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SPEAKERS

Plenary Speakers

Meet the distinguished plenary speakers who will share their expertise, insights, and unique perspectives at this year’s IVBM.

Professor Ralf Adams

Director, Department of Tissue
Morphogenesis, Max-Planck-Institute for Molecular Biomedicine

GERMANY

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Professor Katerina Akassoglou

Director, Centre for Neurovascular Brain Immunology, Senior Investigator, Gladstone Institutes Professor, Department of Neurology, University of California

UNITED STATES

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Professor Kari Alitalo

Director of the Translational Cancer Medicine Research Program and Scientific Director of the iCAN Precision Cancer Medicine Flagship in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Helsinki.

FINLAND

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Professor Gabriele Bergers

VIB-Center for Cancer Biology, Dep of Oncology, KU Leuven

BELGIUM

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Professor Anne Eichmann

Ensign Professor of Medicine (Cardiovascular Medicine) and Professor of Cellular And Molecular Physiology, Yale University

UNITED STATES

Professor Luisa Iruela-Arispe

Department of Cell and Developmental Biology, Northwestern University

UNITED STATES

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Professor Gou Young Koh

Distinguished Professor, KAIST


SOUTH KOREA

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Professor Paul Kubes

Canada Excellence Research Chair in Immunophysiology and Immunotherapy

CANADA


Professor Taija Makinen

Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology

FINLAND

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Professor Tohru Minamino

Department of Cardiovascular Medicine, Juntendo University Hospital



JAPAN

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Professor Stefania Nicoli

Director of the Zebrafish Phenotyping Core for Precision Medicine, Internal Medicine and Genetics; Co-Director, Yale Cardiovascular Research Center (YCVRC)

UNITED STATES

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Professor Guillermo Oliver

Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine



UNITED STATES

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Professor Kristy Red-Horse

Professor of Biology and Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, Stanford University & Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

UNITED STATES

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Professor Didier Stainier

Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research in Bad Nauheim



GERMANY

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Professor Bin Zhou

Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences


CHINA

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Professor Ralf Adams

Director, Department of Tissue
Morphogenesis, Max-Planck-Institute for Molecular Biomedicine

GERMANY

BIOGRAPHY

Ralf Adams started his independent career at the Cancer Research UK London Research Institute in 2000. Later, he became director at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine and professor at the University of Münster, Germany. The main research interests of Ralf Adams are vascular biology, the growth and organ-specific specialization of blood vessels, and the crosstalk with cells in the surrounding tissue. A key discovery by his team is the identification specialized vessel subpopulations in bone with critical functional roles in skeletal development, bone homeostasis, age-related bone loss, and osteoporosis. His research uses advanced mouse genetics and confocal/two-photon microscopy together with a range of cell biology approaches. Ralf Adams is an elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation. He has received the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society, the Werner Risau Memorial Award, the Malpighi Award of the European Society for Microcirculation, and the Feldberg Prize.

Professor Katerina Akassoglou

Director, Centre for Neurovascular Brain Immunology, Senior Investigator, Gladstone Institutes Professor, Department of Neurology, University of California

UNITED STATES

BIOGRAPHY

Katerina Akassoglou is a Professor of Neurology at UCSF, a Senior Investigator at Gladstone Institutes and Founder and Director of the Center for Neurovascular Brain Immunology. She has pioneered studies on vascular mechanisms of inflammation and tissue repair and discovered the molecular interface blood proteins utilize to interact with immune and nervous system cells, as a common thread driving autoimmune, neurodegenerative and vascular diseases. She developed a first-in-class fibrin-targeting immunotherapy currently in Phase 1b clinical trials in Alzheimer’s disease and ophthalmic diseases. She has authored over 110 publications and is a named inventor on 11 issued and several pending patents. She is the scientific founder of Therini Bio and she was named by the San Francisco Business Times among the 2021 Most Influential Women in Bay Area Business. She was awarded by the White House the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the Barancik Prize for Innovation in Multiple Sclerosis Research, the Vilcek Prize in Creative Promise honor, the Pharmacia-ASPET Award, and the Alzheimer’s Association’s Zenith Fellows Award. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Neurology, an elected Fellow of ASPET, the National Academy of Inventors, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Professor Kari Alitalo

