César de la Fuente is a Presidential Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is Director of the Machine Biology Group. He is one of the youngest tenured professors in the history of Penn Medicine. He completed postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and earned a PhD from the University of British Columbia (UBC).

De la Fuente’s research aims to use the power of machines to accelerate discovery in biology and medicine. He pioneered the development of the first computer-designed antibiotic with efficacy in animal models, helping establish AI-driven antibiotic discovery as an emerging field. His lab develops computational methods to mine the world’s biological information, enabling the identification of more than one million antimicrobial compounds and reframing the human body itself as a rich, systematic source of antibiotics. This work began with the first comprehensive exploration of the human proteome for antibiotics, which revealed a previously unrecognized branch of host immunity.

His group also launched the field of molecular de-extinction by becoming the first to identify therapeutic molecules in extinct organisms, an approach that has already yielded preclinical antibiotic candidates including neanderthalin, mammuthusin, and elephasin. Beyond eukaryotes, his lab has expanded antibiotic discovery across other branches of the tree of life. By computationally analyzing microbial dark matter, the team identified nearly one million additional antibiotic molecules and released them open access to accelerate worldwide synthesis, characterization, and development. This effort leveraged machine learning to analyze 63,410 metagenomes and 87,920 microbial genomes. In parallel, through computational exploration of thousands of human microbiomes, de la Fuente and collaborators discovered numerous antimicrobial agents, including prevotellin-2 from the gut microbe Prevotella copri.

Collectively, these initiatives have compressed the time required to identify preclinical candidates from years to hours, with estimated speedups on the order of several million-fold—saving years of human research and transforming what once demanded decades of collective effort into workflows that can be executed within hours. To support this work, his lab has developed the APEX AI stack—APEX, ApexGO, ApexDuo, and ApexOracle—for sequence-to-function prediction, computational optimization, multimodal therapeutic design, and rapid-response discovery. Additional advances from his lab include reprogramming venoms into antimicrobials, developing autonomous nanorobots to treat infections, creating resistance-proof antimicrobial materials, and inventing rapid, low-cost diagnostic devices for COVID-19 and other infections. He is an NIH MIRA investigator and has received recognition and research funding from numerous organizations.

De la Fuente has received numerous national and international awards. He is an elected Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), becoming one of the youngest ever inducted, and was recognized by MIT Technology Review as one of the world’s top innovators for “digitizing evolution to make better antibiotics.” His honors also include the inaugural Langer Prize, ACS Kavli Emerging Leader in Chemistry recognition, ASM Distinguished Lecturer, Waksman Foundation Lecturer, the Miklós Bodanszky Award, AIChE’s 35 Under 35 Award, the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers Young Investigator Award, the ACS Infectious Diseases Young Investigator Award, the Thermo Fisher Award, and the EMBS Academic Early Career Achievement Award for pioneering the development of antibiotics designed using principles from computation, engineering, and biology. More recently, he has received the Princess of Girona Prize, the ASM Awards for Early Career Applied and Biotechnological Research and for Early Career Basic Research, the Rao Makineni Lectureship Award from the American Peptide Society, and the Fleming Prize, and was selected as a National Academy of Medicine Emerging Leader in Health and Medicine. He has been named a Sloan Fellow and selected by the World Economic Forum to the Young Global Leaders Class of 2025. In 2026, de la Fuente was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology.

He serves on the editorial boards of numerous scholarly journals and is currently an Associate Editor of Drug Resistance Updates, Nature Communications Biology, Bioactive Materials, Bioengineering & Translational Medicine, and Digital Discovery. He has been named a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher (top 1% most cited in the world) multiple times and received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Leon at age 39. Prof. de la Fuente has delivered around 400 invited lectures, including many keynote and named lectures, and has also spoken at TEDx. He has co-authored an influential book on machine learning for drug discovery, secured multiple patents, and published around 200 peer-reviewed papers in journals including Cell, Science, Cell Host & Microbe, Nature Biomedical Engineering, Nature Microbiology, Nature Communications, and PNAS.

Prof. Dr. Aránzazu del Campo is a Scientific Director at the INM - Leibniz Institute for New Materials and Professor for Materials Synthesis at the Faculty of Chemistry at Saarland University. Her group develops instructive materials to encapsulate and interface living cells with the aim to bioengineer tissues and living therapeutic devices for medical applications. Central to her research are photoresponsive molecules and hydrogels with latent functional levels that can be unlocked upon light exposure to trigger cell responses. To integrate the materials with the living components into functional devices, the group uses processing technologies like 3D bioprinting, electrospinning or microfluidics.

