【ISSF】Life Sciences Summer School 2025

Jonathan Kipnis：

Dr. Jonathan Kipnis is BJC Investigator, Alan A. and Edith L. Wolff Distinguished Professor of Pathology and Immunology and Professor of Neurology, Neuroscience, and Neurosurgery at Washington University in St. Louis, School of Medicine. He is also the inaugural Director of Center for Brain immunology and Glia (BIG) at Washington University. Kipnis lab focuses on the complex interactions between the immune system and the central nervous system (CNS). The goal is to elucidate the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying these interactions in neurodegenerative, neurodevelopmental, and mental disorders as well as in physiology (including healthy aging). Dr. Kipnis is a member of National Academy of Medicine and among other awards, he is a recipient NIH Director’s Pioneer award for 2018 to explore in more depth neuro-immune interactions in healthy and diseased brain and National Institute on Aging MERIT award to study the role of meningeal immunity and lymphatics in aging and Alzheimer’s disease.

Don Cleveland：

Professor Don Cleveland is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. As a distinguished cancer biologist and neurobiologist, he currently serves as the dean of the Department of Cell and Molecular Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. In 2013, he was elected as the President of the American Society for Cell Biology. Recognized for his groundbreaking work, he was awarded the Life Science Breakthrough Award in 2018 for his pivotal research on elucidation of the molecular pathogenesis of hereditary ALS, including the role of glia in neurodegenerative diseases, and the establishment of antisense oligonucleotide therapy in animal models of ALS and Huntington's disease. His groundbreaking research contributions extend to  the assembly of mitotic spindles and the regulation of chromosome movement.

Tak Wah Mak：

Professor Tak Wah Mak is a famous immunologist, oncologist, and biochemist. He achieved worldwide recognition for his seminal discovery of T cell TCR receptors in 1983, marking a significant milestone in immunology. In 1995, he published a milestone paper on the immune function of immune checkpoint molecule CTLA-4, paving the way for cancer treatment targeting immune checkpoints. He is also the founder of Agios Pharmaceuticals, whose flagship compound IDHIFA ® received FDA approval in August 2017 for the treatment of acute myeloid leukemia, marking the first cancer treatment drug targeting cancer metabolic pathways. He has been selected as a member of the Royal Society of Canada, a member of the Royal Society of London, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in USA. He has also been honored with a series of internationally renowned awards, including the Behring Price, the King Faisal Price for Medicine, and the Novartis Price in Immunology.

Philip A. Beachy：

Dr. Philip A. Beachy is a world leading developmental biologist. His research interests mainly focus on functional characterization of Hedgehog proteins and other extracellular signals in morphogenesis and in injury repair and regeneration. He also studies the functional roles of various signaling molecules in stem cell physiology and how they can induce cancer stem cells. He discovered how Cyclopamine and Smoothened are related to Itraconazole, thus linking diverse fields of scientific research.

Vivek Malhotra：

Professor Vivek Malhotra obtained his doctoral degree from the University of Oxford. In 2024, he was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. As one of the founders, he established the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CGR) in Barcelona, which is among the top institutions for basic life science research in Europe. Professor Malhotra's research work mainly focuses on the non-classical mechanisms of protein secretion. Throughout his career, he has published nearly 200 articles, including more than a dozen articles in top natural science journals such as Nature, Cell and Science. His works have been cited more than 16,000 times in total, with an h-index of 70 and an i-10-index of 122.

Yishi Jin

Prof. Jin received her bachelor's degree in Cell Biology from Peking University in 1984 and earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1991. In 1996, she joined the Department of Neurobiology at the University of California, San Diego as an Assistant Professor. From 2001 to 2017, she served as an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). Dr. Jin's laboratory uses C. elegans as a model to study the molecular genetic mechanisms underlying nervous system development and function. Her research group has identified multiple key molecules that play evolutionarily conserved roles in synapse formation, maintenance, and function. Her work has been published in leading international journals such as Cell, Nature, PNAS, Neuron, and JBC. Prof. Jin was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019, named a Fellow of the American Society for Cell Biology in 2020, and elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2022.

