Dr Michelle Monje, MD, PhD, is a professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford University and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. She is recognized as an international leader in the pathophysiology of glioma, especially diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG)/H3K27M-mutated diffuse midline gliomas and a pioneer in the emerging field of Cancer Neuroscience. Her clinical focus is on childhood glial malignancies and cognitive impairment after childhood cancer therapy.

Her laboratory studies neuron-glial interactions in health and disease, with a particular focus on mechanisms and consequences of neuron-glial interactions in health, glial dysfunction in cancer therapy-related cognitive impairment and neuron-glial interactions in malignant glioma. Together with these basic studies, Michelle’s research program has advanced preclinical studies of novel therapeutics for pediatric high-grade gliomas and cancer therapy-related cognitive impairment in order to translate new therapies to the clinic. She has led several of her discoveries from basic molecular work to clinical trials for children and young adults with brain tumors including a promising clinical trial of CAR T cell therapy for DIPG and diffuse midline gliomas.

Following the successful completion of the Human Genome Project, the challenge now is to decipher the information encoded within the human genetic code — including genes, regulatory controls and cellular circuitry. Such understanding is fundamental to the study of physiology in both health and disease. At the Broad Institute, his lab collaborates with other to discover and understand the genes responsible for rare genetic diseases, common diseases, and cancer; the genetic variation and evolution of the human genome; the basis of gene regulation via enhancers, long non-coding RNAs, and three-dimensional folding of the genome; the developmental trajectories of cellular differentiation; and the history of the human population.

Dr. Ronny Drapkin, MD, PhD, is the Franklin Payne Professor of Pathology in Obstetrics & Gynecology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Penn Ovarian Cancer Research Center, the Gynecologic Cancer Research Program at the Basser Center for BRCA and co-directs the Ovarian Cancer Translational Center of Excellence at the Abramson Cancer Center. His research focuses on the pathogenesis and molecular evolution of women’s cancers, with an emphasis on ovarian and endometrial carcinomas. His laboratory played a pivotal role in the identification of the fallopian tube epithelium as the origin of most high-grade serous ovarian cancers—a discovery that transformed the field and redefined prevention and early detection strategies. His group develops innovative model systems to study disease initiation, progression, and tumor–microenvironment interactions and is leading efforts to build a precancer atlas to identify biomarkers and therapeutic targets for cancer interception. Dr. Drapkin trained at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and previously served on the Harvard faculty before he was recruited to the University of Pennsylvania.

Prof. Shulamit Goldberg Michaeli is from the pioneers of RNA research in Israel. Her research focuses on the RNA world of the ancient eukaryotes and infamous parasites trypanosomes and Leishmania. These parasites lack transcription regulation of mRNAs and regulate their gene expression post-transcriptionally. She was the first to demonstrate that pseudouridine, the most crucial RNA modification on the COVID vaccine, is found on non-stable RNA and is guided by small nucleolar RNA (snoRNA). RNA modification and especially methylation and pseudouridylation on rRNA, spliceosomal RNA and mRNAs regulate gene expression while the parasite cycles between its two hosts. Her lab described almost all known non-coding in these parasites including SRP RNAs, U snRNAs, telomerase RNA and showed how unique these are in these organisms. Recently, her group described the first anti-sense regulators in an organism lacking microRNA, and showed that over expression of a single snoRNA can stop infection. Over the years she deciphered the mechanism and machinery of trans-splicing and showed that the spliced leader RNA (SL RNA ) regulate life and death of these parasites. The lab discovered the first programmed cell death pathway that they termed SLS for SL RNA silencing. Shula is the former dean of Life Science and currently VPR for research at BIU. She was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute international scholar for ten years, obtained twice the ISM prizes, the Landu prize for Microbiology and the Andre Lwoff prize from the French Academy of Sciences, Prof. Ephraim Katzir Prize Winner 2023.