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

Florey Institute

Professor Clare Parish is Deputy Director of Science at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health in Melbourne, Australia, where she leads the Stem Cells and Neural Repair Group. After completing her PhD at Monash University, she undertook postdoctoral training in human stem cell biology at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden before returning to Australia in 2007. 

Her research focuses on using human pluripotent stem cells to understand neural development, model neurodegenerative diseases (namely Parkinson’s disease, and MND), and develop regenerative therapies for brain repair. Her team is a leader in advancing stem cell transplantation, gene therapy and biomaterial technologies to improve the safety, integration and effectiveness of neural grafts. 

Professor Parish has received numerous prestigious fellowships and research awards, including support from the Human Frontiers Science Program, the Viertel Foundation, NHMRC, Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s, the Michael J. Fox Foundation and the Medical Research Future Fund. She has published more than 135 research papers in leading journals and is recognised internationally for her contributions to stem cell biology, regenerative neuroscience and brain repair.

Murdoch Children’s Research Institute

Professor Enzo Porrello FISHR FAHMS is Director of Stem Cell Medicine, founding Co-Director of the Melbourne Centre for Cardiovascular Genomics and Regenerative Medicine, Node Director of the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Stem Cell Medicine (reNEW) and Head of the Heart Regeneration Group at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (since 2017). He previously held appointments as founding Co-Director of the UQ Centre for Cardiac and Vascular Biology and Head of the Heart Regeneration Group at The University of Queensland (2012-2017).Over the course of his career, Prof Porrello has made important contributions to our understanding of mammalian heart regeneration and has pioneered the development of human cardiac organoids for drug discovery.

Prof Porrello’s research has been recognised by numerous awards. He is an elected Fellow of the International Society for Heart Research and the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences. Prof Porrello is also a biotech founder - his companies Dynomics and Ibnova Therapeutics are developing new treatments for heart failure based on breakthrough stem cell technologies developed by his group.

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).

MCRI

Associate Professor Katie Ayers is Deputy Director of the Genomic Medicine Theme and co-lead of the Reproductive Development group at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI) in Melbourne, Australia. Her research focuses on the genetic and molecular mechanisms underlying gonad development and Variations/Differences of Sex Development (DSD) in humans. Katie has a background in genetics, genomics and developmental biology and is an international leader in the differences of sex development field. Katie also has a special interest in using stem cells to model human reproductive development and the conditions that affect it.

Flinders University

Professor Cedric Bardy is an ARC Future Fellow at Flinders University. He is the Founding Director of the Brain Organoid Therapeutics Screening Platform and the group leader of the Laboratory for Human Neurophysiology and Genetics.

Originally from the South of France, Cedric moved to Australia as a graduate student to earn a PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Sydney (2008). He then completed postdoctoral training at prominent institutions, including the Pasteur Institute (Paris, 2008-2011) and the Salk Institute in the laboratory of Prof Fred Gage (California, 2011-2016). He moved back to Australia at the end of 2016 to establish his independent research group at SAHMRI and Flinders University.

Cedric gained international recognition for inventing BrainPhys™, a neural medium that changed how human brain cells and organoids are cultured in vitro, and for pioneering some of the first iPSC models of brain disorders. Cedric’s team integrates patient-derived stem cells, electrophysiology, high-content imaging, transcriptomics, bioinformatics, and automated screening to predict therapeutic efficacy and neurotoxicity. Currently, his group use these methods across multiple disease programs, including childhood dementia, Parkinson’s disease and brain cancer.

Prof Bardy’s Publications: https://www.bardylab.com/publications.html

MCRI

Dr Peter Houweling is a Team Leader and Senior Research Fellow (Level C) at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and the University of Melbourne. After completing a PhD at the University of Sydney, he undertook postdoctoral training in skeletal muscle physiology, systems biology and genomics at the Institute for Neuroscience and Muscle Research, Children’s Hospital at Westmead, the University of New South Wales, and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden.

His research focuses on uncovering the molecular and physiological mechanisms underlying paediatric genetic muscle disorders, including Duchenne muscular dystrophy, facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy, nemaline myopathy and myotonic dystrophy. Peter leads a multidisciplinary team using advanced mouse and human induced pluripotent stem cell models to develop novel therapeutic strategies. He also established Australia’s first National Muscle Disease Bio-databank and co-founded FlexBio, an MCRI contract research platform supporting preclinical therapeutic development. With more than 60 peer-reviewed publications and over 3,700 citations, his research has been published in leading international journals, including Nature Communications, Science Advances and the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

ARMI/Monash University

QUT/MiPSET

UNSW

Professor Irina Voineagu is an NHMRC Investigator at UNSW Sydney, where she leads a laboratory investigating the mechanisms of gene expression regulation in the human brain. Her research combines high-throughput CRISPR screening, single-cell genomics, computational modelling and brain organoid systems to understand how non-coding regulatory elements and their chromatin regulation contributes to neurodevelopmental and neurological disorders.