Wolfram Goessling:

Dr. Wolfram Goessling is the Robert H. Ebert Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is an oncologist and gastroenterologist who treats patients with chronic liver disease and liver cancer. Dr. Goessling is the HMS Director of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and Chief of the Gastroenterology Division at the Massachusetts General Hospital, where he holds the Jules L. Dienstag, MD and Betty and Newell Hale Endowed Chair in Gastroenterology. In his laboratory, Dr. Goessling utilizes chemical and genetic methods in the zebrafish combined with high-resolution imaging and genomics approaches to dissect regulatory networks controlling hepatopancreatic cell differentiation and organ growth. They employ clinically relevant fish and mouse models of hepatic injury to achieve novel mechanistic insight into liver regeneration, fatty liver disease, alcoholic liver disease and liver cancer.

Xiangdong Fu:

Dr. Xiangdong Fu joined the University of California, San Diego in 1992, where he served as Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, Full Professor, and Distinguished Professor. Since 2023, he has been the Chair Professor of RNA Biology and Regenerative Medicine at Westlake University. He has received numerous honors, including the Searle Scholar Award, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Scholar Award, AAAS Fellow, and the Berlin Wall Innovation Science Breakthrough Award. Professor Fu has long been dedicated to studying the regulatory mechanisms of coding and non-coding RNAs and has developed high-throughput technologies to analyze gene expression and genome interactions. His team proposed a novel strategy to convert non-neuronal cells into functional neurons, effectively reversing pathological features in Parkinson’s disease models.

Kun-Liang Guan：

Professor Kun-Liang Guan was a faculty member at the University of California, San Diego from 2007 to 2023, serving as a Distinguished Professor since 2013. In 2023, he joined Westlake University as the Chair Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology. Professor Guan has long been dedicated to studying signal transduction in cell growth regulation and tumorigenesis. Over the past two decades, his lab has made significant contributions to establishing the mTORC1 signaling network. More recently, his team has focused on the Hippo pathway and its role in cancer, playing a leading role in advancing this field. Professor Guan has published over 300 research articles and is among the most highly cited researchers in molecular biology and genetics, with more than 130,000 citations and an H-index of 168, according to Google Scholar.

Jin Billy Li：

Professor at Stanford University, he obtained his Bachelor's degree in Biology from Tsinghua University in 1997 and his Ph.D. in Biology from Washington University in St. Louis in 2005. Before joining Stanford University in 2010, Jin Billy Li was a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Professor George Church at Harvard Medical School. The lab primarily focuses on RNA editing mediated by ADAR enzymes. They discovered that the main function of RNA editing is to label endogenous dsRNAs as self to avoid being recognized as non-self by MDA5 (a host innate immune dsRNA sensor). This leads us to explore therapeutic applications in cancer, autoimmune diseases, and viral infections. Another major direction of the lab is developing technologies to use endogenous ADAR enzymes for site-specific transcriptome engineering.

Katrin Andreasson：

Prof. Katrin Andreasson is a physician-scientist studying mechanisms of immune-mediated brain injury in the Department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine. She is Co-Director of the Stanford Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC) and Co-Director the ADRC Biomarker Core. Her research focuses on the investigation of the cellular and molecular mechanisms of neuronal injury mediated by maladaptive systemic and central nervous system immune responses. She has identified innate immune pathways critical in establishing neurotoxic immune responses that lead to neurodegeneration in models of aging, AD, and stroke.

Yang Yun-gui：

Yang Yungui, graduated from Fudan University and the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is a member of the European Academy of Sciences, a Distinguished Researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a doctoral supervisor. He has received the National Outstanding Youth Science Fund, the Tan Jiazhen Life Science Innovation Award, and enjoys a special government allowance from the State Council. His research focuses on the characteristics, regulation, and functions of RNA epigenetics, with an emphasis on elucidating the mechanisms by which RNA methylation regulates genetic traits, phenotypes, and diseases.

