Adam R. Hall received his training in physics and materials sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a NASA Graduate Student Research Program (GSRP) Fellow and received the Ross & Charlotte Johnson Family Dissertation Fellowship. He then spent three years as a postdoctoral researcher at Technische Universitat Delft in the Netherlands. From 2010-13, he was an Assistant Professor of Nanoscience at the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering in Greensboro, NC, where he earned awards for both his research activities and teaching. He joined the faculty of the Virginia Tech-Wake Forest School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences in August of 2013 as an Assistant Professor in the Wake Forest School of Medicine. He was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2021 and was appointed Assistant Director of Translational Research for the Atrium Wake Forest Comprehensive Cancer Center in 2023. Dr. Hall has published more than 50 journal articles, is an inventor on 5 patents, and his research has been supported by diverse agencies including the National Institutes of Health (NCI, NIGMS, NIBIB, and NHGRI), DoD, BARDA, 3M, and the North Carolina Biotechnology Center. His research focuses on translational applications of micro- and nanotechnologies.

Andrew K. Godwin, PhD is the Chancellors Distinguished Chair in Biomedical Sciences endowed Professor and the Director of Molecular Oncology in the Department of Pathology at the University of Kansas Medical Center (KUMC). He is a leader in the field of translational research and precision medicine. A native of Lawrence, Kansas, Dr. Godwin graduated with highest distinction from the University of Kansas (KU) with a bachelor’s degree in Cellular Biology. He obtained his PhD in Molecular Biology from the University of Pennsylvania while carrying out his thesis research at Fox Chase Cancer Center (FCCC) in Philadelphia. While at FCCC he had the pleasure of learning from “giants” in their respective fields of cancer-focused science. He was appointed leader of the FCCC’s Cancer Center Support Grant Ovarian Cancer Program in 2008 and served as co-leader of the Women's Cancer Program from 2009 to 2010. He was the founding director of both the Clinical Molecular Genetics/Pathology Laboratory and the Biosample Repository at FCCC since their inception in 1995 and 1999 respectively, and until leaving FCCC.

Dr. Godwin was recruited to KUMC as the director of Molecular Oncology and as the Associate Director for Translational Research within the KU Cancer Center in October 2010 after 26 productive years at FCCC. His engaged participation in the cancer center led to being appointed the Deputy Director in 2013 and his unwavering efforts helped to gain NCI designation in 2012/2017 and comprehensive designation in 2022. He founded the Clinical Molecular Oncology Laboratory, a CLIA-certified, CAP-accredited molecular diagnostics laboratory in 2012. He was appointed the Division Director for Genomic Diagnostic for the KU Health System in 2020. He also founded the Center for Genetics Services and Health Equity, to address health disparities in medical underserved populations regionally and nationally.

Dr. Godwin holds secondary appointments as a Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine, and the Department of Microbiology, Molecular Genetics, and Immunology. He also leads the ovarian cancer research-working group, is a member of the Investigator Initiated Trial Steering Committee, serves as the founding Scientific Director for the Biomarker Discovery Laboratory, the Director of the KU Cancer Center’s Biospecimen Shared Resource, and the KU Medical Center’s Biospecimen Repository Core Facility. He was named the Vice Chair for the Breast Translational Medicine subcommittee of the Southwest Oncology Group in 2018 and was appointed to the National Cancer Institute’s NCTN Core Correlative Sciences Committee in 2021.

Dr. Godwin heads KU’s institutional efforts in precision medicine. In 2016 he founded the Kansas Institute for Precision Medicine which is currently supported by a Phase 2 Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence (P20 GM130423) grant from the NIGMS. He is also a co-founder of a startup company, Sinochips Diagnostics, a private reference laboratory that provides pharmacogenomic testing to provide a road map for which drugs will be most effective for each individual patient.

