Morten Meldal is a Danish chemist and professor at the Department of Chemistry at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, alongside Barry Sharpless and Carolyn Bartozzi, for the groundbreaking development of ‘Click chemistry and biorthogonal chemistry’. Throughout Meldal’s career, his research has had innovative influences on methods in peptide and combinatorial chemistry. His involvement in method development of solid-phase and combinatorial peptide synthesis, as well as development of the CuAAc Click reaction, have become mainstream methods for application in bioorganic and organic synthesis.

Born in South Africa in 1947, in 1963, I vacationed in London staying to do a BSc degree in physics at Kings College, London.After a pre-doctoral year with Shneior Lifson and his PhD student Arieh Warshel at the Weizmann Institute, Israel, I returned to England in 1968 to start my PhD at the Cambridge Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB).

I returned to Israel in 1972 collaborating with Warshel on multi-scale modeling: coarse-grained models allowed folding simulation and hybrid models combined classical and quantum mechanics In 1974, I returned to LMB for three years, spent two years with Francis Crick at Salk Institute and seven years at Weizmann, before moving to Structural Biology at Stanford in 1987.

My diverse interests include RNA & DNA modeling, protein folding, protein classification and geometry, X-ray refinement, antibody modeling, side-chain geometry, normal modes, solution molecular dynamics, mass spectrometry and the crystallographic phase problem.

I am increasingly interested in social problems and the application of scientific methods broadly to all walks of life, My ambitions are to enjoy life to the fullest, be a supportive parent and grandparent, work on hard problems and help today’s young scientists gain the recognition and independence my generation enjoyed.

Dr. Andrew Adams serves as the Group Vice President of Molecule Discovery and Director of Genetic Medicines at Eli Lilly and Company. Andrew is responsible for leading the discovery of new therapies across Neuroscience, with a specific focus in our core strategic areas of pain and neurodegeneration. Andrew is also responsible for our growing portfolio of genetic medicines at Lilly, spanning RNA, gene therapy and gene editing. Andrew holds a degree in biology and a doctorate in zoology from the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Prior to joining Lilly in 2011, Andrew was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School. During his time at Lilly, he has served in a number of roles in discovery, external innovation and as a leader of Lilly’s early trailblazer teams, spanning diabetes and complications, neuroscience, genetic medicine and the MIH.

Steven Austad is a Distinguished Professor and the Inaugural Protective Life Endowed Chair in Healthy Aging Research in Department of Biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) where he was Department Chair from 2014-2022. He is also founding Director and current Co-director of UAB’s Nathan Shock Center of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging and has been Scientific Director of the New York-based American Federation for Aging Research for the past decade. Having published more than 200 scientific papers, Dr. Austad’s aging research, which ranges from the level of cells to the impact on society, has won multiple awards, including the National Institute on Aging’s Nathan A. Shock Award, the Robert W. Kleemeier Award, the Fondation IPSEN Longevity Prize, the Irving S. Wright Award of Distinction, and is the inaugural recipient of the George M. Martin Lifetime Achievement in Mentoring Award. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the New York Academy of Medicine, and the Gerontological Society of America. With an abiding interest in communicating science to the general public, he has served on the Scientific Advisory Board of National Public Radio, advised three major museum exhibitions on the biology of aging, and written more than 150 op-eds and essays for electronic and print media, including the Huffington Post, The Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, and Salon. He has also written four trade books -- Why We Age (1997) has been translated into nine languages, Real People Don’t Own Monkeys (2002, co-authored with his wife, J. Veronika Kiklevich), To Err is Human, To Admit It is Not and Other Essays (2022) and Methuselah’s Zoo: What Nature Can Teach Us about Living Longer, Healthier Lives (2022). Before his career in science, he put food on the table by driving a taxi in New York City and training lions for the Hollywood movie industry.