He is currently director (director) of the Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (National Bioinformatics Center).

Liu Guanghui：

Liu Guanghui is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. A Fellow of the International Union of Physiological Sciences; Chief Scientist of the National Natural Science Foundation's Distinguished Research Group Project; and Principal Investigator of the Innovative Research Group Project. He has been recognized as one of Elsevier’s Highly Cited Chinese Researchers. He has published over 100 papers as a corresponding author in top journals such as Cell/Nature and Science, with more than 10,000 citations and an H-index of 72. He holds 35 authorized patents, including 2 PCTs. His representative achievements have been selected as one of the “Top Ten Scientific Advances in China”  and the “Top Ten Advances in Life Sciences in China”. He currently serves as Vice President of the China Anti-Aging Promotion Association, and President of the Aging Cell Biology Branch of the Chinese Society for Cell Biology. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of Life Medicine、Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Protein & Cell, Editorial Board Member of Cell Reports and Aging Cell, His honors include the National Innovation and Pioneer Medal, the Ho Leung Ho Lee Foundation Science and Technology Award, the Tan Jiazhen Life Science Innovation Award, the Special Prize of the China Youth Science and Technology Award, the Xplorer Prize.

Li Jin：
Member of Chinese Academy Sciences, President of Fudan University

Professor Li Jin is a leading scientist of the model of recent African origin of modern humans and the study of human phenomics. His research encompasses genetic structure and migrations of human populations, genetics of human complex diseases and computational biology. He has served as a board member of HUGO, co-founded Genographic Project, Pan-Asian SNP Consortium, and International Human Phenome Consortium (IHPC) , and co-founded National Human Genome Center at Shanghai, Shanghai International Human Phenome Institute. He received numerous well-known awards including State Award of Natural Sciences twice, C.C. Tan Life Science Achievement Award, Distinguished Academic Achievement Award of Human Genome Organization (HUGO), Prize for Scientific and Technological Progress of Ho-Leung-Ho-Lee Foundation.

Mark Stoneking

Group Leader, Human Population History Group, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Honorary Professor of Biological Anthropology, University of Leipzig

Elected Member, National Academy of Sciences (2020)

Prof. Stoneking is a geneticist and molecular anthropologist contributing to the field of human evolution. His research interests involve using molecular genetic methods to address questions of anthropological interest concerning the origins, migrations, and relationships of human populations, and the influence of selection during human evolution. He, along with his doctoral advisor Allan Wilson, contributed to the Out of Africa Theory in 1987 by introducing the concept of Mitochondrial Eve, a hypothetical common mother of all living humans based on mitochondrial DNA.

Chung-I Wu：

Professor Chung-I Wu has made numerous contributions in the fields of molecular evolution, population genetics, and evolutionary genomics, particularly in the genetic basis of speciation and natural selection. He has pioneered the study of speciation at the molecular level, introducing cutting-edge gene replacement techniques to answer classical ecological questions in the model organism Drosophila. He also made original contributions in areas such as selfish genes, molecular clocks, X chromosome degeneration, and evolutionary genomics. His proposed hypotheses on the genetic mechanism of reproductive isolation and the gene concept of speciation are innovative and represent a significant departure from traditional ideas in species biology. He has published over 200 papers in top journals like Science, Nature, and PNAS. He has been cited over 20000 times in total and rated as top 100 global scientists in life science by Elsevier. In 2011, he received the second prize of the National Natural Science Award, further solidifying his standing as a leading authority in molecular evolution and genetics.

Manyuan Long：

Professor Manyuan Long has made groundbreaking contributions to the field of evolutionary biology, particularly in the identification of the Jingwei gene and elucidating the mechanisms governing new gene formation across various species. His pioneering work in the field of Origin and Evolution of New Genes has challenged conventional theories in evolutionary developmental biology and greatly expanded our understanding of gene evolution. His research has been published in top-tier journals such as Nature, Science, Cell, alongside the publication of five books and monographs. His exceptional contributions have been recognized with prestigious awards as the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for Natural Sciences and the Ray Wu Award in 2022, highlighting his leadership and impact in the scientific community.

