Catherine Wu, MD, is a Professor of Medicine and Chief, Division of Stem Cell Transplantation and Cellular Therapies, at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the Association of American Physicians.  She is also the 2024 recipient of the prestigious Sjoberg Award. Wu received her MD from Stanford University School of Medicine, and completed her clinical training in Internal Medicine and Hematology-Oncology at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Dana-Farber. She joined the staff at Dana-Farber in 2000. At Dana-Farber, she has initiated an integrated program of research and clinical activities that focuses on dissecting the basis of effective anti-tumor immunity. Wu's laboratory has focused on the use of genomics-based approaches to discover immunogenic antigen targets, and to understand the molecular basis of therapeutic response and resistance. She has led early-phase clinical trials to test personalized tumor vaccines in melanoma and glioblastoma.

Tao Dong is the founding co-director of the CAMS-Oxford Institute based in Nuffield Department of Medicine at Oxford University. She has held the post of Professor of Immunology in the MRC Human Immunology Unit at Oxford University since 2014 and is a Senior Fellow at University College Oxford. In May 2023, Tao was appointed the Ita Askonas Professorship of Translational Immunology. Tao moved to Oxford University in 1993 where she received a DPhil degree in Immunology in 1998. In 2010 she became the Head of the human anti-viral and anti-cancer cytotoxic T cell laboratory and subsequently Program Leader in the MRC Human Immunology Unit at Oxford University. She has served as a panel member in varies international funding organisations, and SAB members for several pharmaceutical companies. 

The aim of Tao Dong’s research group is to investigate the functional aspects of antigen specific cytotoxic T cells (CTL) with a focus on the factors affecting CTL in controlling virus infection and cancer progression. While a robust and appropriate T cell response is typically beneficial to the host during human infections, a weak or inappropriate response can be ineffective or even have a detrimental effect. Over the past two decades, they have been working to understand the key factors required for efficient viral control by T cells in a number of different viral infections and cancer. Establishing both ex-vivo and in-vitro T cell functional evaluation platforms for antigen-specific T cells isolated from tissue and blood. By linking functional data with multi-omic single cell and T cell receptor (TCR) repertoire analysis, they continue to identify potential targets and pathways to augment and control the immune response as a way of improving the outcome of several important human diseases including SARS-CoV-2 virus infection and cancer.

Dr. Chen Wu is the Deputy Director of the Cancer Hospital, CAMS & PUMC. She earned her M.D. and Ph.D. from Peking Union Medical College and China Medical University, followed by postdoctoral training at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Wu’s research focuses on cancer evolution. She has led one of China's largest prospective cohort studies on esophageal cancer for over a decade, establishing a dedicated biobank and database for cancer genome evolution research. Her team systematically identifies cancer susceptibility and driver genes through genome-wide association and multi-omics studies. Additionally, she has reconstructed a comprehensive body map of morphologically normal human organs to uncover profound genomic alterations associated with healthy aging. Dr. Wu has published 140 research articles in leading journals, including Nature, Nature Genetics, and Cancer Cell. She is also the recipient of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders (2020), the China Youth Science and Technology Award, the Chinese Young Women in Science Award, and the Xplorer Prize.

Dr. Marlies Meisel is an Associate Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where her research focuses on the complex interactions between gut microbes and the host immune system in health, cancer, and autoimmunity.
Following her PhD in Austria studying T cell autoimmunity, her postdoctoral work at the University of Chicago uncovered mechanisms by which microbes influence intestinal inflammation and cancer development.
Her current lab investigates how the gut microbiota modulates tumor immunity, while also exploring the modulation of gut metabolites through diet and exercise to impact systemic immunity in the context of cancer.

Christina Leslie did her undergraduate degree in Pure and Applied Mathematics at the University of Waterloo in Canada. She was awarded an NSERC 1967 Science and Engineering Fellowship for graduate study and did a PhD in Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, with thesis work in differential geometry and representation theory. She won an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship and did her postdoctoral training in the Mathematics Department at Columbia University in 1999-2000. She then joined the faculty of the Computer Science Department and later the Center for Computational Learning Systems at Columbia University, where she began to work in computational biology and machine learning. In 2007, she moved her lab to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where she is currently a Member of the Computational and Systems Biology Program. Dr. Leslie's research group uses computational methods to study the regulation of gene expression in mammalian cells and the dysregulation of expression programs in cancer. She is well known for developing machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML/AI) approaches for modeling single-cell, spatial, and 3D genomics data. Major biological domain areas include basic and cancer immunology, cancer epigenetics, and stem cell and developmental biology.

Eric Vivier is a Professor of Immunology at Marseille Medical School and heads the Innate Lymphoid Cells laboratory at the Centre d'Immunologie de Marseille-Luminy (CIML). He also holds a professorship at École Polytechnique and serves as President of the Paris Saclay Cancer Cluster. A pioneer in natural killer cell and innate immunity research, his work has had a profound impact on cancer immunotherapy, reflected in his recognition as a Highly Cited Researcher continuously since 2015. He ahas received several European Research Council grants, including Synergy and Advanced grants.

Beyond academia, he has played a significant role in translating research into clinical applications, co-founding Innate Pharma, where he served as CSO and SVP until 2025, as well as co-founding InVimmune and MI-mAbs. He advises several biotechnology firms and investment groups in the immunology space.

His contributions have been recognized with election to the French National Academy of Medicine and EMBO, and he holds the distinctions of Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur, Officier de l'Ordre du Mérite, and Officier des Palmes Académiques. He is also the recipient of numerous research awards, including the EFIS Prize and the Prix Fondation ARC Léopold Griffuel.