Thomas Hartung is the Doerenkamp-Zbinden-Chair for Evidence-based Toxicology in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, with a joint appointment at the Whiting School of Engineering. He also holds a joint appointment for Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Bloomberg School. He is adjunct affiliate professor at Georgetown University, Washington D.C.. In addition, he holds a joint appointment as Professor for Pharmacology and Toxicology at University of Konstanz, Germany; he also is Director of Centers for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT, http://caat.jhsph.edu) of both universities. CAAT hosts the secretariat of the Evidence-based Toxicology Collaboration (http://www.ebtox.org), the Good Read-Across Practice Collaboration, the Good Cell Culture Practice Collaboration, the Green Toxicology Collaboration and the Industry Refinement Working Group. As PI, he headed the Human Toxome project funded as an NIH Transformative Research Grant. He is Chief Editor of Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. He is the former Head of the European Commission’s Center for the Validation of Alternative Methods (ECVAM), Ispra, Italy, and has authored more than 600 scientific publications (h-index 100).

Lena Smirnova is an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Center of Alternatives to Animal Testing at Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on the development of new advanced cell culture methods (microphysiological systems), which allows to study the development of the brain without using animals. Her main interest is to understand how the environment can interplay with genetics and what the consequences are for such interactions for brain development. She received her PhD from Charité Free University, Berlin and her postdoctoral training from the Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, Berlin. She is a Co-organizer of a series of conferences on Microphysiological Systems (MPS) and president of the International MPS Society.

Itzy E. Morales Pantoja is an IRACDA-ASPIRE postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, in Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on improving the biocomplexity of brain organoids for the study of neurodegeneration. She earned her PhD on cellular and molecular medicine at the interface of neuroimmunology and stem cells, from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Lomax Boyd is an Assistant Research Professor at the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University. His research investigating the origins of the human brain has provoked curiosity and wonder about what it means to be human, but also raised ethical questions about how to seek, understand, and incorporate public epistemologies in discovery science. Previously, Lomax served as a Civic Science Fellow examining the ethical issues raised by human brain organoid technology, and conducted his postdoctoral research Neuroengineering human speech and language circuit into non-huma models at The Rockefeller University in New York City, after receiving his PhD in neurogenetics from Duke University.

Julian Kinderlerer is the emeritus professor of intellectual property law at the university of Cape Town, a former professor for biotechnology and society at TUDelft in the Netherlands, and Professor of biotechnology law at the university of Sheffield in England where he was director of the Sheffield institute of biotechnology law and ethics. He was a member of the European Group on Ethics in Science and new technologies (EGE) for over 15 years and served as its elected President for about 6 years. The EGE is the primary advisor on ethical issues to the Commission, Council and Parliament of the European Union. He has acted as a director at the United Nations Environment Program for bio safety and as a specialist adviser to the House of Lords on agricultural biotechnology.

Alysson R. Muotri a professor in the Departments of Pediatrics and Cellular & Molecular Medicine at the University of California, San Diego, is focusing his research on solving one of life’s greatest evolutionary and developmental perspective, differentiating stem cells to recreate “brain organoids” in the controlled setting of a lab. This work has implications for the generation of human disease models by determining the molecular and cellular mechanisms driving neurological complex disorders, such as autism. It is also creating opportunities for identifying and testing novel therapeutic approaches; the nature of this work reduces the amount of time required for moving new drugs to clinical trials. He obtained his B.S. in Biological Sciences and PhD in Genetics from the University of Campinas, Brazil and did his postdoctoral training on neuroscience and stem cells at the Salk Institute, La Jolla, CA.

David Gracias is a Professor at the Johns Hopkins University with a primary appointment in the Whiting School of Engineering and secondary appointments in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Medicine. He has made pioneering contributions to micro and nanotechnology as described in over 200 technical publications, including several in high impact journals such as Science. He is also a prolific inventor and holds 36 issued US patents, with notable inventions on microchip integration, self-folding polyhedra, integrated biosensors, and untethered microgrippers. He is an elected Fellow of diverse prestigious international scientific and engineering societies, including AAAS, IEEE, APS, RSC, and AIMBE.

Brett J. Kagan is Chief Scientific Officer of Cortical Labs, based in Melbourne, Australia. Brett completed post-doctoral training in bioinformatics and regenerative medicine and has a PhD in stem cell therapy for neonatal brain injury. Brett’s key focus is on harnessing biological neurons to elicit intelligent behavior and leverages a multi-disciplinary approach in this endeavor.

Rhein Parri is currently Professor of Pharmacology at Aston Pharmacy School, Aston University UK. He is a neuroscientist, with particular interest in the role of astrocyte neuron interactions in brain function. He completed his PhD in Neurophysiology at Southampton University UK before conducting postdoctoral research at UCSF on voltage gated calcium channel modulation, and Cardiff University, Wales on somatosensory thalamus function and astrocyte signaling. He is coordinator of “NeuChip”, an EU funded “Future emerging technologies” project on the potential of hIPSC neurons to for biological AI. Comprising multidisciplinary groups from the UK, France, Spain, Switzerland, and Israel.

Erik Johnson is a research scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, working in the Neuroscience Group. He joined JHU/APL after completing his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a brief stint at a robotics start-up. His research work has focused on two key areas 1) software systems for large-scale neuroinformatics and 2) biologically inspired machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms.

Carey E Priebe is the Director of the Mathematical Institute for Data Science (MINDS) and Professor of Applied Mathematics and Statistics (AMS) at Johns Hopkins University. Carey has been at Hopkins since 1994 and is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the American Statistical Association.