Dr. Nir Barzilai is a preeminent leader in geroscience, demonstrating in his studies that aging has its own biology that drives age-related diseases, a process that can be targeted. At Albert Einstein College of Medicine, he is a professor in the departments of Medicine and Genetics, the director of the Institute for Aging Research, and the director of the Einstein-National Institutes of Health (NIH) Nathan Shock Center of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging, and the author of >350 papers. He made seminal discoveries in extending the health and lifespan of animals and discovering pathways for exceptional longevity in humans. He is leading an international effort to approve drugs targeting aging. Targeting Aging with Metformin (TAME) is a specific study conceived by Dr. Barzilai to prove that a single drug can combat multiple diseases associated with aging and get FDA approval for targeting aging. Dr. Barzilai is a co-founder and the President of the Academy for Health and Lifespan Research (AHLS). He is also on the American Federation for Aging Research board of directors, where he co-leads its biomarker effort (FAST), TAME, and SuperAgers family study initiative. He is an Executive of the Longevity Biotech Association (LBA) and serves on the Healthy Longevity Medicine Society council. He authored Age Later: Health Span, Life Span, and the New Science of Longevity.

Joseph Baur is a Professor in the Department of Physiology and the Institute for Diabetes, Obesity, and Metabolism at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania. He has made key contributions to the understanding of how metabolism and dietary factors influence longevity. In 2006, Dr. Baur and colleagues showed that a sirtuin activator, resveratrol, is able to improve insulin
sensitivity and ameliorate premature mortality in obese mice. He led a team that revealed a mechanism accounting for off-target effects of rapamycin, a drug that extends life in mice, but has side effects that may limit its utility in humans. His laboratory at Penn is currently focused on the use of small molecules to understand and mimic the health-promoting effects of caloric restriction in rodents, with a particular focus on nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD + ) metabolism. The lab has contributed substantially to the understanding of NAD + turnover in cells and tissues, as well as how precursors are obtained from the diet, and co-discovered the mitochondrial NAD + transporter, SLC25A51 (MCART1). He has co-authored more than one hundred peer-reviewed publications, as well as several book chapters and numerous invited commentaries and reviews.

Dr. Brunet obtained her B.Sc. from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and her Ph.D. from the University of Nice, France. She did her postdoctoral training with Dr. Michael Greenberg at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Brunet is interested in the molecular mechanisms of aging and longevity. She wants to understand the mechanism of neural stem cell aging. She also seeks to discover novel genes regulating longevity, notably developing a new short-lived vertebrate, the African killifish. Dr. Brunet has published over 80 peer-reviewed papers and reviews. She has received several awards, including the Pfizer/AFAR Innovation in Aging Research Award and the Vincent Cristofalo "Rising Star" Award in Aging Research. She received a Pioneer Award and a Transformative Award from the NIH Director's fund, which supports scientists who propose pioneering and transforming approaches to major challenges in biomedical research.

Dr. de Cabo earned his Ph.D. in 2000 from the Department of Foods and Nutrition at Purdue University. He received a postdoctoral position in the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore, Maryland. In 2004, he was appointed as a tenure track investigator in the Laboratory of Experimental Gerontology. He is now a senior investigator and Chief of the Translational Gerontology Branch at NIA. His research has focused on the effects of nutritional interventions on basic mechanisms of aging and age-related diseases, the effects of caloric restriction on aging, and pharmacological interventions for healthy aging. Ultimately his research aims to identify interventions that will improve healthspan and lifespan with translational potential to benefit human aging.

I am a molecular and cell biologist with twenty years of experience as a group leader.
I have devoted my professional life to understand the criFcal biological mechanisms
underlying aging and cancer. I work at IFOM (Milan) and IGM-CNR (Pavia) in Italy.
Together with my group, we study the connecFon between DNA damage and disease.
I am a member of the European Molecular Biology OrganizaFon (EMBO), I am a twice recipient of the European Research Council (ERC) advanced grant and I am generally recognized for our discoveries in telomere biology and cellular senescence.
Recently, my group has recently idenFfied what I believe is the main cause of several diseases of aging: loss of integrity of the telomeres, the protecFve caps at the ends of our chromosomes. Following that discovery, we’ve developed a universal inhibitor of cellular aging based on RNA therapeuFcs and have validated it in several in vivo models of human diseases.

Dr. Luigi Ferrucci is a geriatrician and an epidemiologist who conducts research on the causal pathways leading to progressive physical and cognitive decline in older persons. He has made major contributions in the design of many epidemiological studies conducted in the U.S. and in Europe. Dr. Ferrucci received a Medical Degree and Board Certification in 1980, Board Certification in Geriatrics in 1982 and Ph.D. in Biology and Pathophysiology of Aging in 1998 at the University of Florence, Italy. Between 1985 and 2002 he was Chief of Geriatric Rehabilitation at the Department of Geriatric Medicine and Director of the Laboratory of Clinical Epidemiology at the Italian National Institute of Aging. In September 2002, he became the Chief of the Longitudinal Studies Section at NIA. From 2002 to 2014 he was the Director of the Baltimore Longitudinal Study on Aging. Dr. Ferrucci is currently the Scientific Director of NIA, since May 2011.

