Host Academic Unit

Professor LIM Chwee Teck, the NUS Society Chair Professor and Director of the Institute for Health Innovation and Technology at the National University of Singapore, as well as the Founding Director of the Singapore Health Technologies Consortium, is a renowned researcher and entrepreneur. His research focuses on human disease mechanobiology, microfluidics, and flexible wearable technologies for healthcare. With over 470 co-authored journal publications, including in prestigious journals like Nature and Science, and more than 450 plenary/keynote/invited lectures, Prof. Lim is highly accomplished. He has founded six deep tech startups to commercialize technologies from his lab. As an elected fellow of multiple prestigious organizations and recipient of numerous awards such as the Nature Lifetime Achievement Award for Mentoring in Science and the President's Technology Award, Prof. Lim's work has garnered significant media coverage and recognition globally.

Host Academic Unit

Professor Cynthia Morton is the William Lambert Richardson Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology and Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School, Kenneth J. Ryan, M.D. Distinguished Chair in Obstetrics and Gynecology, Director of Cytogenetics and Past Director of the Biomedical Research Institute at Brigham and Women's Hospital. She is an Institute Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. She is the recently elected Vice Chair of the Harvard Medical School Faculty Council. Professor Morton is certified by the American Board of Medical Genetics in PhD Medical Genetics, Clinical Cytogenetics and Clinical Molecular Genetics. Her research interests are in molecular cytogenetics, hereditary deafness, genetics of uterine leiomyomata and human developmental disorders. She has published 335 original articles. Professor Morton was a member of the Board of Directors of the American Society of Human Genetics for 12 years and served as the 2014 President. She completed a six-year tenure as Editor of The American Journal of Human Genetics and is currently Co-Editor of Human Genetics. Professor Morton is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Host Academic Unit

Professor David Simchi-Levi is a Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT and serves as the head of the MIT Data Science Lab. He is considered one of the premier thought leaders in supply chain management and business analytics. He is the current Editor-in-Chief of Management Science, one of the two flagship journals of INFORMS. In 2023, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering. In 2020, he was awarded the prestigious INFORMS Impact Prize for playing a leading role in developing and disseminating a new highly impactful paradigm for the identification and mitigation of risks in global supply chains. He is an INFORMS Fellow and MSOM Distinguished Fellow and the recipient of the 2020 INFORMS Koopman Award given to an outstanding publication in military operations research; Ford Motor Company 2015 Engineering Excellence Award; 2014 INFORMS Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice; 2014 INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section Practice Award; and 2009 INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section Prize.

Host Academic Unit

Professor Domenico Otranto is a Professor of Parasitology and Parasitic Diseases of Animals at the Department of Veterinary Medicine (University of Bari, Italy), where he was Head for two terms (2015-2021). He is President of the World Association for the Advancement of Veterinary Parasitology, WAAVP (2019-2027) and former President of the European Veterinary Parasitology College, EVPC (2016-2019). In recognition of his studies in the field of parasitology, he was the recipient of many awards (Young Scientist award from the WAAVP, 2007; international award of the Accademia dei Lincei, 2006; Bayer Research Award from the WAAVP, 2019). His research focuses on the study of the biology, diagnosis and control of arthropods and arthropod borne diseases of zoonotic concern, with both a basic and an applied approach. His activities focus on research and education projects in low- and middle- income Countries with a One Health approach. He is the author of more than 710 peer-reviewed articles in international scientific journals and of numerous book chapters. He is Deputy Editor of PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, Advisor Editor and Associate Editor of many scientific journals in the field. He is the organizer of the Parasitology Summer Courses (ParSCo) held under the aegis of the EVPC and of the WAAVP and Chair of the Odile Bain Memorial Prize. Since 2023, he has been a member of the Scientific Steering Committee of One Health Action Commission supported by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a consultant of WHO for the preparation of guidelines on canine leishmaniosis.

Host Academic Unit

Professor Edman Tsang is a Professor of Chemistry and Head of Wolfson Catalysis Centre at the University of Oxford, UK. His main research interests are on materials and catalysis concerning energy and environment which include developments of catalytic, photocatalytic and electrocatalytic technologies for green chemistry, fine chemicals, cleaner combustion, energy storages, processes and production, ammonia and hydrogen technologies including fuel cells, etc. Particular expertise is in design and architecture of nanocatalysts and their in-situ/operando diffraction and spectroscopic characterization using large facilities, which can lead to understanding of catalytic surfaces and interfaces. He has contributed to the designs of Diamond I and II beamlines and stations as community champions in APXPS. He has about 500 publications including Nature, Science and their sister journals and has won a number of international awards including IChemE award on iAc innovation in catalysis (2005), RSC Green Chemistry award (2012), RSC Surfaces and Interfaces award (2013) and RSC Industry-Academia Collaboration Award (2019), etc.

