Prof. Ofra Benny is a Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a leading entrepreneur in the field of Biomedicine. Since 2013, she has directed the Laboratory for Nanomedicine at the School of Pharmacy and Faculty of Medicine, where her multidisciplinary team pioneers research at the intersection of bioengineering, drug delivery, and tissue regeneration. Prof. Benny earned her Ph.D. in Biotechnology Engineering from the Technion in Israel, followed by postdoctoral training in angiogenesis research under the mentorship of the late Prof. Judah Folkman at Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School.

Her Nanomedicine lab focuses on bio-convergence strategies to develop innovative nanotherapeutic platforms for targeted drug delivery in cancer and ocular diseases. In parallel, her team develops advanced ex vivo models and Tumor-on-Chip technologies to support personalized medicine approaches. Prof. Benny’s research has led to numerous patents and publications in high-impact journals. She has received prestigious funding, including the Horizon 2020 ERC grant, NanoTecMed, and ERC Proof-of-Concept awards from the European Research Council. In addition to her academic leadership, Prof. Benny is the founder and Chief Scientific Officer of four biomedical startups, actively translating scientific innovation into clinical applications.

Dr. Bozhi Tian is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Chicago whose research lies at the interface of materials science, electronics, and biology. His group develops semiconductor-based materials and devices to study and modulate subcellular dynamics, focusing on the molecular–nano interactions between soft and hard matter. Ongoing research focuses on developing living bioelectronics and photoelectroceuticals—platforms that enable non-genetic, minimally invasive modulation of biological tissues, with applications in arrhythmia management, inflammation control, and tissue regeneration.

His contributions have been recognized with honors such as the Raymond and Beverly Sackler International Prize in the Physical Sciences, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), MIT Technology Review’s Innovator Under 35 distinction, and the University of Chicago Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring.

Michael J. Mitchell is an Associate Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Lipid Nanoparticle Delivery Systems Group Leader at the Penn Institute for RNA Innovation. He received a BE in Biomedical Engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology in 2009, a PhD in Biomedical Engineering with Prof. Michael King from Cornell University in 2014. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Chemical Engineering with Prof. Robert Langer at MIT from 2014-2017, prior to pursuing his independent career at University of Pennsylvania in 2018. The Mitchell lab’s research broadly lies at the interface of biomaterials science, drug delivery, and cellular and molecular bioengineering to fundamentally understand and therapeutically target biological barriers. Specifically, his lab engineers new lipid and polymeric nanoparticle platforms for the delivery of different nucleic acid modalities to target cells and tissues across the body. His lab applies their research findings and the technologies developed to a range of human health applications, including the engineering of CAR T cells for cancer immunotherapy, mRNA vaccines, genome editing, cardiovascular disease, and in utero therapeutics to treat disease before birth.

Mitchell has received numerous awards as an independent investigator, including the National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award, the Rising Star Award from the Biomedical Engineering Society, the Career Award at the Scientific Interface from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, and the Research Scholar Award from the American Cancer Society. In 2022 Mitchell was named “Emerging Inventor for the Year” by Penn’s for Innovation in recognition for his lipid nanoparticle technologies and received the Young Investigator Award from the Society for Biomaterials, the T. Nagai Award from the Controlled Release Society, the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and was named a 2023 Young Innovator in Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering. He is a co-founder of Liberate Bio, a biotechnology company focused on developing non-viral delivery technologies for genetic medicines, and serves on Scientific Advisory Board of numerous biotechnology companies.

Professor Shulamit Levenberg is the head of the Stem cell and Tissue engineering lab at the Technion Faculty of Biomedical Engineering and the director of the Technion Center for 3D Bioprinting. She earned her PhD at the Weizmann Institute of Science and pursued her post-doctoral research at MIT in the lab of Professor Robert Langer. She spent a sabbatical year as a visiting professor at the Wyss Institute for Biology Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and a summer sabbatical at the University of Western Australia as a winner of the Raine Visiting Professor Award. Prof. Levenberg groundbreaking discoveries involve in vitro vascularization of engineered tissues where, upon implantation, the engineered vessels anastomose with the host vasculature, improving survival and perfusion of engineered grafts. Prof. Levenberg was the first to engineer vascularized tissue flaps, offering novel reconstruction techniques using engineered tissue constructs. Her pioneering work demonstrated the effect of scaffold stiffness and tensile forces on early differentiation and organization of stem cells in 3D constructs, and on alignment of vessel networks in engineered tissues. She recently developed unique stem-cell engineered tissue constructs that induce the regeneration and repair of injured spinal cords.

Prof Levenberg received the Krill Prize for excellence in scientific research, awarded by the Wolf Foundation, and was named by Scientific American as a “Research Leader” in tissue engineering, for her seminal work on vascularization of engineered tissues. She also received the Rappaport Prize for Biomedical Sciences, the Bruno prize and the Katz prize. Recently she was awarded a Medal of Distinction from the Peres center for peace and innovation. Levenberg has authored over 100 publications, and presented her work in over 100 international conferences as an invited or keynote speaker. She is founder and CSO of three start-up companies in the areas of cultured meat, spinal cord regeneration and nanoliter diagnostic arrays. She is the former President of the Israel Stem Cell Society and the former Dean of the Technion Faculty of Biomedical Engineering.

Jang-Ung Park achieved his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2009. Following his doctoral studies, he served as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University from 2009 to 2010. He worked as an associate professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at UNIST from 2010 to 2018.

In 2018, he joined Yonsei University as a professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, where he currently serves. He also holds a concurrent appointment as an adjunct professor in the Department of Neurosurgery, College of Medicine, Yonsei University. His current research is focused on wearable and biomedical electronics, bridging the gap between advanced materials engineering and medical applications.

Li Tang received his B.S. in Chemistry from Peking University, China, in 2007, and Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, in 2012, under the supervision of Prof. Jianjun Cheng. He was a CRI Irvington Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Darrell Irvine at Massachusetts Institute of Technology during 2013-2016. He joined the faculty of Institute of Bioengineering, and Institute of Materials Science & Engineering, at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, as a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in 2016, and promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2022. He is also the Vice Dean for Innovation, and Director of Innovate4Life program at School of Life Sciences, EPFL.

His research focuses on developing multidimensional immunoengineering approaches for enhanced cancer immunotherapies. Dr. Tang is the recipient of Friedrich Miescher Award (2025) from Life Sciences Switzerland (LS2), Leenaards Prize for Translational Medical Research (2025), Biomaterials Science Lectureship  (2025), CAB Mid-Career Investigator Award (2024), Biomaterials Award for Young Investigators (2024), Cancer Research Institute CLIP Award (2021), Anna Fuller Award (2021 and 2022), European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant Award (2018), and named in the MIT Technology Review’s "Top 35 Innovators under Age 35" list of China region (2020).