Evandro F. Fang is an Associate Professor of Molecular Gerontology at the
University of Oslo (UiO) and the Akershus University Hospital, Norway, and
his group are working on the molecular mechanisms of human ageing and
age-predisposed neurodegeneration (https://evandrofanglab.com/). More
specifically, the Fang laboratory is focusing on the molecular mechanisms
behind how cells clear their damaged and aged mitochondria, a process
termed “mitophagy”, as well as the roles of the NAD + -mitophagy/autophagy
axis in healthy ageing and AD inhibition. NAD + is a fundamental molecule in
life and health and decreases in ageing and AD. Dr Fang is fascinated with
and actively engaged in moving his laboratory findings to translational
applications and is involved in 5 NAD + -based clinical trials, with the
overarching goal of establishing novel and safe biological approaches to
promote longer and healthier human lives.

He has published over 100 papers in international peer-reviewed journals
including papers in Cell, Cell Metabolism, Nature Reviews MCB, Nature
Neuroscience, Nature Ageing, Nature Biomedical Engineering, and Lancet
Healthy Longevity. He routinely reviews grants for more than 30 leading
foundations, including European Research Council (ERC, EU), Medical
Research Council (MRC, UK), and AFAR (USA). He has been associate
Editor-in-Chief (Deputy Editor) of 4 leading ageing journals, including Ageing
Research Reviews, Mechanisms of Ageing and Development, npj Ageing,
and Journal of Gerontology: Biological Section. He has received several
awards including the Butler-Williams Scholar on Aging 2016 by NIA (USA),
the 'Scientific Award to Young Scientist in the Natural Sciences for 2020 by
The Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters (Norway), and the
2023 Norwegian National Dementia research award of the National
Association for Public Health presented by H.M. King Harald V of Norway.

After finishing his PhD at the Chinese Universtiy of Hong Kong, he had a 6-
year postdoc training with Prof. Vilhelm Bohr on molecular gerontology and
Prof. Mark Mattson on neuronal resilience in Alzheimer’s disease at the
National Institute on Ageing, Baltimore. He opened his lab in Oslo in the fall of
2017. He is the founding (co)coordinator of the Norwegian Centre on Healthy
Ageing network (NO-Age, www.noage100.com), the Norwegian National anti-
Alzheimer’s disease Network (NO-AD, www.noad100.com), and the Hong
Kong-Nordic Research Network.

Vadim Gladyshev is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Director of the Center for Redox Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Associate Member of the Broad Institute. Dr. Gladyshev's lab focuses on studying aging, rejuvenation and lifespan control using a combination of experimental and computational approaches. He has published more than 400 articles. Dr. Gladyshev is the recipient of NIH Pioneer, Transformative and Eureka awards and is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, USA.

Jan Hoeijmakers heads research teams at the Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology and the Oncode Institute, Utrecht, the Netherlands and at the CECAD, University of Cologne, Germany. He made major contributions to the field of DNA damage repair, discovered that accumulating DNA damage causes systemic aging by physically blocking transcription thereby lowering transcriptional output in a gene-length-dependent manner and that dietary restriction delays aging by reducing DNA damage and transcription stress. These findings have wide clinical implications for rare DNA repair syndromes, neurodegeneration and dementia, chemotherapy, surgery and organ transplantation, impacting major areas in medicine. He received many (inter)national prizes, awards and distinctions.

Prof. dr. Riekelt Houtkooper received his PhD from the laboratory Genetic Metabolic Diseases of the Amsterdam UMC-AMC. His research centered on cardiolipin metabolism, particularly in relation to the rare mitochondrial disorder Barth syndrome. During a postdoctoral project in Lausanne (CH) geared towards understanding and treating more common metabolic diseases, he became interested in the metabolic aspects of aging. Early 2012 Riekelt moved back to Amsterdam to start his own research group, for which he received funding from Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research and from ERC. He is now professor of Translational Metabolism, and his group works on molecular and translational metabolism, both in the context of inborn errors of metabolism and aging. Prof. Houtkooper is coordinator of the MSCA-Doctoral Network project NADIS, and a board member for the Dutch Society for Research on Aging and the Emma Center for Personalized Medicine.