Director of the Translational Cancer Medicine Research Program and Scientific Director of the iCAN Precision Cancer Medicine Flagship in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Helsinki

FINLAND

BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Kari Alitalo is a Research Director and Academician at the Wihuri Research Institute and in Translational Cancer Biology Research Program at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki.  He is known for the discovery and characterization of several vascular receptor tyrosine kinases and growth factors, as well as the meningeal lymphatic vascular system. Dr. Alitalo and his collaborators have contributed to research on the translational aspects of vascular growth factors in development, physiology, and disease, with a special focus on the lymphangiogenic growth factor VEGF-C and its receptor VEGFR-3, angiopoietins and their receptors, and VEGF-B as a growth factor for the coronary vasculature.

Professor Gabriele Bergers

VIB Center for Cancer Biology, Department of Oncology, KU Leuven

BELGIUM

BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Gabriele Bergers is a Professor of Oncology at the University of Leuven and a group leader at the Vlaams Instituut Voor Biotechnologie (VIB)-Center for Cancer Biology in Leuven since 2016. Prior, she followed the faculty rank at the University of California, San Francisco, and was a Professor in the Department of Neurological Surgery and a PI in the Brain Tumor Research Center (BTRC) at the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of California, San Francisco until 2016.

The overall research interest of her group relates to the tumor vasculature, which entails an integral and critical component of the tumor microenvironment and closely interacts with distinct cell constituents of the heterogeneous tumor community. Such crosstalk is pivotal not only for the genesis and progression of a tumor but also for the tumor’s ability to resist therapeutic elimination.

Over the last years, her group has made seminal discoveries in the heterogenous crosstalk of the vascular immune axis and identified several intimate regulatory mechanisms between angiogenesis and immunosuppression that provide novel target possibilities to enhance the effects of cancer therapy by modulating the tumor vascular system and its communication with immune cells; among those, to induce high endothelial venules and subsequent tertiary lymphoid structures, with the overarching goal to sensitize and enhance an immune response in cancer patients to thwart tumors and metastases and invigorate tissue homeostasis.

For her research, Dr. Bergers has received several awards, including the Sidney Kimmel, the Sandler Opportunity, UCSF Breakthrough Biomedical Research, and the Judah Folkman Award. She has acted as an external advisory board member for a number of universities and pharmaceutical companies; most recently for Mestag Therapeutics. Dr. Bergers was the co-director of the U54 Tumor microenvironment Brain Tumor Center at UCSF until 2016. She was a Scientific co-founder of Oncurious.

Professor Luisa Iruela-Arispe

Professor and Chair, Department of Cell and Developmental Biology, Northwestern University

UNITED STATES

BIOGRAPHY

Luisa Iruela-Arispe, Ph.D., is Stephen Walter Ranson Professor and Chair of the Department of Cell & Developmental Biologyat Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Born in Spain, she immigrated to South America to attend school in Argentina and Brazil. She received her Ph.D. in 1989, followed by postdoctoral training at the University of Washington in Seattle. From 1994 to 1998, she was an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. Arispe subsequently joined UCLA in 1998 before moving to Northwestern in 2019 to chair the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology.  Her vision is to decode the vascular system at every level: from molecules to medicine and to drive transformative discoveries that create lasting, impactful advancements.  She was the first recipient of the Judah Folkman award (2009) and was president of the North American Vascular Biology Organization (2006-2007). More recently, she was recognized as a Fellow of the American Society of Cell Biology, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was elected a foreign member of the Belgian Royal Academy of Medicine. 