Chunhai Fan is a K. C. Wong Chair Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, New Cornerstone Investigator (NCSI), Dean of the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, and Executive Director of the National Center for Translational Medicine. He is a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a member of the World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) and the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences. He is also a fellow of AAAS/RSC/AIMBE/ISE. He is an Associate Editor of JACS-Au, and serves as a Co-Chair on the editorial board of ChemPlusChem and an editorial board member of over 10 journals including Cell Biomaterials, Angewadte Chemie, Accounts of Chemical Research and ACS Nano. Dr. Fan has published more than 900 papers in peer-reviewed journals (with ~100, 000 citations and H-index 150), and been recognized as Highly Cited Researchers by Clarivate Analytics since 2014. His work has been recognized by many awards including National Natural Science Prize of China (2016), The Ho Leung Ho Lee Foundation Prize for Scientific and Technological Innovation (2019), Advances in Measurement Science Lectureship Award in American Chemical Society (2019) and Rozenberg Tulip Award (2025).

I have always been curious about fundamental questions in science and long fascinated by the idea to engineer a cell from scratch. Since 2022, I am a professor at the Center for Molecular Biology of Heidelberg University (ZMBH). I led the Max Planck Reseach Group Biophysical Engineering of Life (2019-2024). Previously, as a Skłodowska-Curie Fellow in Stuttgart, I worked on bottom-up synthetic biology and microfluidics with Joachim Spatz. In April 2017, I completed my PhD in physics as a Gates Cambridge Fellow at the University of Cambridge, UK, where I built DNA origami nanopores in the group of Ulrich Keyser.

My groups research is generously supported by the Alfried Krupp Prize (2024), the Women Interactive Materials Award (2022), the Hector Fellow Academy Award (2022), and several grants such as an ERC Starting Grant (2022), and an HFSP Grant (2023).

If I don’t do science, I like talking about it with students and the wider public, via our plattform Ring-a-Scientist, YouTube or media outlets like The Naked Scientists (BBC – Radio 5 live), ZDF neo or Spektrum der Wissenschaft.

Prof. Huang earned his BS degree from Fudan University, Shanghai and went to the US through the CUSBEA program to pursue his PhD study in transcriptional regulation during fruit fly embryonic pattern formation.  He earned his PhD degree from the University of California, Los Angeles.  Thereafter, Prof. Huang received his postdoctoral training in mouse genetics at National Cancer Institute, NIH in the USA.  During this period, Prof. Huang was the first to report that the two major intracellular transportation systems of mammalian cells, the microtubule- and actin-filament-based systems directly interact with each other through their motor proteins, kinesin and myosin.  Later, he established his own laboratory at the University of Hong Kong.  Prof. Huang is now the Chair Professor of Synthetic Biology and the L & T Charitable Foundation Professor in Biomedical Sciences in the School of Biomedical Sciences, the University of Hong Kong.
Prof. Huang’s current research focuses on two areas: synthetic biology and intracellular transportation. For intracellular transportation study, Prof. Huang has focused on illustrating the functions of a microtubule-based motor molecular, Kinesin-1, in different cell types, aiming at understanding its roles in different cell types in development and disease. For synthetic biology, Prof. Huang has created novel genetic circuits for the control of gene expression and hence biological behavior. One successful example is the design and assembly with his colleagues of a genetic circuit for the spatiotemporal control of cell distribution and function. This new circuit was used to reveal how repetitive biological structure could be generated and how the number of repeats in biological structures can be controlled. Most recently, his team further engineered the interactions among multiple cell types to generate biological structures. The abilities for spatiotemporal control of gene activities, cell-cell interactions, cell distribution and functions are very useful for future preventive and therapeutic medicine, which Prof. Huang is applying to vaccine development and cancer therapy.

Prof. Kewang Nan is a ZJU100 Professor in the School of Pharmacy at Zhejiang University and an adjunct professor at the Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine. His research lies at the interface of bioelectronics, biomedical devices, synthetic biology, and drug delivery, with a focus on developing intelligent therapeutic systems that can sense, compute, and intervene in living organisms. He completed his Ph.D. and postdoctoral training at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Harvard University, and MIT, and became an independent PI at Zhejiang University in 2023. He has published more than 30 journal articles as first or corresponding author, including papers in Nature Materials, Nature Biomedical Engineering, Nature Communications, multiple Nature Reviews, Science Advances, and holds 6 Chinese patents. He also serves as a young editorial board member for journals including Med-X, Soft Science, and Bio-Design and Manufacturing, and has served in organizing roles for international conferences such as the IEEE-NSENS and the BMES Annual Meeting.