Dr. Horvath is a biogerontologist, whose research lies at the intersection of several fields including epigenetic biomarkers of aging, preclinical and clinical studies, genomics, epidemiology, and comparative biology. Dr Horvath is a principal investigator at Altos Labs. He and his UCLA colleagues published the first epigenetic clock for saliva in 2011. In 2013, he published the first pan-tissue clock, also known as the Horvath clock. Recently, he presented a universal clock that applies to all mammals. The recipient of several awards, he has been on Clarivate’s annual list of the world’s most influential scientific researchers every year since 2018.

Dr. Brian Kennedy is a Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Biochemistry and Physiology and serves as the Director of the Healthy Longevity Translational Research Programme and the Bia- Echo Asia Centre for Reproductive Longevity and Equality, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University Singapore. In addition, he is also the Director of the Centre for Healthy Longevity, National
University Health System. Collectively, NUS ageing research seeks to demonstrate that longevity interventions can be successfully employed in humans to extend healthspan, the disease-free and highly functional period of life.

Dr. Kennedy’s research has been focused on delineating mechanisms driving biological aging and identifying interventions that extend healthspan and lifespan. His work was instrumental in uncovering roles for Sirtuins and the mTOR pathway in regulating aging. More recently, he has also focused on aging biomarker development.

From 2010 to 2016, Dr. Kennedy was the President and CEO of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging and he maintained a professorship there through 2020. Dr. Kennedy has an adjunct appointment in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Washington, where he was a faculty member from 2001 to 2010, and at the Davis School of Gerontology at USC. His Ph.D. was performed in the laboratory of Leonard Guarente at M.I.T., where he published the first paper
linking Sirtuins to aging.

Dr. Kennedy served as Co-Editor-In-Chief at Aging Cell from 2011-2021 and has a long track record of collaboration with scientists in China, where he was a Visiting Professor at the Aging Research Institute at Guangdong Medical College from 2009 to 2014.

Dr. Dudley Lamming is an Associate Professor and Vice Chair for Biomedical Research in the Department of Medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Director of the UW-Madison Comprehensive Diabetes Center Mouse Phenotyping and Surgery Core. Dr. Lamming received his PhD in Experimental Pathology from Harvard University in 2008. He subsequently completed postdoctoral training at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, where he discovered that many of the deleterious effects of rapamycin, a pharmaceutical that extends lifespan by inhibiting the amino acid responsive protein kinase mTORC1, were mediated by “off-target” inhibition of a second complex, mTORC2. Dr. Lamming is the author of over 90 peer-reviewed papers and the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the 2018 Nathan Shock New Investigator Award from the Gerontological Society of America. He is a fellow of the American Aging Association and of the Gerontological Society of America, and served as President of the American Aging Association from 2023-2024. His NIH-supported laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studies how diets with altered levels of specific dietary macronutrients can promote longevity and be used to prevent or treat age-associated diseases.

He started his career in 1984 as engineer at CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research). After a Ph.D. of Molecular and Cellular Biology of Development at Paris 7 University received in 1995 and a Post-Doc at Jacques Monod Institute in Paris, he joined the Institute of Human Genetics of Montpellier (IGH), where he obtained a tenure position at INSERM (National Institute for Scientific and Medical Research) in 2004.

Awarded by an AVENIR INSERM Program in 2006, he obtained a senior Group leader position in 2010 at the Institute of Functional Genomics of Montpellier (IGF) working on Genome and Stem Cell Plasticity in Aging.

He identified replication timing domain signatures of physiological and accelerated aging, and revealed DNMT1 as a major actor in the reorganization of chromosomes in SAHFs during senescence induced by oncogene.

His main contributions also include the demonstration of cellular aging reversibility through a patented iPSC reprogramming strategy, as a new paradigm of cell rejuvenation and that a single in vivo transient reprogramming might prevent age related diseases.

He is co-founder and advisor of two startup INGRAALYS (dedicated to skin rejuvenation and hair regrowth by reprogramming strategies) and ORGANIPS (dedicated to the production of human organoids from iPSC).

