ELENA CATTANEO

Elena Cattaneo born in Milano, in 1962. Degree in Pharmacy and Ph.D. in Biotechnology Applied to Pharmacology at the University of Milan. She spent three years as Post-doctoral Fellow at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (Prof. R. McKay lab) M.I.T., Cambridge USA and at the University of Lund, (Prof. A. Bjorklund lab). Assistant Professor of Pharmacology in 1995, Associate Professor of Pharmacology in 2001, and Full Professor of Pharmacology in 2003 at the University of Milan, where she is Director of the “Laboratory of stem cell biology and pharmacology of neurodegenerative diseases”, Department of Biosciences and Director of UniStem, Centre for Stem Cell Research.  She received prestigeous awards. Member of numerous scientific association including Academia dei Lincei. She has been Knighted and nominated Senator for life for the Presidency of the Italian Republic.

RICCARDO CORTESE

Riccardo Cortese, scientist and entrepreneur, MD in Italy, PhD in Biochemistry at Berkeley, California. Worked at the Collège de France, the MRC-LMB in Cambridge, and at the EMBL in Heidelberg, where he was founder and first director of the Gene Expression Department. From 1990 to 2006 he was Founder and Scientific Director of IRBM, where he coordinated research that led to the discovery development and commercialization of important anti-HCV and anti HIV drugs. In 2006 he founded Okairos, a biotech dedicated to the development of vaccines. In 2013 he founded Keires AG e Nouscom AG, dedicated to the discovery and development of novel therapeutic strategies in oncology and senescence. He was Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of Naples, and is an elected member of EMBO and of the Acadèmie dès Sciences. He lives and works in Basel, Switzerland.

JEFFREY FLIER

Jeffrey S. Flier was named dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard University in 2007. An authority on the molecular causes of obesity and diabetes, Dean Flier is also the Carolyn Shields Walker professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Previously he served as the HMS faculty dean for academic programs and chief academic officer for Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Following his residency training in internal medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital, he joined the National Institutes of Health. In 1978, he joined the Faculty of medicine at HMS and was named chief of the Diabetes Unit at Beth Israel Hospital until 1990, when he became chief of the Endocrine Division. He has authored more than 200 scholarly papers and reviews. He is a fellow of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.

TIM HUNT

Tim Hunt was, until his retirement in 2010, a ‘principal scientist’ at Cancer Research UK, Clare Hall Laboratories, in South Mimms, Hertfordshire. Dr Hunt moved to Cambridge to read Natural Sciences in 1961. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Department of Biochemistry in Cambridge in 1968. He spent almost 30 years in Cambridge, working in the Department of Biochemistry on the control of protein synthesis and the cell cycle, but with spells in the USA; he was a postdoctoral Fellow at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1968-­‐70 and spent summers at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole from 1977 until 1985, teaching laboratory classes and doing research. In 1982, he discovered cyclins, which turned out to be components of “Key Regulator(s) of the Cell Cycle”. This led to a share of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2001, together with Lee Hartwell and Paul Nurse.

LAMBERTO MAFFEI

Dr. Lamberto Maffei is professor of Neurobiology at the Scuola Normale Superiore, University of Pisa, Italy. Since 1980, he has been Director of the Institute of Neuroscience of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) in Pisa. Dr. Maffei is a member of three Academies: the European Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Science and the Italian National Academy of Sciences, where he has been vice-president since 2003. In addition, he is also a member of the Italian Ministry of University and Research’s Committee for Neurosciences and of the European Institute for Paraplegia. With 271 scientific publications to his credit, Dr. Maffei has received several prestigious awards, such as the Award of the Italian Society for Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology in 1965, Golgi Award for Neurophysiology in 1975.

ROBERT PACIFICI

Robert Pacifici is the Chief Scientific Officer of CHDI Foundation, a private, not-for-profit research organization that works with an international network of scientists to accelerate therapeutics development for Huntington’s disease. Previously he was the Site Director and Chief Scientific Officer at the Research Triangle Park Laboratories of Eli Lilly and Company. There he oversaw the company’s global screening and quantitative-biology efforts. Prior to joining Lilly, Pacifici was Vice President of Discovery Technologies at Xencor, a pri¬vately held biotechnology company that applied rational design principles to the development of protein therapeutics. At Amgen for nearly ten years, Pacifici held positions of increasing responsibilities including leadership for their automation, high throughput screening, and information technologies groups.

SERGIO PECORELLI

Sergio Pecorelli, MD is the President of AIFA, the Italian Regulatory Agency for Medicines. A former fellow in Surgery at the Mayo School of Medicine, Rochester, MN,  he is also Professor and Chairman of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Director of the Division of Gynecologic Oncology at the University of Brescia and since 2010, President of the University Research Council and Dean of the School of Obstetrics at the University of Brescia. From 1970 to 2009, Prof. Pecorelli performed and participated in more than 6,600 major surgical procedures, of which 3,739 were oncological cases. He is author of 306 papers , 21 book chapters and 4 books.

TODD SHERER

Todd Sherer, PhD, is the CEO of The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. Formally trained as a neuroscientist, he directs the organization’s research strategy and is responsible for the organization’s overall scientific and fundraising direction to speed treatment breakthroughs and a cure for Parkinson’s disease. Dr. Sherer is a member of the Board of Directors of PAN and participates in the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies Forum on Neuroscience and Nervous System Disorders. He is a collaborating scientist for CAMD and a member of the CINAPS Advisory Committee at the National Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease and Stroke, National Institutes of Health (NIH). Additionally, Dr. Sherer was selected to join the NCATS Council and the Cures Acceleration Network Review Board at the NIH.