Professor Gou Young Koh

Distinguished Professor, KAIST

SOUTH KOREA

BIOGRAPHY

Gou Young Koh is the Director of the Center for Vascular Research at the Institute for Basic Science and a Distinguished Professor at the KAIST Graduate School of Medical Science and Engineering. He serves as an External Member of the Max-Planck Institute, an Associate Member of EMBO, and a member of both KAST and the National Academy of Sciences, Republic of Korea. Over the past three decades, he has devoted his career to discovering and elucidating growth factors that regulate microvasculature, including those that shape tumor vessels. During this period, he and his research team have made numerous influential advances and breakthroughs in the fields of angiogenesis and lymphangiogenesis. Notably, they discovered and engineered several potent modulators of angiogenesis—three angiopoietin-based proteins, COMP-Ang1, DAAP, and ABTAA—arising from their sharp insights and inventive strategies. He has also made seminal contributions to defining the unique features and regulatory principles of tumor vasculature, as well as identifying key factors governing organotypic angiogenesis and vascular homeostasis. Recently, he has led landmark work revealing essential regulators that preserve the integrity of specialized lymphatic vessels, including meningeal lymphatics and their connections, enabling CSF drainage. In recognition of his exceptional scientific achievements and lasting impact on biomedical research, he has been honored with the Kyung-Am Prize (2011), the Asan Award in Medicine (2012), the Samsung Ho-Am Prize in Medicine (2018), and the Top Scientist Award of Korea (2023).

Professor Taija Makinen

Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology

FINLAND

BIOGRAPHY

Taija Mäkinen obtained her PhD from the University of Helsinki and completed postdoctoral training at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried, Germany. She previously served as a group leader at the Cancer Research UK London Research Institute (now the Francis Crick Institute) and later as Professor at Uppsala University. In 2024, she returned to Finland and currently serves as Director of the Wihuri Research Institute and Professor at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on the mechanisms regulating the lymphatic vascular system and its roles in health and disease.

Professor Tohru Minamino

Department of Cardiovascular Medicine, Juntendo University Hospital

JAPAN

BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Tohru Minamino is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Cardiovascular Biology and Medicine, Juntendo University Graduate School of Medicine. He graduated from Chiba University, Faculty of Medicine in 1989, and won the PhD degree from the University of Tokyo in 1997. He is a medical cardiologist and research scientist focusing on molecular mechanisms of aging. He has started his major research focusing on cardiovascular aging at Harvard Medical School, and his research interests have currently been growing in the biology of aging including metabolic pathways of longevity and senolysis. He published more than 400 papers including Nature, Nature Medicine, Cell, Cell Metabolism, and Lancet. Dr. Minamino has won several awards including Award of International Symposium on SHR, Jokichi Takamine’s Award in Japanese Society of Cardiovascular Endocrinology and Metabolism, Satoh Memorial Award in Japanese Circulation Society, and Erwin von Bälz Award (1st prize). Because of his achievements, he also has won prestigious grants, including AMED-CREST, AMED-Moonshot, and Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas. He has actively played important roles as a director, chairman, or president in various international scientific societies. In addition, he has contributed to the development of Japanese scientific programs by acting as a program officer for the Japan Society for Promotion of Science, Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development, and Japan Science and Technology Agency.

Professor Stefania Nicoli

Director of the Zebrafish Phenotyping Core for Precision Medicine, Internal Medicine and Genetics; Co-Director, Yale Cardiovascular Research Center (YCVRC)

UNITED STATES

BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Stefania Nicoli is an Associate Professor Tenure at Yale School of Medicine, in the Departments of Internal Medicine, Genetics, and Pharmacology. She obtained her B.S. in Pharmaceutical Biotechnology from the University of Milan and her PhD in Biomedical Biotechnology from the University of Brescia. She performed postdoctoral research at University of Massachusetts, and specialized in microRNA-based regulatory mechanisms in vascular biology.

Her laboratory has over a decade of experience investigating the intersection of non-coding RNA, post-transcriptional mechanisms, and vascular resilience. The long-term goal of the Nicoli lab is to understand what genetic mechanisms are responsible for ensuring robust and resilience vasculature in the face of environmental perturbations. Her laboratory takes a multi-disciplinary approach, using tools from cell and RNA biology to dive deeply into foundational biological mechanisms that may be leveraged to to address current health challenges. Their studies on the role of miRNA in endothelial cells have made important contributions to vascular biology, notably their transformative work in uncovering specific signaling pathways controlling the endothelial-to-hematopoietic transition, buffering environmental insults and genetic noise to control vascular phenotypic variation, and identifying new behaviors related to endothelial cell specification, formation, and morphogenesis. The group’s work on endothelial cells and non-coding RNA have profoundly affected scientific thinking about vascular development.