Dr. Bai Lu is currently a Professor at the Institute of Biomedical Sciences of Fudan University in Shanghai. Before that, he was a Professor at Tsinghua University for over a decade. He has served leadership positions in both academia - Executive Dean of Tsinghua University Medical School (2013-2016), and industry - Vice President of GlaxoSmithKline R&D (2009-2013) responsible for neurodegeneration drug discovery, internal research and external collaborations. Prior to that, Dr. Lu worked at US National Institutes of Health (NIH) for 14 years, with increasing responsibility from Head of Synapse Development Unit, to Chief of Neural Development and Plasticity Section, to Associate Director of a trans-NIH translational research program. Dr. Lu obtained his Ph.D. from Cornell University Medical College and did his postdoctoral training with Nobel Laureate Paul Greengard at Rockefeller University.
Dr. Lu has made significant contributions to the field of brain growth and trophic factors, particularly BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor) in brain development and cognitive functions, and is credited for several important discoveries: 1) discovered BDNF regulation of LTP, a cellular model for memory and pioneered neurotrophic regulation of synaptic plasticity. 2) identified a human genetic variant that impacts BDNF secretion, hippocampal function and episodic memory in human; This work was ranked No. 2 in the “10 Breakthroughs of the Year" by Science in the year 2003. 3) developed a ‘BDNF-based neural repair’ hypothesis for neurodegenerative diseases. Dr. Lu’s current research focuses on neural circuits underlying cognitive functions, translational medicine and drug discovery for neurodegenerative and psychiatric diseases. His recent work includes novel drug targets as TrkA, TrkB, ApoE3ch, and technology platforms such as novel models for AD and schizophrenia, AD brain organoids derived from human stem cells, and AI-assisted digital biomarkers for brain diseases. His laboratory has also generated several First-in-Class (FIC) and Best-in-Class (BIC) drug candidates, some are in the clinical stages.
During his time at GSK, Dr. Lu’s responsibilities include:
1) overall biology strategy,
2) neurodegeneration drug discovery pipeline,
3) experimental medicine and early clinical development,
4) internal discovery engine,
5) external collaborations.
He managed 3 Discovery Performance Units (DPUs), which are end-to-end business units with defined business plans, budgets and multi-disciplinary functions (biology, chemistry, assay/platform, translational science, early clinical development); led the Biology Council to help set the strategy for several disease indications, and initiate collaborations with academia and biotech companies.
Dr. Lu served on many consulting/advisory roles both internationally and in China. Currently, he serves as Director, Chinese Institutes for Medical Research, Beijing (CIMR), Chief Scientist of Advanced Innovation Center for Human Brain Protection, etc. Dr. Bai Lu has received a number of distinguished honors, including the NIH Director’s Award, Mathilde Solowey Award, Ray Wu Award, etc. He was named by Thomson Reuters in 2014 as one of World’s Most Cited Researchers and Elsevier’s “Most-cited scientists in China” consecutively in the last 10 years.
Finally, Dr. Lu is the founder of 4B Technologies, Limited, a biotech company aimed at developing innovative drugs for nervous system diseases. He also founded “The-Intellectuals”, a public WeChat that has now become a highly influential science medium in China.

Andrea B. Maier (1978), a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians (FRACP), graduated in Medicine (MD) 2003 from the University of Lübeck (Germany), was registered 2009 in The Netherlands as Specialist in Internal Medicine-Geriatrics and was appointed Full Professor of Gerontology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (The Netherlands) in 2013. She was the head of Geriatrics at the Vrije Universiteit Medical Center from 2012 to 2016. From 2016 to early 2021 Professor Maier served as Divisional Director of Medicine and Community Care at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, Australia, and as Professor of Medicine and Aged Care at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She continued her career at the National University of Singapore as Director of the Centre for Healthy Longevity. Professor Maier’s research focuses on unraveling the mechanisms of ageing and age-related diseases to bring diagnostics and interventions to optimize health into clinical practice. She is heading international longitudinal cohort studies and geroscience interventions. She has published more than 430 peer-reviewed articles, achieving an H index of 75, spearheading the significant contributions of her highly acclaimed innovative, global, multidisciplinary @Age research group. She is a frequent guest on radio and television programs and book author to disseminate aging research. Furthermore, she is invited member and advisor of several
international academic and health policy committees and funding agencies, including the World Health Organization evaluating the United Nations Decade of Healthy Ageing and Hevolution. In 2022, she co-founded the first evidence based Healthy Longevity Medicine Clinic in Singapore, Chi Longevity, and joined NU as Chief Medical Officer. She is the past President of The Australian and New Zealand Society for Sarcopenia and Frailty Research, the Founding President of the Healthy
Longevity Medicine Society and serves as selected Member of The Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities, Fellow of the Atria Academy of Science and Medicine, and Academy for Health and Lifespan Research. In 2023, she co-founded the NUS Academy for Healthy Longevity to disseminate Geroscience and evidence based Healthy Longevity Medicine.

