Tami Bakas, PhD, RN

"Advancing the Science of Care for Family Caregivers of Stroke Survivors"

Tami Bakas is a Professor and Jane E. Procter Endowed Chair at University of Cincinnati, College of Nursing with a focus on stroke patients and caregivers.

John F. Cryan, PhD,

"A Gut Feeling about the Brain: The Microbiome as a Key Regulator of Stress across the Lifespan"

John F. Cryan is Professor and Chair, Dept. of Anatomy and Neuroscience, University College Cork and serves on the University’s Governing Body. He is also a Principal Investigator in the APC Microbiome Institute. He received a B.Sc. (Hons) and PhD from the National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland. He was a visiting fellow at the Dept. Psychiatry, University of Melbourne, Australia, which was followed by postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA and The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California. He spent four years at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research in Basel Switzerland, as a Lab Head, Behavioral Pharmacology prior to joining UCC in 2005. Dr. Cryan's current research is focused on understanding the interaction between brain, gut and microbiome and how it applies to stress, psychiatric and immune-related disorders at key time-windows across the lifespan. Dr. Cryan has published over 340 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and has an H-index of 73. He is a Senior Editor of Neuropharmacology and of Nutritional Neuroscience and an Editor of British Journal of Pharmacology. He is on the editorial board of a further 15 journals. He has edited three books including “Microbial Endocrinology: The Microbiota-Gut-Brain Axis in Health and Disease” (Springer Press, 2014). He has received numerous awards including UCC Researcher of the Year in 2012; the University of Utrecht Award for Excellence in Pharmaceutical Research in 2013 and being named on the Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher list in 2014.

Stephan Grupp,MD PhD

"Reverse Engineering Exceptional Responses to CAR T Therapy"

Stephan Grupp, MD PhD, is the Director of the Cancer Immunotherapy Program, Director of Translational Research in the Center for Childhood Cancer Research at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), and the Yetta Dietch Novotny Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a member of the Stem Cell Transplant Section of the Division of Oncology and the Medical Director of the Stem Cell Laboratory. Dr. Grupp graduated from the University of Cincinnati after completing the MD/PhD program with a PhD in Immunology. He completed pediatric residency at the Boston Children’s Hospital, followed by a fellowship in Pediatric Hematology/Oncology at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and postdoctoral work in Immunology at Harvard University. He then joined the faculty at Harvard University until 1996, when he came to CHOP. His primary area of clinical research is the use of engineered cell therapies in high risk pediatric cancers, and he has led the largest and most successful engineered T cell therapy clinical trial conducted to date (CART19/CTL019 (1, 2)). His primary laboratory interest is the development of new cell therapy treatments for pediatric cancers and the molecular control of leukemic cell growth. Dr. Grupp is a reviewer for several journals and the author of over 120 peer-reviewed journal articles, as well as numerous abstracts and book chapters.

Jonathan Jarry, MSc,

Jonathan Jarry is a biological scientist born and bred in Canada who once worked for the U.S. Armed Forces, using the power of DNA technology to identify old American soldiers. He has also helped to characterize a new form of muscular dystrophy and spent many years in a clinical laboratory, designing assays and managing rapid-turnover diagnostic tests, which allow physicians to make informed decisions regarding cancer patient care. He is a rationalist who believes each person should be empowered with the necessary knowledge to make rational, informed decisions about their health and the world around them.

Christopher Labos, MD CM, MSc, FRCPC

"If You See it on the Internet, It's Probably Not True: The Joys of Critical Science Communication"

Dr. Christopher Labos is a cardiologist with a degree in epidemiology and biostatistics. He spends most of his time doing things that he doesn’t get paid for, like doing research, teaching, and podcasting. Occasionally, he finds time to practice as a cardiologist so he can pay his rent. He realizes that half of his research findings will be disproved in five years: he just doesn’t know which half. He is a freelance contributor for the Montreal Gazette, a reviewer for HealthNewsReview.org and appears CBC Radio and CBC Television. To date, no one has recognized him on the street.

Ramon Parsons, MD, PhD,

"PTEN Upstream, Instream and Downstream"

Dr. Ramon Parsons grew up in Washington, DC, and graduated from Columbia College, Columbia University in 1983. Dr. Parsons then attended the State University of New York at Stony Brook where he received his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees in 1992. Dr. Parsons continued his education at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as a postdoctoral fellow with Bert Vogelstein. There, he and his colleagues discovered that inactivation of DNA mismatch repair genes cause hereditary colorectal cancer. At Columbia University Medical Center, his research laboratory identified the PTEN tumor suppressor gene, which is inactivated in a wide variety of cancers and cancer predisposition syndromes. He has been a leader in establishing the importance of PTEN and the PI3K pathway for cancer using a combination of genetic, biochemical, human tissue, and systems biology approaches. In 2013, he joined the faculty at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai as Ward-Coleman Professor in Cancer Research, Chairman of the Department of Oncological Sciences and co-Leader of the Cancer Mechanisms Program of the Tisch Cancer Institute where he studies cancer signaling and biology with an emphasis on breast cancer.

Michael J. Silverman, PhD, MT-BC,

"Introduction to Music Therapy: A Diverse Profession Capable of Meeting Patients Multifaceted Needs"

Michael J. Silverman (Ph.D., MT-BC) is the director of Music Therapy and a Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Minnesota. The author of Music therapy in mental health for illness management and recovery (published by Oxford University Press in 2015), he specializes in music therapy for adults with mental illnesses and substance abuse disorders. An active presenter at national and international conferences, Dr. Silverman currently serves on the Editorial Boards for the Journal of Music Therapy, Journal of Creativity in Mental Health and the World Journal of Methodology and frequently provides guest reviews for other refereed journals. Dr. Silverman has published articles in peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of Music Therapy, the Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, Archives of Psychiatric Nursing, the Substance Use and Misuse, and the Arts in Psychotherapy. A member of the research staff at the University Hospital (Minnesota Health), he is actively engaged in music therapy clinical work and research with mental health and substance use populations. Dr. Silverman has also served as an elected member on the Board of Directors for the American Music Therapy Association since 2013.

Semyon M. Slobounov, PhD

"Emerging Technologies for Assessment of Concussion"

Semyon M. Slobounov received his PhD from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a Professor of Kinesiology with a research focus on neural substrates of human movement both in normal and pathological populations, he also does clinical research focused on sports-related traumatic brain injuries using Advanced Virtual Reality and Brain Imaging (fMRI, EEG) tools at Pennsylvania State University.

A.F.W. van der Steen, MSc, PhD,

"Technical Solutions for Sustainable Healthcare: Intravascular Imaging Guided Cardiovascular Interventions"

A.F.W. (Ton) van der Steen is Professor in Biomedical Engineering in Cardiology. He has an MSc in Applied physics (1989, Technical University Delft) and a PhD in Medical Science (1994, Catholic University Nijmegen). Since 1994, he is connected to the Thorax Centre and the Interuniversity Cardiology Institute of the Netherlands. He is head Biomedical Engineering of the Thorax Centre, Erasmus MC. Since 2013 he is also full professor in Applied Physics at the Technical University Delft. Since 2014, he is honorary visiting professor to the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technologies. He is cofounder of the Medical Delta, a collaboration between Erasmus MC, TU Delft and Leiden University Medical Centre, working on technical solutions for sustainable health. His expertise is mainly in diagnostic cardiologic imaging devices with emphasis on echography. Current research interests are focused to image-guided catheter based treatment of atherosclerosis, ultrasound contrast agents, ultrasound transducers and vascular biomechanics.