Host Academic Unit

Professor Guillermo Sapiro received his B.Sc. (summa cum laude), M.Sc., and Ph.D. from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. After post-doctoral research at MIT, he became a Member of Technical Staff at HP Labs. He was with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota. Currently he is a James B. Duke School Professor with Duke University. He is also a Distinguished Engineer with Apple, Inc., where he leads a team on Health AI. He works on theory and applications in computer vision, computer graphics, medical imaging, image analysis, and machine learning. He has authored over 500 papers in these areas and has written a book published by CUP. Professor Sapiro was awarded the ONR Young Investigator Award in 1998, the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientist and Engineers (PECASE) in 1998, the NSF Career Award in 1999, and the National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellowship in 2010. He received the Test-of-Time award at ICCV 2011 and at ICML 2019. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018 and to the National Academy of Engineering in 2022, and is a Fellow of IEEE and SIAM. He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the SIAM Journal on Imaging Sciences.

Host Academic Unit

Professor Gui-Qiang G. Chen is currently the Statutory Professor in the Analysis of Partial Differential Equations, Director of the Oxford Centre for Nonlinear PDEs (OxPDE) at the Mathematical Institute, and a Professorial Fellow of Keble College, University of Oxford. With expertise in nonlinear partial differential equations and nonlinear analysis, his research spans various fields, including geometry, mechanics, and mathematics. He has published more than 200 original research papers and more than 10 research books. Professor Chen has received numerous prestigious honors, fellowships and awards, including Member of Academia Europaea (elected, 2022), Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences (elected, 2020), Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (elected, 2017), Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (elected, 2014), Turner-Kirk Fellow of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (Cambridge, 2013-14), Fellow of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (elected, 2012), The 2011 SIAG/Analysis of Partial Differential Equations Prize (SIAM 2011).

Host Academic Unit

Professor Hee-Sup Shin, with an MD from Seoul National University Medical College (1974) and a Cornell University Medical College PhD in genetics and cell biology (1983), has taught at MIT (USA) and POSTECH (Korea). He was the founding Director of Brain Science Institute, KIST, and then Director of Center for Cognition and Sociality, IBS. After stepping down from the directorship of the Center for Cognition and Sociality, he continues his research as an Honorary Fellow of IBS. He has been using molecular genetics to study neural mechanisms for animal behaviors, primarily focusing on the role of the thalamus in normal and diseased brains. His interest was on the regulation of intracellular Ca2+ levels in brain cells. He utilized gene knock-out tools on genes such as voltage-gated Ca2+ channels and PLC enzymes. Since 2010, his research interest has evolved to neurobiology of social behaviors. He has pioneered to establish a behavioral paradigm, observational fear learning in mice, a rodent model for emotional contagion, basic form of affective empathy. This paradigm allowed, for the first time, to study affective empathy at the molecular and cellular levels. Prof Shin’s contribution to science has been recognized globally by multiple honors that include being elected to be a member of the National Academy of Science, Republic of Korea, an international member of the National Academy of Science, USA, and an AAAS Fellow.

Host Academic Unit

Professor Iain McCulloch is a Professor of Polymer Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oxford since 2020. Prior to this, he held joint appointments as Professor of Chemical Science and Director of KAUST Solar Center at KAUST, as well as a Chair in Polymer Materials in the Chemistry Department at Imperial College. Previously, he spent 18 years managing industrial research groups at Hoechst in the US and Merck in the UK. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the European Academy of Sciences and a Member of Academia Europaea. He is the recipient of the 2022 Royal Society Armourers and Brasiers Prize, the 2020 Blaise Pascal Medal for Materials Science, the Royal Society of Chemistry 2020 Interdisciplinary Prize, 2014 Tilden Medal for Advances in Chemistry and the 2009 Creativity in Industry Prize. His interests are in the design and investigation of organic semiconducting materials.

Host Academic Unit

Professor Ioannis Brilakis is a Laing O’Rourke Professor of Civil & Information Engineering and the Director of the Construction Information Technology Laboratory at the Division of Civil Engineering of the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. He completed his PhD in Civil Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign in 2005. He has held visiting posts at the Department of Computer Science, Stanford University as a Visiting Associate Professor of Computer Vision (2014) and at the Technical University of Munich as a Visiting Professor, Leverhulme International Fellow (2018-2019), and Hans Fischer Senior Fellow (2019-2021). He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award, the 2019 ASCE J. James R. Croes Medal, the 2018 ASCE John O. Bickel Award, the 2013 ASCE Collingwood Prize, the 2012 Georgia Tech Outreach Award and the 2009 ASCE Associate Editor Award. Professor Brilakis is an author of over 200 papers in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings, an Associate Editor of the ASCE Computing in Civil Engineering, ASCE Construction Engineering and Management, Elsevier Automation in Construction, and Elsevier Advanced Engineering Informatics Journals, and the lead founder of the European Council on Computing in Construction.