Anna Murray is Professor of Human Genetics and leads the Reproductive Genomics group at the University of Exeter. She is interested in the genetics of female reproductive ageing, from menarche to menopause and the diseases and traits associated with reproductive ageing. Anna is also one of the lead investigators in the ReproGen consortium, which has published some of the largest genome-wide studies of common genetic variants associated with timing of menopause, puberty timing and hormone levels. Current projects include a Wellcome Trust funded Discovery award to use genomics to understand reproductive ageing and ovary-specific disease and an MRC-funded project to find novel therapeutic targets for menopausal symptoms. Anna is also a co-founder and shareholder in OvartiX, a drug-discovery company for ovary-centric disorders. For a full list of Anna’s publications, please go to Google scholar.

Bente Klarlund Pedersen, MD MDSc, is Professor of Integrative Medicine at the University of Copenhagen; a specialist in infectious diseases, tropical diseases and internal medicine and chief physician at Copenhagen University Hospital – Rigshospitalet, Denmark. She is the Director of Centre for Physical Activity Research (CFAS), which count 25 senior researchers/postdocs, 12 PhD students, 15 other academic and technical personnel, 18 pre-graduate students and an administration of 4 persons (http://aktivsundhed.dk).
The research group has contributed to identify skeletal muscle as an endocrine organ that produces and releases so-called “myokines”. The identification of myokines provides a conceptual basis for understanding how muscles communicate with other organs. Through translational research, the aim is to develop
targeted exercise training regimes for specific disease groups by applying a translational strategy: “from bedside to bench and back”.
BKP has had many positions of trust and is a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. BKP has more than 700 scientific publications, > 60.000 citations and her “H”-index is 125 (Web of Science). BKP has written several popular books about exercise and health. She has contributed to hundreds of articles in the public press. BKP writes weekly columns on health for Politiken. In addition, her research has been featured internationally to a broad audience on several occasions. She has received several prestigious prizes for her research and research communication.

Michael Ringel is a Managing Director and Senior Partner at BCG, and BCG's Global Topic Leader for Growth and Innovation. He is a frequent author and speaker on R&D and innovation topics. His TED talk on innovation can be viewed at TED.com. He is also Strategic Advisor to Life Biosciences, a company targeting aging biology to address multiple diseases.

Prior to BCG, Michael worked in academia, pursuing research in theoretical population dynamics and conducting field experiments in the Amazon basin near Manaus, Brazil. Michael holds a B.A. summa cum laude in biology from Princeton, a Ph.D. in biology from Imperial College, and a J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School. He Chairs the Board of the ATOM Consortium, a public-private partnership with a mission of transforming drug development using advanced analytics.

Since 2013, Björn Schumacher is full professor and director of the Institute for Genome Stability in Aging and Diseases (IGSAD) at the CECAD Research Centre of the University of Cologne. He received his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Munich and conducted his postdoctoral research as EMBO and Marie Curie fellow at the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam. Professor Schumacher is President of the German Society for DNA Repair (DGDR), co-Director of the Minerva Center of the Biological Mechanisms of Healthy Aging at Bar-Ilan University (IL), and between 2014 and 2020 served as President of the German Society for Aging Research (DGfA). Since 2023, Schumacher is speaker of the DFG Research Unit FOR 5504 on “Physiological causes and consequences of genome instability”. He was awarded with the Eva Luise Köhler Research Prize, the Innovation Prize of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, the DFG Reinhart Koselleck and European Research Council (ERC) grants, coordinated the Marie Curie initial training network on chronic DNA damage in aging (CodeAge) and served on several editorial boards. His research interest focuses on the molecular mechanisms through which DNA damage contributes to cancer development and aging-associated diseases. Employing the C. elegans system and mammalian disease models, his group uncovered cell-autonomous and systemic responses through which the organism adapts to accumulating DNA damage with aging. Through the
understanding of the basic mechanisms of genome instability-driven aging, Schumacher aims to contribute to the development of future strategies to prevent aging-associated diseases.

