Professor Yuchun Gu is a medically trained physiologist and is currently the director of the Regenerative Medicine Center at Aston Medical School (Birmingham, UK). In 2017, he was awarded a professor and chair in Molecular Physiology at Aston Medical School and has held the position of Professor and Chair of Molecular Pharmacology at the Institute of Molecular Medicine, Peking University (Beijing, China) since 2010.

Professor Gu’s expertise lies in cardiovascular disease, mitochondria biology and ion channel studies. His research has made a significant contribution in understanding the role of carbon monoxide (CO) in human physiology and pathophysiology. His discoveries identified three novel signaling pathways mediated by CO. In the past 6 years, his research has moved into the field of immune cell engineering for the treatment of cancer and the clinical applications of stem cells for a variety of degenerative diseases.

Professor Pengtao Liu is currently a professor at the School of Biomedical Sciences, at the University of Hong Kong. He graduated from Henan University with a Bachelor of Science (BSc.) in Biology and obtained his Master of Science (MSc.) from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Institute of Genetics. Professor Liu received his PhD from Baylor College of Medicine (Houston, Texas, USA) and received his postdoctoral training at the National Cancer Institute (Maryland, USA). Prior to joining the University of Hong Kong, Professor Liu was a Senior Group Leader and an affiliated faculty member at the Wellcome Trust-MRC Stem Cell Institute, University of Cambridge (UK).

Professor Liu’s current research studies the use of stem cells in studying human development, which he believes holds a great promise in regenerative medicine. At present, he is establishing stem cells with totipotency features and characterizing them using molecular and functional approaches including single cell genomics. Professor Liu’s research lab is particularly interested in studying the differentiation of stem cells into functional cells (i.e. immune cells) and dissecting its molecular mechanisms.

Trained in Physics and Engineering, Dr. Zeming Ning has been active in genome informatics for the past 16 years. After completing his PhD degree at Aston University (Birmingham, UK) and receiving his postdoctoral training at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge University (UK), he joined the Sanger Institute in 1999 to pursue bioinformatics research.

Over the past years, he and his colleagues have developed several bioinformatics tools, which are widely appreciated by the genomics community. The group has also produced over 30 de novo assemblies from large animals and plant genomes, including Gorilla, Zebrafish, Tasmanian Devil, Bamboo and Miscanthus.

Dr. Shengjiang Tan is currently a senior research associate at the University of Cambridge (UK). He received his PhD from the Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences before joining as a research associate at the University of Oxford (UK). Dr. Shengjiang Tan’s research skills and expertise lies in the field of Biochemistry, Molecular genetics, and Molecular cloning.

Professor Alan Warren obtained his undergraduate degree in Biochemistry and Medicine at the University of Glasgow (UK). He completed his PhD in Molecular Biology at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, where he discovered that the LIM-only protein Lmo2 is required for hematopoiesis. He is currently a Professor of Hematology at the University of Cambridge (UK).

Dr. David Kent earned his BSc. in Genetics and English Literature at the University of Western Ontario (Canada) and obtained his PhD in Genetics at the University of British Columbia (Canada). He received his postdoctoral training at the University of Cambridge (UK) where he studied normal and malignant blood stem cell biology. At present he is a group leader and currently heads his own research lab which studies the fate choices in single blood stem cells and how changes in their regulation leads to cancer.