Kazuto Yamashita is a researcher of diagnostic field in Central Research Laboratories, Sysmex Corporation (Kobe, Japan). The company provides diagnostic instruments, reagents and related software all over the world. He got B.S. and M.S. from Department of Chemistry, Kobe University. After he joined Sysmex Corporation (2016 –), he focused on protein chemistry, especially for the aggregation of proteins, and assay development using fully automated immunoassay system. Currently, he is working on the development of new reagents aiming for a blood-based diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease.

Dr. Charles S.Y. Yang finished PhD program of Physics at National Taiwan Normal University in 1999. In 2003, he served as an assistant professor at Institute of Electro-optical Science and Technology, National Taiwan Normal University. He promoted to be an associate professor in 2007. His academic interests included design, synthesis, and characterization of magnetic particles for bio-applications, and published more than 10 SCI papers. He quitted the faculty position and started up MagQu Co., Ltd. in 2008. One of the main products is the assay system for neurodegenerative biomarkers in human plasma. Dr. Yang received the 2020 Carl H. Rosner Entrepreneurship Award issued by IEEE Council on Superconductivity.

Yang Yang's research interest is assembling and accumulation mechanisms of various amyloids in Neurodegenerative diseases. Dr. Yang explored and characterized the cryo-EM structures of amyloid-β (Aβ) filaments from human brains with Alzheimer’s disease, and α-synuclein filaments from Parkinson’s disease and dementia with Lewy bodies. Dr. Yang received her Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular biology at the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, where she focused on GPCR related to diseases in the laboratory of Dr. Zihe Rao. She started her postdoctoral training in Dr. Sjors Scheres’ laboratory at the Medical Research Council, Laboratory of Molecular Biology to determine the structures of amyloid filaments.

I am a professor and neurologist at Soonchunhyang Medical University Hospital in Korea. My major is Dementia.

Katherine Yao is a research scientist at the University of Minnesota- Twin Cities in the United States. She researches in the Liao Lab, primarily studying neurodegenerative tauopathies. Under Dr. Dezhi Liao, she is currently investigating the role of tau in morphine-induced dendritic spine loss to identify novel drug targets for chronic opioid users with an increased deposition of hyperphosphorylated tau in the brain. She has also studied the implications of tau on CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) and has participated in interdisciplinary research in medicinal chemistry. Outside of her research, Katherine is devoted to improving healthcare accessibility in her community and is interested in health equity.

The Yassine lab specializes in how changes in lipid metabolism and nutrition affect the brain and the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The lab has a specific interest in studying how carrying the APOE4 allele, the strongest genetic risk factors for developing AD, and diabetes affect brain lipid metabolism and the response to the diet. Our approach combines basic science, clinical trials, and brain imaging studies.

Yee Jie completed her undergraduate studies in Pharmacology and Toxicology at The State University of New York at Buffalo and master’s degree in Pharmacology at King’s College London. Upon graduation, she worked as a research associate and PhD student under the supervision of Prof. Dean Nizetic at The Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, a partnership between Nanyang Technological University and Imperial College London. Later, she joined Prof. Lim Kah Leong’s laboratory and continues to be supervised by both professors. Her research focuses on using induced pluripotent stem cells and cerebral organoids to understand the role of BACE2 in Alzheimer’s Disease.

Pravin Yeapuri, is a postdoctoral research associate at the Dept. of Pharmacology and Experimental Neuroscience, University of Nebraska Medical Center, USA. His research is focused on modulating the immune system as a therapeutic target for neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease (AD/PD). He is investigating the role of T-cell subsets in disease progression and developing T-cell based therapies for AD/PD. Additionally, he is developing a novel CRISPR based humanized mouse models for Alzheimer’s disease that can be reconstituted with human immune system and “human like” microglia. The novel model overcomes the limitations of over-expression based transgenic animal models and develops clinical progression of amyloid pathology. In addition to providing a clinically relevant platform to evaluate AD therapeutics, he is utilizing these models to elucidate the role of human immune system in AD. Furthermore, he is investigating the role of neuroinflammatory diseases like HIV in AD disease progression.

Zheng Yin was born in Tangshan, China. He received Ph.D. degree in Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence in 2009 in the Department of Control Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. He joined Department of Radiology of Houston Methodist Research Institute, Weill Cornell Medical College in May 2007, and Since January 2020 he’s been an Assistant Professor of Computational Biology and Mathematics in Radiology at Houston Methodist Academic Institute, Weill Cornell Medicine. Zheng's research focuses on the advanced bioinformatics algorithms and computational systems biology methods required to process, analyze and integrate various types of –omics data with imaging, clinical and outcomes data. Recently, Zheng have been collaborating with neuroscientists in delineating novel pathways of Alzheimer’s disease for drug repositioning. Taking advantage of the multi-disciplinary environment and broad range of data, computing, drug screening resources and collaborations available in Houston Methodist, Zheng lead the development a recursive drug repositioning paradigm, inspired by the adaptive control theory, that iterates modeling, prediction, and validation steps to identify known drugs and bioactive compounds for treating AD/ADRD. The recursive paradigm converges technologies from bioinformatics, cheminformatics, medical informatics, artificial intelligence, high-content drug screening and systems biology modeling.

After receiving the M.D. in China, I pursued the Ph.D. in neuroscience at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. I am a research fellow at Oleg Butovsky Lab, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School. My research interest focuses on regulating the functions of microglia using genetical and pharmacological approaches and looking for translational targets to treat Alzheimer’s disease.