Host Academic Unit

Professor Isaiah (Shy) Arkin studied biology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University and obtained his Ph.D. from Yale University. He served on the faculty of Cambridge University, D.E. Shaw Research, and the Hebrew University, where he was the Vice president for research and development for eight years. His research interests revolve around viral membrane proteins. Using experimental and computational approaches, his group analyzes membrane transport systems of pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2, Flu, and more. His work led to identifying novel inhibitors of said viruses and unraveling the mechanisms leading to viral drug resistance.

Host Academic Unit

Professor James J. Heckman is the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Chicago. He works to understand the origins of inequality, and skill formation, and develops and applies strategies for addressing these issues. Heckman has published over 350 articles and 9 books. Heckman received the Nobel Prize in Economics, the Dan David Prize, and the Chinese Government Friendship Award, among other recognitions. He is Director of the Center for the Economics of Human Development at the University of Chicago. The center investigates the sources of poverty and social immobility and policies to improve human flourishing.

Host Academic Unit

Professor Maksym V. Kovalenko is a full professor of Functional Inorganic Materials at ETH Zürich. He is also affiliated with Empa (Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology). He had completed BS/MS in chemistry at the Chernivtsi National University (Ukraine, 1999-2004), doctoral studies at the University of Linz (Austria, 2004-2007) and postdoctoral training at the University of Chicago (USA, 2008-2011). The research activities of M. Kovalenko and his group focus on chemistry, physics and applications of inorganic solid-state materials and nanostructures. In particular, present research efforts concern: (i) the precision synthesis of highly luminescent perovskite nanocrystals; (ii) nanocrystal surface chemistry; (iii) nanocrystal self-assembly; (iv) exploration of novel semiconductor materials by solution- and solid-state synthesis; (iv) novel semiconductors for hard radiation detection; (iv) electrochemical energy storage. He is a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher since 2018. He has been the recipient of highly prestigious awards including an ERC Consolidator Grant (2018), ERC Starting Grant (2012), Ruzicka Preis (2013), Werner Prize (2016), Rössler Prize (2019) and Dan Maydan Prize (2021). He also serves as an associate editor of the Chemistry of Materials and ACS Materials Au.

Host Academic Unit

Professor DeFond is the A. N. Mosich Chair of Accounting, Leventhal School, University of Southern California, in addition to being appointed as the Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs. His research investigates issues in auditing, international accounting, and earnings management. He is one of the most celebrated researchers in the field of Accounting, with more than 35,000 Google Scholar citations to his name, and is ranked at No. 5 on the all-time list of most cited authors worldwide in the BYU Accounting Rankings. He is the recipient of many academic awards, including the Notable Contribution to Auditing Literature Award bestowed by the American Accounting Association. He has served as Senior Editor of The Accounting Review and on the editorial boards of several leading academic journals. He was also appointed the vice president of Research & Publications by the American Accounting Association. Professor DeFond's expertise and reputation extend beyond the borders of the United States. He is highly regarded nationally and internationally as a leading scholar in accounting. His research has had a global impact, influencing the practices and policies of accounting professionals worldwide. Professor DeFond is also a four-time MBA Golden Apple teaching award winner. He received his PhD at the University of Washington and prior to that worked as an auditor with Deloitte (formerly Touche Ross).

Host Academic Unit

Professor Richard Chappell is a distinguished scholar in the field of statistics and medical informatics. He has been faculty at the University of Wisconsin for 34 years, with current title a Full Professor in the Department of Statistics and the Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics, as well as a member of the University of Wisconsin Comprehensive Cancer Center. His research focuses on analysis and design of clinical trials, modelling long term effects of caner radio- and chemotherapy, models in radiation physics, bivariate and nonparametric survival analysis.

Host Academic Unit

Professor Sean Li is the director of UNSW Materials and Manufacturing Futures Institute at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. He is leading the futures institute to transform the future of materials and manufacturing research from manipulation of atomic arrangements to device fabrication and high throughput industry scale manufacturing. He has invented several game-changing technologies that have already been licensed and used by industry. As a leading academic, Professor Li has published his works in the prestigious journals of the field, including “Nature”, “Science”, “Nature Nanotechnology”, “Progress in Materials Science”, “Energy and Environmental Science” and “Advanced Materials” etc. Under his supervision, 82 postgraduate researchers including 42 Ph.D. and 40 M.Eng./Sci./Phil. students have successfully completed their degrees and embarked on remarkable global careers spanning Australia, USA, Japan, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Singapore and China. Professor Li’s laboratory is equipped with unique and world-class research facilities, and it is the most advanced laboratory of its type in Australia.