He was named a Kansas Bioscience Authority Eminent Scholar in 2010 and the University of Kansas School of Medicine Chancellor’s Distinguished Chair in Biomedical Sciences Endowed Professor in 2012. In 2014, Dr. Godwin received the KUMC School of Medicine’s Achievement Award for the mentoring of post-doctorate students. Of his awards, he is most proud of being acknowledged for his years of mentoring. He has mentored over 150 trainees, including high school students, undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral associates/fellows, medical students/fellows, visiting scientists, and junior faculty during his academic career. He was awarded the KU Medical Center’s Faculty Investigator Research Award in 2015, the University of Kansas Cancer Center Director’s William Jewell Team Science Award in 2017, the KUCC Director’s Basic Science Award and the Chancellor’s Club Award for Research in 2018, and the Dolph C. Simons, Sr. Higuchi Award in the Biomedical Sciences in 2020 – the state higher education system’s most prestigious recognition for scholarly excellence. Most recently, Godwin was presented with the 2021 KU School of Medicine Excellences in Mentoring (Faculty) award and the 2021 Cancer Center Director’s Award in Mentoring and was named the 2022 Lead Scholar in Biomedical Sciences by the Ewha Womans University in South Korea. Most recently he presented the 2024 Outstanding Mentorship in Pathology Award by the University School of Medicine and Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine in recognition of dedication to the mentorship and education of future pathologists.

Dr. Godwin is internationally recognized for his molecular biology/genetic studies of sarcoma (gastrointestinal stromal tumors and Ewing sarcoma), breast and ovarian cancer, and his efforts to help bridge the gap between basic and clinical science to improve patient care. As a result of his efforts, Dr. Godwin has been continuously since his first faculty appointment at the Fox Chase (in 1993) and has secured extramural funding totaling >$250M. He has published over 550 peer-reviewed manuscripts and scholarly review articles (h index = 143; >95,000 citations) and is the author of 4 patent applications.

Prof. 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.

Daniel T. Chiu is currently the A. Bruce Montgomery Professor Chemistry, Endowed Professor of Analytical Chemistry, and Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Washington. He is a member of the University of Washington’s Center for Nanotechnology, Neurobiology and Behavior Program, and the Cancer Consortium of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. He has authored more than 180 publications and is the inventor on over 40 issued patents. Dr. Chiu obtained a B.A. in neurobiology and a B.S. in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley in 1993, and a Ph.D. in chemistry from Stanford University in 1998.

My research focuses on the integration of microelectronics, microfluidics, nanomaterials and molecular targeting, and their application to medicine. This multidisciplinary approach enables me to explore new technologies to bring medical diagnostics from expensive, centralized facilities, directly to clinical and resource-limited settings. My academic background in electrical engineering and applied physics and my research experience in a hospital research laboratory prepared me to work and collaborate effectively on these inherently cross-disciplinary problems. Furthermore, the multidisciplinary nature of this work make it especially well suited for the broad expertise present in Penn’s research community, including researchers from material science, electrical engineering, bioengineering, cancer biology, and infectious diseases. My prior work has focused on developing automated and inexpensive tools to control and analyze biological samples, both for point-of-care medicine and as a platform to explore questions in basic science. My most recent work was the development of a biomedical chip for the ultra-sensitive detection of rare cells ex-vivo.

David T.W. Wong DMD, DMSc is Felix & Mildred Yip Endowed Professor, Associate Dean of Research and Director of the Oral/Head and Neck Oncology Research Center at UCLA. Dr. Wong is an active scientist in oral cancer and saliva diagnostics research. He has authored over 280 peer reviewed scientific publications. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS), past member of the ADA Council of Scientific Affairs and the past president of American Association of Dental Research (AADR).

Prof. Dr. Dominique PV de Kleijn is molecular biologist and chemist and professor of Exp. Vascular Surgery at UMC Utrecht and professor at the Netherlands Heart Institute. From 2012 to 2016, he was Research Professor of Surgery at NUS/NUHS and preclinical director of the Cardiovascular Research Institute (CVRI) Singapore. He was until 2016 professor of Cardiovascular Immunology and co-chair of Experimental Cardiology at UMC Utrecht. Since 1997 he is coordinating cardiovascular research from basic science, animal myocardial infarction and atherosclerotic studies (pig and sheep) towards clinical biobanking studies. His research interests are: The innate immune system in cardiovascular disease and atherosclerosis & Biomarkers predictive for primary & secondary events with a focus on plasma extracellular vesicles. He has more then 275 publications and a H-factor of 78.

Dr. Alexandrakis performed his undergraduate work in Physics at Oxford University. He then obtained Master’s and PhD degrees in Medical Physics from McMaster University in Canada. He was postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School and UCLA before joining the faculty at the University of Texas at Arlington. His current interests are focused on developing ultra-sensitive nanosensors for screening protein-ligand interactions in cancer immunotherapy and on novel nanopore-based methods to test the quality gene therapy vehicles and other therapeutic nanoparticles.

