Speaker Bios

Dr. Irwin Arias is a triple Emeritus: Professor of Medicine, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Professor of Physiology and Medicine, Tufts University School of Medicine, and Senior Scientist at the National Institutes of Health where he continues to teach.

He has dedicated his career to bridging the gap between scientists in the lab and medical doctors in the clinic, continually building bridges to link basic biology to human disease. In his long and continuing career in liver-related science, medicine, and education, some of his most notable accomplishments include discoveries of mechanisms of inheritable jaundice, ABC transporters mediate bile transport, and that AMP Kinase and Liver Kinase-81 regulate hepatocyte polarization, mitochondrial fusion, ATP production, and bile transporters. These research outcomes established new paradigms for biliary secretion and led to molecular identification of inheritable liver diseases.

A founder of the American Liver Foundation (ALF) and long-term member of both the former New England Division and National Board of Directors, Dr. Arias has contributed substantially to the mission of ALF and his energy and passion for helping liver patients shows no signs of stopping. His support of young PhD and physician scientists interested in the pursuit of liver disease is nothing short of inspiring. Dr. Arias has been the recipient of many national and international honors and his course, “Demystifying Medicine”, which he established at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has gained national and global attention.

Alex K. Shalek, PhD (pronouns: he/him/his) is the Director of the Institute for Medical Engineering & Science (IMES), the Director of the Health Innovation Hub at MIT, and he is the J. W. Kieckhefer Professor in IMES and the Department of Chemistry at MIT, as well as an Extramural Member of its Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.  He is also an Institute Member of the Broad Institute, a Member of the Ragon Institute, an Assistant in Immunology at MGB, and an Instructor in Health Sciences & Technology at HMS. Dr. Shalek received his bachelor’s degree summa cum laude from Columbia University and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in chemical physics under the guidance of Hongkun Park, and performed postdoctoral training under Hongkun Park and Aviv Regev (Broad/MIT). His lab’s research is directed towards the development and application of new approaches to elucidate cellular and molecular features that inform tissue-level function and dysfunction across the spectrum of human health and disease. Dr. Shalek and his work have received numerous honors including a NIH New Innovator Award, a Beckman Young Investigator Award, a Searle Scholar Award, a Pew-Stewart Scholar Award, the Avant-Garde (DP1 Pioneer) Award from the National Institute for Drug Abuse (NIDA), and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in Chemistry, as well as the 2019-2020 Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award at MIT and the 2020 HMS Young Mentor Award.

Jonathan Weissman, Ph.D., studies how cells ensure that proteins fold into their correct shape, as well as the role of protein misfolding in disease and normal physiology. He is also widely recognized for building innovative tools for broadly exploring organizational principles of biological systems. These include ribosome profiling, which globally monitors protein translation, CRISPRi/a for controlling the expression of human genes and rewiring the epigenome, and lineage tracing tools, to record the history of cells. Dr. Weissman is the Landon T. Clay Professor of Biology and a member of Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, a Professor of Biology Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. 

Karl-Dimiter (Dimi) Bissig, MD, PhD, is the Chen Family Associate Professor at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He received his MD and PhD from the University of Bern, Switzerland. During his postdoctoral training at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, he pursued his longstanding interest in metabolic liver disease and established one of the first human liver chimeric mouse models, in which mice are repopulated with human hepatocytes. After establishing his independent laboratory, Dr. Bissig developed the first humanized xenograft model for inherited metabolic liver disease and has since generated numerous next-generation humanized mouse models to study human liver biology and disease. His current research focuses on translating fundamental biological discoveries into innovative therapies for liver disorders using advanced genome engineering, nucleic acid therapeutics, and novel cell-based approaches. More recently, his laboratory uncovered that toxic metabolites produced by the liver are responsible for the neurological manifestations of glutaric aciduria type I, fundamentally changing the understanding of disease pathogenesis. These studies demonstrated that liver-directed therapies can cure the disorder, establishing a new therapeutic paradigm for this devastating neurometabolic disease.

Katherine A. Fitzgerald, PhD, is Professor of Medicine, Chief of the Division of Innate Immunity, and Executive Vice Chancellor for Research at UMass Chan Medical School. She is an internationally recognized leader in innate immunity whose research has helped define the molecular pathways through which the immune system detects infection, cellular injury, and other threats.

Dr. Fitzgerald’s research focuses on the mechanisms of innate immune sensing and inflammatory signaling and their roles in infectious, autoimmune, autoinflammatory, and malignant diseases. Her laboratory has made foundational contributions to understanding how immune receptors recognize microbial and host-derived nucleic acids, activate interferon and cytokine responses, assemble inflammasomes, and initiate inflammatory forms of cell death. This work has advanced fundamental understanding of host defense and inflammatory disease while identifying pathways with significant potential for therapeutic intervention.

Dr. Fitzgerald received her BSc in Biochemistry from University College Cork, Ireland, in 1995 and her PhD in Biochemistry from Trinity College Dublin in 1999. Following postdoctoral training at Trinity College Dublin, she joined UMass Chan, where she established an internationally distinguished research program and rose through the academic ranks to become a tenured professor and institutional research leader.

