Professor Cunningham has been a faculty member in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the department Bioengineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 2004, following a 15-year career in Industry. Prof. Cunningham’s technical focus is the utilization of photonics for biosensing in applications that include life science research, diagnostics, environmental monitoring, and pharmaceutical screening. He has over 90 issued US patents and over 200 peer reviewed journal publications. He is a Fellow of NAI, IEEE, Optica, RSC, AAAS, and AIMBE. He serves as the Director of the Center for Genomic Diagnostics at the Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, and as a Program Leader for the Cancer Center at Illinois on the topic of Cancer Measurement Technology and Data Science. In 2023, his technical contributions were recognized by Optica by the Michael S. Feld Biophotonics Award.

Martyn Boutelle is Professor of Biomedical Sensors Engineering in the Department of Bioengineering, Imperial College London, and Associate Provost for Estates Planning for Imperial College. His research group is multidisciplinary comprising bioengineers, scientists, and clinicians. He develops novel analytical science methods using microfluidics, electrochemical sensors / biosensors, and wireless electronics to make portable (sometimes wearable) monitoring devices for use as point of care devices – typically giving continuous real -time displays. He then uses these in a program of clinical science research focusing on the neonatal monitoring, acute traumatic brain injury, pesticide exposure monitoring. Martyn is past president of the International Society for Monitoring Molecules in Neuroscience, and a founder of the COSBID organization for studying acute human brain injury. He published > 200 papers, chapters and patents. He obtained a BSc and PhD in Chemistry from Imperial College and worked as an EP Abraham Research Fellow in the University of Oxford.

I hold a BSc (Hons) from National University of Singapore, a PhD from SUNY at Buffalo and received postdoctoral training at Columbia University. For nearly three decades, I have led independent research groups across multiple institutions in Singapore, with a consistent focus on disease mechanisms and therapeutic development. My current research centers on extracellular vesicles (EVs), particularly MSC-derived EVs, exploring their production, characterization, and clinical applications. I was named a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher (2021–2024) and received the 2023 ISEV Special Achievement Award for Stem Cell EV Research. As an inventor, I hold over 100 granted patents across 12 families and have founded three biotech start-ups, one of which completed a Phase 1 clinical trial using topical MSC-exosomes for psoriasis in 2022.

Dr. Xing Wang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Bioengineering, affiliated with the Chemistry Department, IGB, HMNTL, and CCIL at UIUC. He received a Ph.D. in Chemistry from New York University and did postdoc training at Princeton University focusing on RNA biochemistry/biology and noncoding RNA-mediated genome editing. His group invented the DNA Star, DNA Net, and DNA NanoGripper platforms, and conceived the concept of pattern-recognition enabled multivalent molecular interactions. Dr. Wang received the Mikashi Award in 2021, was selected as a Fellow of the Y Combinator Founder Cohort that same year, and earned the Spoke Award in 2024. His research group utilizes nucleic acid and protein engineering to evolve new molecular binders for important and emerging biomarkers, and to design and customize DNA nanostructure-based “plug-and-play” platforms for bioengineering and biomedical applications. Dr. Wang’s research group is mainly supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF).

Yoon-Kyoung Cho is currently a full professor in Biomedical Engineering and the dean of College of Information and Biotechnology at UNIST, Republic of Korea. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering of Korea (NAEK), an associate editor of the journal ‘Lab on a chip’, a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and vice president of the Chemical and Biological Microsystems Society (CBMS). She earned her Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1999, following her M.S. and B.S. in Chemical Engineering from POSTECH in 1994 and 1992, respectively. Prior to joining UNIST in 2008, she served as a senior researcher (1999–2008) at Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT). Her current research focuses on lab-on-a-chip systems for detecting rare biomarkers, quantitative analysis of cell migration, and systems analysis of intercellular communication. Discover more at http://fruits.unist.ac.kr.
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