Dr. Hyungsoon Im is Associate Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. His research aims to bridge engineering and medicine fields by developing next-generation diagnostic sensing technologies to better understand the makeup of human diseases and changes associated with disease progression and therapy. He also develops and applies artificial intelligence (AI) to multiomics data to improve data analysis accuracies and robustness. Dr. Im has been actively working with clinical investigators both in and outside of MGH to validate my technologies for clinical samples and apply them in clinical settings.

John T. McDevitt serves as the Chair for the Department Biomaterials at New York University College of Dentistry, is a member of NYU’s Bioengineering Institute and participates as a faculty member in the NYU Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering within the Tandon School of Engineering. McDevitt is a pioneer in the development of ‘programmable bio-nano-chip’ technologies. He has a strong track record of translating essential bioscience discoveries into real-world clinical practice. In this capacity, he serves as the Scientific Founder for three diagnostic companies. His most recent company, SensoDx, features a universal platform sensor technology with capacity to digitize biological signatures for a broad range of key health conditions. McDevitt and his team has raised over $45M in Federal and Foundation support. His recent research has been sponsored by major programs funded by the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Army and the United Kingdom’s Home Office Scientific Development Branch.

McDevitt and his team have written more than 200 peer-reviewed scientific manuscripts and have contributed to more than 100 patents and patent applications. This work was recognized with the “2016 AACC Wallace H. Coulter Lectureship Award,” “Best of What's New Award” in the Medical Device Category for 2008 by Popular Science as well as for the “Best Scientific Advances Award” in 1998 by the Science Coalition. Dr. McDevitt’s individual honors include the Presidential Young Investigator Award, the 2010 California Polytechnic Distinguished Alumni Award and the Exxon Education Award. Over the past 7 years, Dr. McDevitt has served as the Principal Investigator for 6 major clinical trials and 2 clinical pilot studies, all involving the programmable bio-nano-chip. Through these clinical efforts, mini-sensor ensembles are being developed for major diseases in the areas of oral cancer, cardiac heart disease, trauma, drugs of abuse, ovarian cancer and prostate cancer.

Lydia L. Sohn received her A.B. (Chemistry and Physics, 1988), M.S. (Physics, 1990), and Ph.D. (Physics, 1992) from Harvard University. She was an NSF/NATO postdoc at Delft University of Technology and a postdoc at AT&T Bell Laboratories (1993-1995). Sohn was an Assistant Professor of Physics at Princeton University prior to joining the Mechanical Engineering Dept. at UC Berkeley in 20013. Her work focuses on developing quantitative techniques to probe single cells. Sohn has received numerous awards including the NSF CAREER, Army of Research Young Investigator Award, DuPont Young Professor Award, and a Bakar Fellowship. In 2014, she was one of five winners in the “Identifying Platform Technologies for Advancing Life Sciences Research” competition for her work on Node-Pore Sensing. Most recently, she was elected a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.

Dr Pulliam received her BA degree from Northwestern University, her MS in Microbiology at California State University at Long Beach and her PhD in Experimental Pathology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She is a Professor of Laboratory Medicine and Medicine at UCSF and Director of Microbiology at the San Francisco VA Health Care Center. She was the Director of Research at the SF VA, the largest VA research center in the US, for 7 years. She is a founding member and past President of the International Society for Neurovirology (ISNV) as well as the Women in Neuroscience awardee and recipient of the ISNV Pioneer Award. She serves on the Board of Directors of ISNV and the Editorial Boards of several journals. She has also received awards from AmFar, the Northern California Institute for Research and Education and Drexel University Prize in Neurovirology.

Dr. Malgorzata (Maggie) A. Witek is an Associate Research Professor at KU, Lawrence. Her research is focused on microfluidic-based isolation and solid-phase extractions of liquid biopsy markers, including circulating tumor cells, extracellular vesicles, and cell free DNA for stroke and cancer disease management. She shares her research efforts between the University of Kansas in the NIH/NIBIB funded Center of BioModular Multiscale Systems for Precision Medicine and the COBRE funded Kansas Institute for Precision Medicine at the University of Kansas Medical Center (KUMC). Maggie co-directs the Liquid Biopsy Core at KUMC campus.

