Ruoxuan Dai is currently affiliated with the Helmholtz Zentrum München, Germany. She received her Master’s degree in Medicine from Tongji University in 2018. Since 2018, she has been a PhD student at the Helmholtz Zentrum München. Her current project focuses on investigating the role of macrophages in skin wound healing. Specifically, she is studying the fibro-immune mechanisms in the fascia, an understudied connective tissue layer that resides beneath the skin. Fascia biology is an exciting new research frontier and she is dedicated to advancing our understanding of how fascia-born cells contribute to the healing process.
Dr. Jin Tao, doctor of medicine, distinguished professor, doctoral supervisor, is currently the deputy dean of the School of Basic Medicine and Biological Sciences at Soochow University, and the director of the Department of Physiology and Neurobiology and the Centre for Ion Channelopathy at the same institution. In 2007, he received a doctorate in pharmacology from the National University of Singapore and Nanjing Medical University. From 2007 to 2009, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Pain Research Center, Washington University, St. Louis. He serves as the chairman of Suzhou University of the Democratic League, a member of the Suzhou Municipal Committee of the Democratic League, and the deputy director of the Jiangsu Provincial Higher Education Committee of the Democratic League. He is an editorial board member of Protein & Peptide Letters (included in SCI), Current Neurobiology, and the Research Journal of Pharmacology, as well as being a National Natural Science Foundation peer reviewer and a review expert for the Ministry of Education Doctoral Program Fund and the Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation Fund. In recent years, he has published more than 50 SCI papers, including 23 papers as the corresponding author in journals such as Science Signaling (Science sub-journal, cover paper), J Pineal Res, JBC, Endocrinology and Br J Pharmacol (single impact factor Maximum 15.2).
Dr. Hans-Günther Machens is a Professor at the School of Medicine and Health, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany. After studying medicine in Hanover, Göttingen, Heidelberg, and Chicago, he completed his PhD in 1988 in Heidelberg. He acquired his German medical board certification in surgery in 1995 and plastic surgery in 1999. During this time, he also earned his postdoctoral teaching qualification (habilitation) while conducting research into techniques for angiogenesis induction via cell-based gene transfer (1999). After holding senior physician positions in Hanover and Lübeck, in 2007 he was appointed Chair of Plastic Surgery and Hand Surgery at TUM. He is one of the founders of the Tissue Engineering competence center in Lübeck, director of various German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) projects focusing on tissue regeneration, and is responsible for setting up a CTA team (composite tissue allotransplantation) to perform extremity transplants at TUM’s Klinikum rechts der Isar. His research interests are focused on the study of tissue engineering, tissue regeneration, reconstructive surgery, and innovative applications for wound treatment. His research focuses primarily on new techniques for matrix-based angiogenesis induction in vitro and in vivo.
Dr. Yuval Rinkevich has been working at the cutting edge of our understanding of tissue/organ repair and regeneration for over 20 years. His passion and commitment to understanding healing responses and tissue rejuvenation has led his career track from the point of obtaining his PhD degree from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, where he studied whole body regeneration from single blood vessels in Protochordates. Today, he is the Director of the Helmholtz Institute of Regenerative Biology and Medicine at the Helmholtz Center, Munich, Germany. His lab fuses a focus on basic biology, continuing to push forward our understanding of tissue/organ repair and regeneration, with a vision to apply these findings to drug development strategies and translation to the clinic. Publication in high-impact journals including Nature and Science, numerous patents, and the support of prestigious awards, such as the ERC Consolidator Grant, highlight the quality of his team’s work. His latest work, describing the role of fascia and transfer of extracellular matrix in tissue scarring and fibrosis in multiple organ systems, is reinventing the way we look at tissue repair and regeneration. These findings provide a new perspective on the potential for clinical intervention, opening our minds to a revolution in antifibrotic therapy, a clinical area impacting fields of medicine from oncology to hepatology and pulmonology, and the potential to prevent and potentially resolve fibrotic disease.