Professor Guillermo Oliver

Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine

UNITED STATES

BIOGRAPHY

Research in the Oliver’s lab aims to address key aspects related to the development and the functional roles of the lymphatic vasculature in normal and pathological settings. Almost 25 years ago, we identified Prox1, the master regulator required for the development and maintenance of the lymphatic vasculature. We also showed that lymphatic endothelial cell fate is plastic and reprogrammable and provided the first evidence showing that lymphatic malfunction promotes obesity. More recently we identified the lymphoangiocrine protein Reelin as a gene required to regulate cardiac growth and repair. Dr. Oliver is a recipient of the North America Vascular Biology Organization Meritorious Earl P. Benditt Award, the Lymphatic Research Foundation Leadership Award, and is elected to the Latin America Academy of Sciences and a fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Sciences.

Professor Kristy Red-Horse

Department of Biology and the Institute for Stem Cell Biology & Regenerative Medicine at Stanford University, Investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute

UNITED STATES

BIOGRAPHY

Kristy Red-Horse, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Biology and the Institute for Stem Cell Biology & Regenerative Medicine at Stanford University and an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Her research focuses on the mechanisms of blood vessel development, regeneration, and repair. During her PhD, she investigated how the placental vasculature connects with the maternal circulation, and as a postdoctoral fellow, she identified the progenitors of coronary arteries. Her lab now studies coronary vessel formation and regeneration with the long-term goal of developing strategies to promote therapeutic vascular growth to treat heart disease.

Professor Didier Stainier

Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research in Bad Nauheim

GERMANY

BIOGRAPHY

Didier Stainier is the director of the Department of Developmental Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research, Bad Nauheim (Frankfurt), Germany.  He studied Biology in Wales, Belgium and the USA (Brandeis University) where he got a BA in 1984.  He then received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Biophysics from Harvard University (1990) where he investigated the cellular basis of axon guidance and target recognition in the developing mouse brain with Wally Gilbert.  After a Helen Hay Whitney postdoctoral fellowship with Mark Fishman at the Massachusetts General Hospital (Boston) where he initiated the studies on zebrafish cardiac development, he set up his lab at the University of California San Francisco in 1995, where he expanded his research to investigate questions of cell differentiation, tissue morphogenesis, organ homeostasis and function, as well as organ regeneration, in the zebrafish cardiovascular system and endodermal organs.  In 2012, he moved to the Max Planck Institute where his laboratory continues to utilize genetic approaches to investigate cellular and molecular mechanisms of developmental and regenerative processes in both zebrafish and mouse.  More recently, his group has also started studying mechanisms of genetic compensation in a number of model systems including zebrafish, mouse, C. elegans, and Neurospora.

Professor Bin Zhou

Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences

CHINA

BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Bin Zhou is a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Shanghai. He completed his MD at Zhejiang University (2002) and his PhD at Peking Union Medical College (2006), followed by postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School. He established his independent research laboratory at CAS in 2010. Professor Zhou’s laboratory investigates the fundamental principles of cell origin and fate plasticity. His work seeks to understand how these processes direct organ formation, enable tissue repair, and become dysregulated in disease. A hallmark of his research is the creation of pioneering genetic methodologies, including dual recombinase-mediated systems and cell-contact genetic approaches. These genetic tools provide exceptional spatial and temporal precision for mapping cell lineages and manipulating genetic programs directly within living organisms. His contributions to the fields of developmental and regenerative biology have been honored with several distinctions, including the International Society for Heart Research – Outstanding Researcher Award, the Chinese Society for Cell Biology – Outstanding Achievement Award, the Xplorer Prize, and recognition as a New Cornerstone Investigator.