Dr. He is an associate professor from the Department of Pharmaceutics, College of Pharmacy at the University of Florida. She obtained her PhD degree from the University of Alberta and postdoc training from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. He is the Editorial Board member of Pharmaceutics and AAPS Scientific Programming Committee Track Leader, as well as the Advisory Board Member of journal Lab on Chip (LOC). Her journal review efforts have been recognized as the Outstanding Reviewers in 2018, 2020, and 2021 from the LOC Royal Society of Chemistry. Dr. He Received NIH Maximizing Investigator’s Research Award for Early Stage Investigators in 2019, and she also received the LOC Emerging Investigator Award in 2019. Her multiple publications received the Most Download Articles of 2016 (LOC), the Featured Cover Story of 2018 (LOC), Technology Readers Choice Award of 2018 (SLAS), and Top 100 Read Articles of 2019 (Scientific Reports from Nature Publishing Group). Her recent publication is appeared in the journal of Nature Biomedical Engineering and highlighted as the Editorial Story. Dr. He research brings in novel technology platforms for differentiating, isolating, and intravesicular loading exosomes precisely, which presents a new way for developing precision medicine Dr. He’s innovation leads to 17 pending and issued patents and have been licensed by multiple companies and commercialized on the market. Particularly, she founded a few startup companies for advancing the innovative exosome research.

Prof. Whelan is Associate Professor of Chemistry at the University of Kansas. She is also affiliated with the Adams Institute for Bioanalytical Chemistry and the KU Cancer Center. She earned her Ph.D. at Stanford University and did postdoctoral research at the University of Michigan. Research during her independent career has focused on applications of separations, affinity agent development, and proteomics to ovarian cancer biomarker characterization and detection.

Prof. Soper is currently a Foundation Distinguished Professor in Chemistry and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. Prof. Soper also holds an appointment at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in Ulsan, South Korea, where he is a World Class University Professor. He is also serving as a Science Advisor for a number of major worldwide companies. Prof. Soper is currently on the Editorial Board for Scientific Reports and Journal of Micro- and Nanosystems.

As a result of his efforts, Prof. Soper has secured extramural funding totaling >$103M and has published over 265 peer-reviewed manuscripts (h index = 71) and is the author of 20 patents. He is also the founder of a startup company, BioFluidica, which is marketing devices for the isolation and enumeration of circulating tumor cells. His list of awards includes Chemical Instrumentation by the American Chemical Society, the Benedetti-Pichler Award for Microchemistry, Fellow of the AAAS, Fellow of Applied Spectroscopy, Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, R&D 100 Award, Distinguished Masters Award at LSU and Outstanding Scientist/Engineer in the state of Louisiana in 2001. Finally, Prof. Soper has granted 60 PhDs and 6 MS degrees to students under his mentorship. He currently heads a group of 20 researchers.

Sven Kreutel studied biology at the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart, Germany. After his graduation in biology, he received his PhD in microbiology and protein biochemistry at the University of Hohenheim under Prof. Dr. Andreas Kuhn and Dr. Dorothee Kiefer working on the light sensing and signal transduction in photosynthetic bacteria. Since then, he worked in different sales and sales manager positions within the life science industry from clinical research over biology to nanoparticle sciences.

Dr. Tony Hu is a Professor in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Biomedical Engineering, and Microbiology at Tulane University. He is also the Weatherhead Presidential Chair in Biotechnology Innovation, founding Director of the Center for Intelligent Molecular Diagnostics at Tulane School of Medicine, and the fellows of National Academy of Inventors (NAI) and American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). Dr. Hu’s research focuses on engineered multi-omics, nanomedicine, mechanism-driven biomarker discovery and assay development. His research differs from conventional biomarker discovery and detection research for clinical microbiology in that it employs the special properties of nanomaterials to improve assay performance and reproducibility. His inventions are intended to serve as a model for the analysis of similar characteristics of infectious and malignant diseases to facilitate the development of a full spectrum of diagnostic, prognostic and treatment evaluation assays, and re-define the diagnostic criteria to differentiate disease stages using molecular tests as a long-term goal. His work has resulted in publications of over 150 high-impact papers, and 25 pat¬ent applications involving nanomedicine. Fourteen of those patents have been licensed by US-based or international companies. Dr. Hu’s lab has been consistently support¬ed by the DOD, NIH, Gates Foundation, WHO and others. Dr. Hu is also the co-founders of two biotech startup companies, Intelligenome Inc. in Houston, TX and NanoPin Technologies in New Orleans, LA.