Prof. Nan’s current research aims to create biohybrid and electronic–synthetic biology platforms for adaptive medicine. His group develops retrievable living drug depots, electronically regulated encapsulated cell therapies, ingestible and implantable bioelectronic devices, and closed-loop drug delivery systems that combine engineered cells or microbes with flexible sensors, microfluidics, and programmable electrical control. These platforms are designed to overcome the limitations of conventional drug depots by enabling sustained in situ production of therapeutic molecules, real-time physiological sensing, and on-demand modulation of therapeutic output. Through this work, his laboratory seeks to establish a new generation of functional materials and devices in which synthetic biology and bioelectronics are integrated for long-term, localized, and intelligent theranostic applications.

Dr. Guangjun NIE is a principal investigator and deputy director at the National Center for Nanoscience and Technology of China. He obtained his doctoral degree from the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in 2002. After that, he conducted postdoctoral research at McGill University in Canada. In 2008, he joined the National Center for Nanoscience and Technology. He was the founding director of Materials Biology and Precision Therapy at the Chinese Biophysical Society, the director of the Nanotechnological Oncology, Chinese Anticancer Association, and council member of the Chinese Society for Biomaterials, a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) of the UK. He is the Executive Editor of Nano Letters, the Associate Editor of Life Medicine, and a member of the editorial board of Fundamental Research and Nano Today.
His research focuses on nanomedicines for sensing and regulating the disease microenvironment, leading to significant advancements in areas such as vascular, ECM, and immune regulation of diseases, drug-delivery nanorobots, and nanovaccines. He has authored over 340 peer-reviewed papers in prestigious journals, including Nature Biotechnology and Science Translational Medicine, and secured 30 patents, successfully transferring three of them to biotech companies. His papers have accumulated over 32,000 citations, with an H-index of 99, according to Google Scholar. He has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Yiling Biomedical Youth Award from the Chinese Pharmaceutical Association in 2016, the Second Prize of the Science and Technology Award from the same association in 2018, and recognition as one of the Top Ten Scientific Advances in China in 2018. Additionally, he was honored with the First Prize of the Beijing Natural Science Award in 2020, the First Prize of the Tianjin Science and Technology Progress Award, the First Prize of the Science and Technology Award from the Chinese Anti-Cancer Association, and the First Prize of the Contribution Award for the Overseas Chinese Community in 2022, the First Prize of the Biomaterials Society Science and Technology in 2025.

Dr. Velia Siciliano is a leading scientist in synthetic biology, mammalian cell engineering, and immunotherapy, currently serving as Tenured Principal Investigator at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), where she directs the Laboratory of Synthetic and Systems Biology for Biomedicine. With training in bioengineering and human genetics at Telethon Institute of Genetics and Medicine , and postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), she has built an internationally recognized research program focused on designing programmable mammalian cells for biomedical applications. Her work combines synthetic biology, systems biology, gene regulation, computational modeling, and immunoengineering to create next-generation cell therapies and diagnostic technologies.

Her research has made pioneering contributions to understanding and overcoming the fundamental limitations of mammalian cell engineering. Dr. Siciliano was among the first researchers to demonstrate how intracellular resource competition constrains synthetic gene circuits in mammalian cells, leading to innovative engineering solutions that improve robustness and predictability of therapeutic cell design. Her laboratory has developed advanced synthetic circuits, RNA-based regulatory systems, protein sensor-actuator devices, and programmable immune cells, with a strong focus on enhancing CAR-T cell therapies and combating T-cell exhaustion in cancer immunotherapy. More recently, her group has pioneered synthetic communication systems between engineered T cells and macrophages to improve treatment of solid tumors.

An internationally recognized leader in the field, Dr. Siciliano has secured multiple prestigious grants, including ERC Starting, Consolidator, and Proof-of-Concept funding, Horizon Europe projects, and major national research awards. She has authored influential publications in journals such as Nature Communications, Nature Biotechnology, Nucleic Acids Research, and ACS Synthetic Biology, contributing foundational advances in synthetic biology for medicine. Her work also bridges computational and experimental biology, integrating mathematical modeling, RNA engineering, and synthetic immunology to create more effective and adaptive therapeutic systems.

