Dr. Milica Radisic is a Professor at the University of Toronto, Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Organ-on-a-Chip Engineering and a Senior Scientist at the Toronto General Research Institute. She is also Director of the NSERC CREATE Training Program in Organ-on-a-Chip Engineering & Entrepreneurship and a co-lead for the Center for Research and Applications in Fluidic Technologies. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada-Academy of Science, Canadian Academy of Engineering, the American Institute for Medical & Biological Engineering, Tissue Engineering & Regenerative Medicine Society as well as Biomedical Engineering Society. She was a recipient of the MIT Technology Review Top 35 Under 35, Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, NSERC E.W.R Steacie Fellowship, YWCA Woman of Distinction Award, Killam Fellowship, Acta Biomaterialia Silver Medal, and Humboldt Research Award to name a few. Her research focuses on organ-on-a-chip engineering and development of new biomaterials that promote healing and attenuate scarring. She developed new methods to mature iPSC derived cardiac tissues using electrical stimulation.

She is an Executive Editor for ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering, Senior Consulting Editor for the Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology, a reviewing editor for eLife and a member of the editorial board of another 8 journals. She served on the Board of Directors for Ontario Society of Professional Engineers, Canadian Biomaterials Society and McMaster University Alumni Association. She organized Keystone, EMBO and ECI conferences and numerous sessions at TERMIS and BMES meetings.  She served as a Scientific Officer for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and member of review panels for CIHR, NIH and Israel Ministry of Education. She is the Chair of Investment Committee for Serbia Innovation Fund. She is a co-founder of two companies TARA Biosystems (acquired by Valo Health), that uses human engineered heart tissues in drug development and safety testing, and Quthero that advances regenerative hydrogels. Her work has been presented in over 260 publications, garnering over 25,000 citations with an h-index of 80. Her publications  appeared in Cell, Nature Materials, Nature Methods, Nature Protocols, Nature Communications, PNAS etc.

Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic is University Professor, the highest academic rank at Columbia University, and the first engineer to receive this distinction. She is also the Mikati Foundation Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Medical Sciences and Dental Medicine. She directs the Laboratory for Stem Cells and Tissue Engineering, the NIH Tissue Engineering Resource Center, and Columbia’s Center for Dental and Craniofacial Research. The focus of her lab is on engineering functional human tissues for use in regenerative medicine and patient-specific “organs-on-chip” models of disease. She published 495 journal articles, including those in Nature, Cell, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Medicine, Nature Biomedical Engineering, Nature Methods, Nature Genetics, Science Advances, PNAS, Cell Stem Cell and Science Translational Medicine. She has mentored over 250 trainees and founded five biotech companies. Among her many recognitions, she was elected to nine national and international academies, including Academia Europaea, the National Academies of Engineering, Medicine and Inventors, the Royal Society of Canada Academy of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Professor Matthias Lutolf is the founding director of Roche’s Institute of Human Biology (IHB) where he leads the Translational Bioengineering department. The IHB focuses on pioneering research in organoids, human biology, and translational bioengineering, bridging the gap between academic and pharmaceutical research. Lutolf's academic journey began at ETH Zurich, where he studied materials engineering and earned a PhD in biomedical engineering. Following his postdoctoral studies at Stanford University, he established his own laboratory at EPFL in 2007. From 2014 to 2018, he served as the director of EPFL’s Institute of Bioengineering. Lutolf’s own research at IHB is dedicated to developing advanced bioengineering strategies to create next-generation organoids with enhanced reproducibility and physiological relevance, essential for early drug development. His teams' work has been published in renowned journals such as Nature and Science. Additionally, his innovations have led to the commercialization of products, including devices and assays for personalized medicine, and the co-founding of biotech startups in Lausanne.