Dr Emmanuelle Charpentier is a professor at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research and Hannover Medical School, Germany and the Laboratory for Molecular Infection Medicine at Umeå University, Sweden. Her seminal research unveiled the key mechanisms of the CRISPR-Cas9 system, laying the foundation for the use of CRISPR-Cas9 as a highly versatile and precise gene editing tool.

Emmanuelle studied biochemistry and microbiology at the University Pierre-and-Marie-Curie in Paris, France where she received her PhD in microbiology for her research performed at the Pasteur Institute. She spent five years working in the US, where she held research associate positions at the Rockefeller University, New York University Langone Medical Center, the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine and St Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Before taking up her current positions, Emmanuelle was heading a microbiology research group at the Max F Perutz Laboratories at the University of Vienna in Austria. In 2013, Emmanuelle received the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt professorship, an international award for research in Germany.

Dr Craig Mello is an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Blais University Chair in Molecular Medicine, and co-director of the RNA Therapeutics Institute at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Craig’s lab uses the nematode C. elegans as a model system to study embryogenesis and gene silencing. His collaborative work with Dr Andrew Fire led to the discovery of RNA interference (RNAi), for which they shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. RNAi allows researchers to rapidly knock out the expression of specific genes, thereby defining the biological functions of those genes. RNAi also provides a potential therapeutic avenue to silence genes that contribute to disease.

Before winning the Nobel Prize, Craig’s work on RNAi was recognized by several awards, including the National Academy of Sciences Molecular Biology Award, the Canadian Gairdner International Award, the Paul Ehrlich-and Ludwig Darmstaedter Award, and the Dr Paul Janssen Award for Biomedical Research. Craig is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.

Dr Chad Cowan is an associate professor at Harvard University in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, and at Massachusetts General Hospital, with appointments in the Center for Regenerative Medicine, the Cardiovascular Research Center and the Center for Human Genetics Research. He is an associate member of the Broad Institute and a principal faculty member of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, where he directs the Diabetes Disease Program and the iPS Cell Core Facility.

Chad has led or been a member of several large efforts to use stem cells to better understand disease, including the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute’s Next Gen iPS Cell Project and the Progenitor Cell Biology Consortium. More recently, Chad has focused on using genome editing tools as therapeutics.

Chad received his BA and BS, with honors, from the University of Kansas. He received his PhD from the University of Texas Southwestern at Dallas, garnering the Nominata award for most outstanding thesis. He subsequently completed a Damon Runyon fellowship with Professor Douglas Melton at Harvard University. He was named a Stowers Medical Investigator in 2006 and has been faculty member at Harvard University since 2008.

Dr Matthew Porteus is an associate professor of paediatrics, Department of Pediatrics; Divisions of Hematology/Oncology and Human Gene Therapy, at Stanford School of Medicine. His research is focused on developing homologous recombination-based therapies for genetic and other diseases. He has a clinical practice at the Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital, where he is an attending physician for the Pediatric Bone Marrow Transplant Service.

Matthew graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard University before completing his MD and PhD degrees at Stanford. His PhD focused on the molecular biology of mammalian forebrain development. He completed his residency training in pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital, and his fellowship training in Pediatric Hematology/Oncology at Boston Children’s Hospital and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

For his post-doctoral work, Matthew trained with Dr David Baltimore at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the California Institute of Technology. It was during his post-doctoral work that he began studying genome editing, and he was the first to show that engineered nucleases could be used to precisely modify human cells by homologous recombination.

Matthew was an assistant professor of pediatrics and biochemistry at UT Southwestern Medical School in Dallas before returning to Stanford in 2010 to take up his current role.

Dr Daniel Anderson is the Sam Goldblith Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is appointed in Chemical Engineering, the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Science and Technology. He is an intramural member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT.

His lab’s research is centered on developing new materials for medicine. He has pioneered the use of robotic methods for the development of smart biomaterials for drug delivery and tissue engineering. In particular, his work has enabled the rapid synthesis, formulation, analysis and biological testing of large libraries of biomaterials for use in medical devices, cell therapy and drug delivery. The advanced drug delivery systems developed in his laboratory have provided new methods for nanoparticulate and microparticulate drug delivery, non-viral gene therapy, siRNA delivery and vaccines.

Daniel received a BA in math and biology from the University of California at Santa Cruz and a PhD in molecular genetics from the University of California at Davis. He has published more than 230 papers, patents and patent applications. These patents have led to a number of licenses to pharmaceutical, chemical and biotechnology companies.