Chris Sander, PhD
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Short Bio: Christian Sander is a Computational Biologist and chair of the Computational Biology Programme at the Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. He originally trained as a physicist receiving his first degree from the University of Berlin in 1967. Later he gained a PhD degree after studying at the State University of New York, the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and the University of California, Berkeley. Sander's current research interests are in computational genomics and systems biology, with a focus on network pharmacology and the development of targeted combinatorial therapy in cancer. His group uses the results of high-throughput sequencing to compute protein 3D structures and functional sites; and studies the regulation of gene expression by small RNAs. In 2012, he is active in the International Cancer Genomics Consortium, the NIH Cancer Genome Atlas Project, the NCI Integrative Cancer Biology Program and a leader in the bioPAX and PathwayCommons community efforts to create an open-source information resource for biological pathways. He has published more than 250 peer-reviewed articles in physics and biology with an h-index of 100. Previously, Sander co-founded the research section of the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, England, and was founding chair of the department of Biocomputing at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg. He is a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology.

Temple F. Smith, PhD
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Short Bio: Temple F. Smith is university professor in biomedical engineering. In 1981 he developed together with Michael Waterman the Smith-Waterman algorithm, which serves as the basis for multiple sequence alignments, identifying the segment with the maximum local sequence similarity. He was director of the BioMolecular Engineering Research Center at Boston University for twenty years and is now Professor Emeritus. In 1969 he obtained his PhD in the Physics Department, University of Colorado at Boulder. Consecutively, he did his Postdoctoral research in the Department of Biophysics and Genetics, University of Colorado Medical School, Boulder.

Jun Wang, PhD
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Short Bio: Jun Wang is the Executive Director of the BGI (previously known as the Beijing Genomics Institute). He was instrumental in the 1999 founding and the growth of the BGI Bioinformatics Department, which is now widely recognized as one of world’s premier research facilities committed to excellence in genome sciences. Dr. Wang also holds a position as an Ole Rømer professor at the University of Copenhagen. He has authored 200+ peer-reviewed original papers – of which 73 are published in Cell, Nature (including Nature series), N Engl J Med., and Science (23 as cover story). Among those 73, Jun Wang is the first/co-first author or corresponding/co-corresponding author for 48 (13 as cover) of them. He has been recognized with an award from His Royal Highness Prince Foundation in Denmark, Nature’s 10 - the year in Science (2012); an Outstanding Science and Technology Achievement from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Top 10 Scientific Achievements in China, and the prize for Important Innovation and Contribution from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. His research focuses on genomics and related bioinformatics analysis of complex diseases and agricultural crops, with the goal of developing applications using the genomic information.