Beyond research, Dr. Siciliano plays an active role in shaping the global scientific community. She serves on advisory and editorial boards including the World Health Organization Global Health Foresight Committee, the European Synthetic Biology Society, and several international journals. She has been recognized with numerous honors, including MIT Innovators Under 35, Forbes Top 150 Women in Science and Technology, Inspiring Fifty, and repeated selection among Italy’s “Unstoppable Women.” Through mentoring, international collaborations, and scientific leadership, she continues to drive innovation in synthetic biology and translational biomedicine worldwide.

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).

Andreas Walther is a Professor for Macromolecular Materials and Systems at the Department of Chemistry at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz (Germany), as well as a Max Planck Research Fellow at the MPI for Polymer Research. He is one of the pioneers of the field of life-like materials and systems that integrate dynamic processes and principles of chemical intelligence inspired from the basic principles of life. He was appointed to his present position in Mainz in 2020 with the prestigious support of the Gutenberg Research College. Andreas Walther is the recipient of an ERC Starting Grant and of an ERC Consolidator Grant. He was a co-founder of the DFG Cluster of Excellence on "Living, Adaptive and Energy-Autonomous Materials Systems" (livMatS).

Dr. Huimin Zhao is the Steven L. Miller Chair of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), director of NSF AI Institute for Molecule Synthesis (moleculemaker.org), NSF iBioFoundry (ibiofoundry.illinois.edu), and NSF Global Center for Biofoundry Applications (gcba.illinois.edu), and Editor in Chief of ACS Synthetic Biology. He received his B.S. degree in Biology from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1992 and his Ph.D. degree in Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1998. Prior to joining UIUC in 2000, he was a project leader at the Dow Chemical Company. Dr. Zhao has authored and co-authored over 480 research articles and over 30 issued and pending patent applications. In addition, he has given over 550 plenary, keynote, or invited lectures. Forty (40) of his former graduate students and postdocs became professors or principal investigators around the world. Dr. Zhao received numerous research and teaching awards and honors such as ECI Enzyme Engineering Award and NSF CAREER Award. His primary research interests are in the development and applications of synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, and laboratory automation tools to address society’s most daunting challenges in health, energy, and sustainability.

Chao Zhong is currently a Professor at the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he holds the position of Vice Director of the Institute of Synthetic Biology. Additionally, he serves as the Deputy Director of the National Key Laboratory of Quantitative Synthetic Biology and the Director of the Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Materials Synthetic Biology. He is the recipient of several prestigious honors, including the National Science Fund of China for Distinguished Young Scholars. Dr. Zhong serves as the topic editor for ACS Synthetic Biology (2023-2014), and is a member of the editorial boards of several international journals, such as Materials Today Bio and Current Research in Chemical Biology.
Dr. Zhong’s research lies at the intersection of synthetic biology and materials science, with a primary focus on the emerging field of materials synthetic biology. His work explores the development of novel materials through synthetic biology approaches, including engineered living materials and programmable biomaterials. He has authored over 70 academic papers, with corresponding-author contributions in leading journals such as Nature, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Chemical Biology, and Nature Reviews Materials. His innovations have resulted in 12 granted patents and over 30 pending patent applications. In 2021, Dr. Zhong founded PAM²L Biotechnologies Co., Ltd., a company dedicated to advancing new materials through synthetic biology, with a particular emphasis on the application and promotion of biomaterials in the health, longevity, and beauty sectors.

Rong Zhu is Full Professor at Department of Precision Instrument in Tsinghua University, China. She is also serving as Executive Vice President of MEMS&NEMS Society, China Instrument and Control Society. Prof. Zhu has been working on research and development of micro/nano electromechanical system, advanced sensors and advanced instruments for smart robot, healthcare, and biomedical applications. She has proposed new concept of piezo-thermic transduction and developed multifunction sensors and flexible e-skin based on thermo-sensation for robotic tactile perception/control and wearable healthcare. She has also proposed and developed multifunction biochip for real-time and label-free single-cell multimodal analyses to promote personalized and mechanism-driven cancer treatment protocols. Prof. Zhu has published more than 200 peer-reviewed journal/conference papers, and held more than 30 granted patents. She has served as co-chair and ETPC of ICMAN and Transducers conference, and has won National Technological Invention Award (China), Provincial and Ministerial Award for Science and Technology Progress (China), Golden Awards of International Invention Exhibition, Transducers Outstanding Paper Award, World Artificial Intelligence Conference Outstanding Paper Award, etc.