Dr. Fitzgerald is an elected member of the Royal Irish Academy, the United States National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is also an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology. Her honors include the American Association of Immunologists–Thermo Fisher Scientific Meritorious Career Award, the St. Patrick’s Day Science Medal from the Government of Ireland and Science Foundation Ireland, and the Seymour and Vivian Milstein Award for Excellence in Interferon and Cytokine Research from the International Cytokine and Interferon Society.

In addition to her institutional leadership, Dr. Fitzgerald has held prominent national and international scientific service roles. She recently chaired the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Board of Scientific Counselors and is a past president of the International Cytokine and Interferon Society. She serves or has served on advisory boards and scientific committees for the Lupus Research Alliance, the Smith Family Foundation, the Cancer Research Institute Irvington Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, and the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation. She also advises biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies on emerging areas of immunology, inflammation, and therapeutic development.

Dr. Taub serves as Madrigal’s Senior Scientific and Medical Advisor. Dr. Taub served as Madrigal’s President, Research & Development from June 2019 and as Chief Medical Officer from July 2016 until April 2025. Dr. Taub also previously served as Executive Vice President, Research & Development, from July 2016 through June 2019 and as Chief Executive Officer from September 2011 to July 2016. Prior to joining Madrigal, Dr. Taub served as Senior Vice President, Research and Development of VIA Pharmaceuticals, Inc. from 2008 to 2011 and as Vice President, Research, Metabolic Diseases at F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG from 2004 to 2008. In those positions, Dr. Taub oversaw clinical development and drug discovery programs in cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, including the conduct of a series of Phase 1 and 2 proof of concept clinical trials. From 2000 through 2003, Dr. Taub worked at Bristol-Myers Squibb Company and DuPont, in a variety of positions, including as Executive Director of CNS and metabolic diseases research at each company. Before becoming a pharmaceutical executive, Dr. Taub was a tenured Professor of Genetics and Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and remains an adjunct professor. Dr. Taub is the author of more than 120 research articles. Before joining the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Taub served as an Assistant Professor at the Joslin Diabetes Center of Harvard Medical School, Harvard University and an associate investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dr. Taub has served on the board of directors of BriaCell Therapeutics Corp., a publicly traded immuno-oncology biotechnology company, since March 2019. Dr. Taub received her M.D. from Yale University School of Medicine and B.A. from Yale College.

Rebecca G. Wells received her undergraduate training at Yale, medical degree from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and internal medicine and gastroenterology/hepatology training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. She did postdoctoral work at Harvard Medical School and the Whitehead Institute. She has been on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania for 24 years, where she is now Professor of Medicine and Bioengineering. Dr. Wells studies the matrix and mechanical factors underlying diseases of the liver and bile ducts, particularly in fibrosis – she has been a leader in defining and appreciating the role of the mechanical changes driving fibrosis.

Vamsi Mootha is a Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School and Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He directs a research laboratory dual-localized at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute. His group focuses on mitochondrial biology and bioenergetics. He and his research team achieved a full characterization of the mitochondrial proteome, discovered all the molecular components of the mitochondrial calcium uniporter, and discovered dozens of genes and biochemical mechanisms underlying Mendelian forms of mitochondrial disease. His team made the unexpected discovery that low oxygen – hypoxia – can suppress diverse forms of mitochondrial disease in pre-clinical models. As a postdoctoral fellow he invented Gene Set Enrichment Analysis, an algorithm that was later adopted into a widely used software package. Vamsi completed his B.S. in Mathematical and Computational Sciences at Stanford, his MD in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, clinical training in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and postdoctoral training at Whitehead Institute. He is a recipient a MacArthur Prize, an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a recipient of a Padma Shri from the Government of India.

Xiaowei Zhuang is an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the David B. Arnold Professor of Science at Harvard University. She pioneered super-resolution and genome-scale imaging technologies. She invented a super-resolution imaging method, STORM, and discovered novel molecular structures in cells using STORM. She invented a genome-scale imaging method, MERFISH, which enabled spatially resolved single-cell transcriptomics, epigenomics, 3D genomics, and functional genomics. Using MERFISH, she discovered novel molecular signatures, spatial organization, and functions of cells in complex tissues. Zhuang is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Medicine, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the European Molecular Biology Organization. Her awards include the Ernest Solvay Prize, Dickson Prize in Medicine, National Inventors Hall of Fame, Dreyfus Prize in Chemical Sciences, Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, Heinrich Wieland Prize, Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics, Lurie Prize in Biomedical Sciences, Vilcek Prize in Biomedical Science, etc. 

Dr. Yasuko Iwakiri is a Professor of Medicine at Yale School of Medicine whose research focuses on how vascular and lymphatic systems regulate liver health and disease. Her laboratory studies liver sinusoidal endothelial cells, hepatic lymphatic vessels, and neuro-vascular niches that coordinate immune responses, inflammation, and tissue repair. Her work aims to uncover mechanisms underlying liver diseases such as portal hypertension, cholestasis, and alcohol-associated liver disease.  Currently, Dr. Iwakiri serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Hepatology, and Clinical and Molecular Hepatology.  She has previously held the same roles with Hepatology and Hepatology Communications. She reviews research grants for NIH and international funding agencies, and has mentored more than 70 trainees during her independent career. She also serves in leadership roles within the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD).