Medicine and an internal medicine resident at the Duke University Hospital. He then completed a clinical and research fellowship in cardiovascular medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School (HMS) where worked with Stuart Orkin at Boston Children’s Hospital to identify a bi-potent cardiac progenitor cell from developing mouse embryos and embryonic stem cells (Wu et al, Cell 2006). He was an Assistant Professor of Medicine at HMS from 2009 until 2012 when he returned to Stanford where he is now a tenured Associate Professor of Medicine and, by courtesy, Pediatrics, an Associate Director at the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute, and an Endowed Faculty Scholar at the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children, Stanford University School of Medicine. His research is dedicated to the identification of molecular mechanisms regulating cardiac lineage commitment during embryonic development and the biology of cardiac progenitor cells in development and disease. His research work has led to the identification Yin Yang 1 as a master regulator of mesodermal commitment into cardiac lineage, the discovery of a robust compensatory response in the early fetal heart towards cell loss, and the role of IGF signaling to expand the number of cardiac progenitor cells, among others. More recently, his lab has explored the transcriptional signature of single cardiac cells from the mouse embryos and embryonic stem cells using single cell RNA sequencing and the use of 3D bioprinting and bioacoustics patterning to generate bioengineered cardiac tissue. His research is funded by awards from the NIH/NHLBI, NIH Director's New Innovator Awards, NIH Director Pioneer Award, American Heart Association Established Investigator Award, California Institutes for Regenerative Medicine, the Endowed Faculty Scholar Award from the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children/Child Health Research Institute at Stanford, among others.