Host Academic Unit

Professor Stella Bruzzi FBA has been Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities and Professor of Film at University College London (UCL) since 2017 where she is also Professor of Film. She has held positions at the University of Manchester, Royal Holloway, University of London and the University of Warwick, where she also served Chair of the Faculty of Arts from 2008 to 2011. She has published widely in the areas of costume and cinema (including Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies, the first book in the field), documentary (including the influential New Documentary in 2006), gender and masculinity in Hollywood and representations of history, and has, to date, published eight monographs, the last of which was Approximation: Documentary, History and the Staging of Reality (Routledge, 2020). In 2013 she was elected Fellow of the British Academy.

Host Academic Unit

Professor Vladimir Fal’ko MAE is condensed matter theorist who made fundamental contributions towards understanding physical properties of two-dimensional (2D) materials, including graphene, 2D transition metals dichalcogenides, simple-metal chalcogenides, moiré superlattice effects in 2D materials and twistronic structures (h-index 66, Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2021, 2022). Fal’ko initiated the Graphene Week Conference series (which runs annually since 2006), during 2014-2021 he was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the IoP 2D Materials Journal, and he is among the leaders of the EU Graphene Flagship Project. Since 2015, Fal’ko is Director of National Graphene Institute at Manchester and the Champion of 2D Materials Theme in the UK’s Henry Royce Institute for Advanced Materials.

Host Academic Unit

Professor Chen Xiaodong is a Full Professor at the School of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE), Nanyang Technological University (NTU). He received his PhD degree (Summa Cum Laude) in biochemistry from the University of Münster, Germany, in 2006. Professor Chen has published over 180 high profiled articles, including in Nature Communications, Angewandte Chemie, and Advanced Materials. His papers have been cited more than 6,500 times with an Hirsch-index of 42. His research work was highlighted by more than 100 local and overseas’ media. Professor Chen’s research work on generating industrial impact is evident from his 22 patents, four of which had been licensed for commercial development. He is also the co-founder of a spin-off company, Quickcharge Pte Ltd, commercializing cutting-edge energy storage technology. Currently, Professor Chen’s research focuses on three directions: (1) Nanobioelectronics: to develop integrated nanostructure-biomaterial hybrid systems for bioelectronics and probe biological processes at the nanoscale; (2) Bioinspired assembly: to mimic methods used by nature for interfacing organic and non-organic material and building hierarchical structures with advanced functions, and (3) Nanomaterials for energy conversion and storage: to explore nanoscale modules for light harvesting, charge separation, solar energy conversion, and storage.

Host Academic Unit

Professor Yakov Amihud is Ira Rennert Professor of Entrepreneurial Finance at the Stern School of Business, New York University. His research includes the evaluation of corporate financial policies, mergers and acquisitions, initial public offerings, objectives of corporate managers, dividend policy, and law and finance.

The focus of his research is the effects of liquidity of assets on their returns and values, and the design and evaluation of securities markets' trading methods. On these topics, Amihud has done consulting work for the NYSE, AMEX, CBOE, CBOT, and other securities markets. He has published more than seventy research articles in professional journals and in books, and edited and co-edited five books on topics such as LBOs, bank M&As, international finance, and securities market design.

Host Academic Unit

Professor Yihai Cao, a medicine professor at the Karolinska Institute, Sweden, is a member of several prestigious academies, including the Chinese Academy of Engineering, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, Academia Europaea, European Academy of Sciences and Arts, National Academy of Inventors, and American Institute of Medicine and Biological Engineering. Professor Cao completed his medical training at Shandong Medical School and earned his Ph.D. from Karolinska Institute, with postdoctoral training in Dr. Judah Folkman’s laboratory at the Harvard Medical School. His laboratory's research is centered on angiogenesis in tumor growth, metastasis, and non-malignant diseases. In 2006, Professor Cao received an honorary medical doctor degree from the Copenhagen University, Denmark. He is also a guest professor at the Linköping University, Sweden; Leicester University, UK; an honorary professor at the Copenhagen University, Denmark and the Shinshu University Japan. With over 302 research articles published, Professor Cao’s work has an average impact factor greater than 14.49 per article, and his scientific articles have been cited over 49,541 times, achieving an H-index of 110.