Jian Yang：

Professor Jian Yang’s research focuses on understanding the genomic variations among individuals within and between populations and the links of genomic variations with health outcomes. He has developed a series of software for data analyses in computational biology, including GCTA, SMR, OSCA , etc, which are widely used in the field of human genetics and genomics. He was awarded the Centenary Institute Lawrence Creative Prize (2012), the Australian Academy of Science Ruth Stephens Gani Medal (2015), and the Prime Minister’s Prize for Sciences (2017). Additionally, he has been selected as one of the Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers from 2018 to 2021, underscoring the significant impact of his work in the scientific community.

Ting Wang：

Professor of Genetics , Sanford and Karen Loewentheil Distinguished Professor of Medicine, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering in Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Professor at McDonnell Genome Institute.

Professor Ting Wang is an internationally recognized geneticist for his research on genetic and epigenetic impact of transposable element on gene regulation. His lab developed widely-used DNA methylomics technologies, and apply integrative methods combining experimental and computational technologies for studying the evolution and adaption of human regulatory networks, particularly on the impact of these processes on human health and disease. His lab is home to the WashU Epigenome Browser, utilized by various large genomic dataset Consortia including the NIH Roadmap Epigenome Project, ENCODE Project, 4D Nucleome Project, and TaRGET Project. He currently directs the NIH 4D Nucleome Network Data Coordination and Integration Center and the NIEHS Environmental Epigenomics Data Center, and co-lead the latest Human Pangenome project.

Daofeng Li:

Dr. Daofeng Li is currently an Assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis. He holds a bachelor's and a doctorate degree from China Agricultural University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Washington University from 2011 to 2016. He is a Bioinformatics expert with fourteen years of genomics-related computational biology experience across two academic institutions. He developed and maintained the WashU Epigenome Browser. He is an active member of the bioinformatics groups for the Roadmap Epigenomics, 4D Nucleome, ENCODE4, and TaRGET Epigenomics consortia.

Daniel Falush：

Daniel Falush, Ph.D. in Biology, is a researcher at the Shanghai Institute of Immunology and Infectious Diseases, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He received an Honors Bachelor's degree from the University of Cambridge in 1992 and a Ph.D. from University College London in 1998. He has served as a senior researcher at Kyushu University in Japan, Max Planck Evolutionary Anthropology Unit in Germany, Oxford University, University of Tokyo, and the University of Bath in the UK. Currently, he has published over 80 representative papers in top journals such as Nature, Science, ISME, Elife, and Nature Communications, with more than 30,000 citations and an h-index of 49. He leads several key research projects funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology, National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the State Advanced Foreign Experts Program, as well as multiple domestic and international research projects including Wellcome Trust Project Grant and Science Foundation of Ireland.

Shuhua Xu：

Dr. Shuhua Xu is professor of human population genetics, Director of Center for Evolutionary Biology in Fudan University, and President of Council, Shanghai Society of Genetics. He joined Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Max-Planck Society Partner Institute for Computational Biology (PICB) in 2006 after he received his PhD at Fudan University. He led the Population Genomics Group (PGG). He is currently holding a Distinguished Professorship at Fudan University, China. The Population Omics Group led by Dr. Xu is using computational approaches and developing new methods to dissect genetic architecture of human populations, quantitatively characterize their admixture features, and reveal their migration history and adaptive divergence. Dr. Xu has authored many scientific papers published in Nature, Science, Cell, PNAS. Dr. Xu serves as Editorial Board member of several international peer-reviewed journals such as JGG, Molecular Genetics and Genomics (co-Editor-in-Chief), Frontier in Genetics, Scientific Reports, BMC Genetics (Section Editor), BMC Genomic Data (Senior Editor).