Emma Caroline Teeling is an Irish zoologist, geneticist and genomicist, who specialises in the phylogenetics and genomics of bats. Her work includes understanding of the bat genome and study of how insights from other mammals such as bats might contribute to better understanding and management of ageing and a number of conditions, including deafness and blindness, in humans. She is the co-founder of the Bat1K project to map the genomes of all species of bat. She is also concerned with understanding of the places of bats in the environment and how to conserve their ecosystem.
Teeling is a full professor at University College Dublin, where she has founded two scientific centres: the Laboratory of Molecular Evolution and Mammalian Phylogenetics (also known as the "BatLab"), and the Dublin part of the Centre for Irish Bat Research. Teeling is widely cited in her areas of study and is an elected member of Ireland's national academy, the Royal Irish Academy.

Dr. Verdin is the president and chief executive officer of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. A native of Belgium, Dr. Verdin received his Doctorate of Medicine (MD) from the University of Liege and completed additional clinical and research training at Harvard Medical School. He has held faculty positions at the University of Brussels, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Picower Institute for Medical Research. Dr. Verdin is also a professor of medicine at University of California, San Francisco.

Dr. Verdin studies how metabolism, diet, and small molecules regulate the activity of HDACs and sirtuins, and thereby the aging process and its associated diseases, including Alzheimer's. He has published more than 210 scientific papers and holds more than 15 patents. He is a highly cited scientist (top 1 percent) and has been recognized for his research with a Glenn Award for Research in Biological Mechanisms of Aging and a senior scholarship from the Ellison Medical Foundation. He is an elected member of several scientific organizations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Society for Clinical Investigation, and the Association of American Physicians. He also serves on the advisory council of National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health.

Tony Wyss-Coray is the D.H. Chen Distinguished Professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences and the Director of the Phil and Penny Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience at Stanford University. His lab studies brain aging and neurodegeneration with a focus on age-related cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease. The Wyss-Coray research team discovered that circulatory blood factors can modulate brain structure and function and factors from young organisms can rejuvenate old brains. Current studies focus on the molecular basis of the systemic communication with the brain by employing a combination of genetic, cell biology, and –omics approaches in mice, and humans. Wyss-Coray has presented his ideas at Global TED, the Tencent WE Summit, the World Economic Forum, and he was voted Time Magazine’s “The Health Care 50” most influential people transforming health care in 2018. He co-founded Alkahest Inc. and several other companies targeting Alzheimer’s and neurodegeneration; he is a AAAS Fellow and has been the recipient of an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, a Zenith Award from the Alzheimer’s Association, and a NOMIS Foundation Award.

Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, is the founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine (insilico.com), a leading clinical-stage biotechnology company developing next-generation generative artificial intelligence and robotics platforms for drug discovery. Since 2014, he has invented critical technologies in the field of generative artificial intelligence and reinforcement learning (RL) for the generation of novel molecular structures with the desired properties and the generation of synthetic biological and patient data. He also pioneered the applications of transformers and other deep learning technologies for the prediction of human biological age using multiple data types, transfer learning from aging into disease, target identification, and signaling pathway modeling. Under his leadership, Insilico raised over $400 million in multiple rounds from expert biotechnology, healthcare, and financial investors, opened R&D centers in 6 countries and regions, and partnered with multiple pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and academic institutions. Since 2021, the company nominated 18 preclinical candidates, started 6 human clinical trials, and entered Phase II with an AI-discovered novel target and AI-designed novel molecule. By 2023, 11 out of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies used a part of the Pharma.AI software suite, and the IND-stage cancer program was sold in a deal with $80 million upfront as a testament to the quality and novelty of the AI-generated molecule.

Prior to founding Insilico, he worked in senior roles at ATI Technologies (GPU company acquired by AMD). Since 2012, he has published over 200 peer-reviewed research papers with over 30 papers in the field of generative adversarial networks, generative reinforcement learning, and multi-modal transformers, and 3 books, including "The Ageless Generation: How Biomedical Advances Will Transform the Global Economy" (Macmillan, 2013). He serves on the advisory or editorial boards of Trends in Molecular Medicine, Aging Research Reviews, Aging, and Frontiers in Genetics, and founded and co-chairs the Annual Aging Research and Drug Discovery (10th Annual in 2023), the world's largest event on aging research in the biotechnology industry. He is the adjunct professor of artificial intelligence at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.