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.
Dr. Francis Collins is a physician-scientist. Under his direction, the Human Genome Project produced the first finished sequence of the human DNA instruction book in 2003. From 2009 to 2021, Collins served under three Presidents as the Director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the largest supporter of biomedical research in the world. Following a year in the White House as the President’s Acting Science Advisor, he oversees a research laboratory as a Distinguished Investigator in the intramural program of the National Human Genome Research Institute. He also leads a bold administration initiative to eliminate hepatitis C in the United States. His contributions to science, medicine, and society have been recognized by the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Science, and the Templeton Prize. His most recent book is The Road To Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust (Little Brown and Worthy, 2024).
Dr. Camargo joined the Children’s Hospital and the Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology Department at Harvard University in 2009. Dr. Camargo was named a 2009 V Foundation Scholar and is the recipient of the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award. Most recently, he has received the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science and the ISSCR’s Dr. Susan Lim Award for Outstanding Young Investigator. In February 2022, Dr. Camargo was named the first Regenerative Biology Endowed Chair, in recognition of his scientific contributions and strong leadership.
Dr Ekong is a professor of pediatrics and surgery at Georgetown University School of Medicine, Washington, DC, and an attending physician in pediatric transplant hepatology at MedStar Georgetown University, Hospital, Washington, DC.
Dr Ekong attended medical school in Nigeria and proceeded to the United Kingdom and United States for residency and fellowship training in pediatrics, pediatric gastroenterology, and pediatric transplant hepatology.
In addition to her clinical work, Dr Ekong is an active researcher.
The Ekong laboratory interest is in mechanisms that underlie regulatory T cell dysfunction in autoimmune and alloimmune liver disease after liver transplantation. Inflammasome activation, Human Endogenous Retrovirus reactivation, Endoplasmic Reticulum stress with unfolded protein response activation contribute to regulatory T cell dysfunction, so a major focus of the laboratory is to understand these phenomena in molecular terms. The Ekong laboratory has a strong history of collaborative work with key collaborations with laboratories at the NIH, Yale University, Columbia University, and Imperial College, London, UK.
Dr. Lijian Hui is the PI in Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology (SIBCB). He is currently the Assistant Director of SIBCB , board member of Chinese Association of Cell Biology, President of Chinese Association of Cell and Gene Therapy, editorial board member of Cell Stem Cell, Hepatology etc.
Dr. Hui studies molecular pathology of liver diseases, with the focus on cell identity conversion, i.e., dedifferentiation and transdifferentiation, in liver regeneration and tumorigenesis. His team demonstrated the conversion from fibroblasts into hepatocytes in vitro, thereby providing one of the first evidence of transdifferentiation in mammalian cells. His team is also among the first to report cell identity conversion in liverinjury and repair. Based on these fundamental findings, his team generates functional hepatocytes, hiHep and ProliHH, for clinical application. Innovative therapies based on these cells, namely bioartificial liver devices and encapsulated liver organoids, are now being tested in clinics. Dr. Hui is also the founder of Hexaell Biotech, which aims to helping liver disease patients with edge-cutting cell therapy technologies.
Dr. Hui has recieved several awards, including 10 Top Breakthroughs in Science and Technology of China, China Young Scientists Award, Natural Science Award of Shanghai Municipality, Tan Jiazhen Life Science Innovation Award etc.
Dr Kristin Knouse is the Whitehead Career Development Professor in the MIT Department of Biology and the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. She received a B.S. in biology from Duke University in 2010 and then enrolled in the Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) M.D.-Ph.D. Program, where she earned a Ph.D. through the MIT Department of Biology in 2016 and an M.D. through the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology in 2018. She conducted her doctoral research in the laboratory of Angelika Amon, where she developed tools to characterize large-scale somatic copy number alterations in mammalian tissues and then used diverse approaches to reveal the importance of tissue architecture for chromosome segregation fidelity in epithelia. In 2018, she established her laboratory as a Whitehead Fellow at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and was honored with the NIH Director’s Early Independence Award. In July 2021, she joined the MIT Department of Biology and Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research as an Assistant Professor. Her lab develops high-throughput functional genomics approaches to understand and modulate organ injury and regeneration.
Dr. Allison O’Neill is a Pediatric Oncology physician-scientist with a passion for translational research and expertise in the care of pediatric patients with solid tumors. She serves as the Clinical Director of the Pediatric Solid Tumor Program and Medical Director of the Liver Tumor Center of Excellence at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Boston Children’s Hospital. In her role as Director of the Solid Tumor Program, Dr. O’Neill’s overarching responsibilities include guiding clinical research initiatives in concert with their experimental therapeutics division and revising their current clinical care infrastructure. Dr. O’Neill is self-tasked with cultivating a programmatic mission surrounding multidisciplinary clinics, visibility in the rare tumor space, and expanding initiatives in immunotherapy. The Liver Tumor Center of Excellence collaboratively unites individuals of a broad multidisciplinary expertise to deliver care to children with these exceptionally rare tumors. Nationally, she chairs the Children’s Oncology Group Liver Tumor Committee which provides a far-reaching collaborative network through which to conduct clinical trials for patients with these rare and often difficult-to-treat tumors.
Dr. Quin Wills is a medical doctor with further degrees in genetics, mathematics, computational biology, and a doctorate in systems genomics, from Oxford and Cambridge Universities. He started his first drug discovery liver genomics company 17 years ago. More recently he founded and led Novo Nordisk’s Advanced Genomics Department, again focused on liver disease. Frustrated with the lack of therapeutic innovation in chronic diseases, Quin co-founded Ochre Bio, a liver RNA therapeutics company that differentiates itself in the ability to generate large-scale human discovery and validation data at its global R&D sites in Europe, Asia, and the US. A key innovation from Quin’s team’s at the intersection of dry-lab (machine learning) and wet-lab has been the ability to progress a hit to generating human data on the lead within weeks, not years. They do this using whole human livers that they maintain on machines.