Department of Genome Biology, Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Osaka

Meritxell Huch obtained her PhD at the CRG, Barcelona in 2007 and did her postdoc at the Hubrecht Institute, Netherlands where she pioneered the generation of organoids from stomach, liver and pancreas. In 2014, she established her independent lab at the Gurdon Institute, Cambridge, where she developed the first human liver organoid models from healthy and diseased human liver tissue. In 2019, she received the prestigious Lise Meitner Award and moved to the Max Planck Institute in Dresden. In 2022, she was elected Director and Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society. She received several prizes including the Otto Bayer Award and has recently been elected member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.

Peter Rugg-Gunn is a Senior Group Leader at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, UK. He is also an Affiliate Principal Investigator at the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute and at the Loke Centre for Trophoblast Research, and is the Chief Investigator of the Human Developmental Biology Initiative. Peter obtained a BSc from the University of York, a PhD at the University of Cambridge, and then undertook postdoctoral training at The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto. In 2011, he received a Wellcome Fellowship that enabled him to establish his research group at the Babraham Institute, where he was awarded tenure in 2017. Peter's research interests centre on understanding how the epigenome is established during human development and how this affects cell fate decisions in human embryos and in stem cell-based embryo models. His group is particularly interested in epigenetic mechanisms that contribute to cellular plasticity and lineage specification. Peter is also the Head of Public Engagement at the Babraham Institute and he has co-led national projects exploring society's views on human embryo research.

Memorial Sloane Kettering Cancer Centre

Murdoch Children’s Research Institute

Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute

A/Prof Jennifer Zenker’s scientific journey started at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland), where she obtained her PhD in Neurobiology, receiving the Amicitia PhD Excellence Prize. Next stop was Australia, starting her PostDoc at EMBL Australia (Monash University), shortly followed by a move to Singapore to IMCB, A*STAR. During her Postdoc, A/Prof Zenker specialised on live imaging of early mouse embryos which led to several seminal discoveries, including first author publications in Science (2017), Cell (2018) and Nature Protocols (2017). She was also awarded three international postdoctoral fellowships, from the prestigious Human Frontier Science Fellowship, German and Swiss National Science Foundation.

She then embarked as an independent group leader at the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute (ARMI, Monash). Her research group contributed to the generation of iBlastoids (Nature, 2021) and discovered RNA asymmetries in early mouse embryos (Nature Communications, 2023). In 2019, she was awarded the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Azrieli Scholarship. This was followed by an NHMRC Ideas Grant (2020-2024), an NHMRC EL2 Investigator Grant (2021-2026) and an ARC Discovery Project Grant (2026-2029). As a real mark of her scientific excellence, A/Prof Zenker received the Sylvia&Charles Viertel Senior Medical Research Fellowship (2023-2027), the Eduard Kellenberger Medal (2023) and the ANZSCDB Emerging Leader Award (2025).

Florey Institute