Hans Clevers is a Dutch scientist and molecular geneticist who is currently a professor at the Hubrecht Institute for Developmental Biology and Stem Cell Research at the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands. He is known for his work on stem cells and for discovering the Wnt signaling pathway, which plays a key role in the development and maintenance of tissues in animals. Clevers has received numerous awards for his research, including the Spinoza Prize, the highest scientific award in the Netherlands, and the prestigious Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine. He is also a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the European Molecular Biology Organization.

Vivian Li obtained her PhD at the University of Hong Kong (Department of Pathology) in 2008, where she researched the molecular mechanism of human colonic development and tumourigenesis. She received the Gold Medal Prize for her PhD thesis.
After completing her PhD study, Vivian was funded by the Croucher Foundation Fellowship to pursue her post-doctoral research training with Hans Clevers at the Hubrecht Institute in the Netherlands. Her work focused on Wnt pathway proteomics and characterising intestinal stem cell genes using newly created transgenic mouse models.
She has contributed to the identification of novel Wnt signalling mechanisms at different subcellular levels (receptor, core destruction complex and transcription). During her postdoc studies, she has become familiar with reverse mouse genetics and the state-of-the-art ex vivo organoid cultures.
Vivian established her lab at the MRC National Institute for Medical Research (now part of the Francis Crick Institute) in February 2013

Professor Thomas Hartung is a toxicologist and pharmacoepidemiologist who is currently the Director of the Department of Evidence-based Toxicology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. He is also the Head of the European Union-funded Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT) and the Chair of the European Chemical Agency’s (ECHA) Scientific Committee. Hartung is known for his work on the development and use of alternative methods to animal testing in the field of toxicology. He has received numerous awards for his research, including the European Society of Toxicology (EUSTOX) Award, the Paul F. Parker Medal, and the European Union Prize for Alternative Approaches to Animal Testing (EUPAAT).

Marta Alves da Silva, PhD, is currently a Junior Researcher at i3S, University of Porto, in the Laboratory Animal Sciences Group. She is the scientific manager of the REMODEL project, which is an H2020 funded project aiming to build capacity to work with organoids and advanced 3D models in biomedical research. Since 2018 she has been exploring organoids and advanced in vitro models as alternatives for animal experimentation. She has established several new organoids models at I3S, namely gastro-intestinal tract organoids (intestine, colon and stomach), as well as lung organoids. She is an experienced researcher in Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine, with over 10 years of academic experience.

Dr Shafagh Waters (BSc, MSc (Disc.), PhD) is a Scientia senior lecturer at UNSW and an honorary senior scientist at Sydney Children’s Hospital. A productive PhD (2012; ANU) and postdoctoral fellowships (2013-2016; UNSW) helped her secure international training fellowships in gene therapy and organoid medicine, establishing her independent lab in 2016. Dr Waters lead an NHMRC funded research program on adult-stem-cell biology for cystic fibrosis (CF) that is supported by 32 grants; 21 as CIA including international and national industry partnerships. Dr Waters has developed an Australian national biobank of stem-cell-derived airway and gut organoids, and has built a platform for high-throughput therapy-testing on patients organoids. She combines her unique strengths in organoid disease modelling, multi-omic molecular profiling and computational research with clinical data to improve individualized outcomes for patients with CF. She is regularly invited to media interviews and present at community, and as a keynote speaker at national and international meetings, on two occasions, and was the recipient of the best ECR research award at the 2019-Australian Academy of Science, Precision Medicine Conference. In 2020, the latter (co-culture airway organoid with pathogens) was pivoted to COVID-19 to delineate the innate immune response to SARS-CoV2 infection.

Veronika moved to the University of Auckland in 2013 after postdoctoral research at UCLA and the Center of Regenerative Medicine in Barcelona, where she had worked on transcriptional gene regulation during embryonic development using several genetic models including Xenopus and Drosophila. She has also acquired an expertise in adult organ regeneration (heart and kidney) that she studied on the zebrafish model.