Prof. Dr. Qingping Yao graduated and earned his MD from Inner Mongolia Medical College, China, in 1984. He trained in Internal Medicine and Rheumatology and obtained his Ph.D at Peking Union Medical College (PUMC) in 1993, then served as an attending rheumatologist and Associate Professor of Medicine at PUMC Hospital, one of the most prestigious medical institutions in China. Dr. Yao came to America as a visiting scholar in the Division of Rheumatology at Columbia University in 1997. He then served as a research associate and performed research on gene therapy for arthritis in Dr. Paul Robbins' laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh for five years. He retrained in American hospitals, including residency training in Capital Health System, New Jersey, and rheumatology fellowship training at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) from 2006 to 2008. He joined the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio and served as a senior rheumatologist in the top-ranked Department of Rheumatic and Immunologic Disease from 2008 to 2015, where he was the inaugural Director of the Clinic for Adult Autoinflammatory Diseases. Subsequently, he joined the Department of Medicine at Stony Brook University in August 2015. He is a Professor at the Department of Medicine and serves as Chief of the Division of Rheumatology, Allergy and Immunology. His subspecialty interests also include systemic lupus erythematosus, Sjὅgren's syndrome, and paraneoplastic rheumatic diseases.

Prof. Dr. Peter D. Gorevic is a board-certified Rheumatologist and Allergist/Immunologist. He is an Emeritus Professor of Medicine, former Chief of the Division of Allergy, Immunology, and Rheumatology at Stony Brook University, and former Chief of the Division of Rheumatology at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. Dr. Gorevic has been recognized as an international authority in amyloidosis and related diseases. He has conducted a basic, translational study of amyloidosis and its clinical trials. He is also an expert in the field of autoinflammatory disease, particularly familial Mediterranean fever. He is also an expert in cryoglobulinemia-associated diseases, including hepatitis C. In collaboration, he has published numerous articles in the field in the most prestigious journals, such as N Engl J Med, JAMA, and PNAS. Dr. Gorevic has joined the Division of Rheumatology, Allergy, and Immunology at Stony Brook University to continue his contribution to patient care, education, and research.

Prof. Dr. Greg Gibson is a Professor of Biology and Director of the Center for Integrative Genomics at Georgia Tech. He received his BSc majoring in Genetics from the University of Sydney (Australia) and a PhD in Developmental Genetics from the University of Basel. After transitioning to quantitative genetic research as a Helen Hay Whitney post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University, he initiated a program of genomic research as a David and Lucille Packard Foundation Fellow at the University of Michigan. He joined the faculty at Georgia Tech in the Fall of 2009, after ten years at North Carolina State University, where he developed tools for quantitative gene expression profiling and genetic dissection of development in the fruitfly Drosophila. He is now collaborating with the Center for Health Discovery and Well-Being on integrative genomic analyses of the cohort. Dr Gibson is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and serves as Section Editor for Natural Variation for PLoS Genetics. He has authored a prominent textbook, "Primer of Genome Science," as well as a popular book about genetics and human health, "It Takes a Genome".