Speakers

Jennifer Van Eyk, Ph.D, FAHA
Professor of Medicine, Biomedical Sciences and Pathology, Erika Glazer Endowed Chair in Women’s Heart Health, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Los Angeles, USA

Dr. Jennifer Van Eyk, Ph.D, an international leader in clinical proteomics, focuses on developing personalized biomarkers and individualized therapies via developing technical pipelines for large scale quantitative protein mass spectrometry. She received her PhD from the University of Alberta, Canada and carried out PDFs in Heidelberg, Germany and Chicago, USA. She started her lab at Queen’s University, Canada, was recruited to Johns Hopkins University and then to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. There she directs the Advanced Clinical BioSystems Research Institute with the motto, “from discovery to patient care” and founded the Precision Biomarker Laboratories to move assays to clinical practice.

Bernhard Kuster
Technical University of Munich, Germany

Bernhard Kuster is Full Professor of Proteomics at Technical University of Munich (TUM), Director of the Bavarian Biomolecular Mass Spectrometry Center, Fellow of the TUM Institute for Advanced Study, Principal Investigator of the German Cancer Center and a member of the German National Academy of Science Leopoldina. He has co-founded two start-up companies that operate in the area of proteomics and artificial intelligence. Bernhard’s research in the area of cancer focuses on understanding how therapeutic drugs impact cellular signaling pathways that are active in individual patients and how this information can be used for therapy recommendations in molecular tumor boards.

Bing Zhang, Ph.D.
Professor of Molecular and Human Genetics, Baylor College of Medicine

Dr. Bing Zhang is a Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) Scholar, McNair Medical Institute Scholar, and Professor of Molecular and Human Genetics at Baylor College of Medicine. Over the past decade, he has led an internationally recognized research program in computational cancer proteogenomics, focusing on integrating genomic and proteomic data to enhance understanding of cancer biology and improve diagnosis and treatment. Dr. Zhang has authored over 180 peer-reviewed papers, including more than 20 in Nature, Nature Methods, Cell, and Cancer Cell. His pioneering efforts were recognized with the Gilbert S. Omenn Computational Proteomics Award in 2023.

David Thomas
University of New South Wales

Prof. David Thomas is the inaugural Director of the Centre for Molecular Oncology at the University of New South Wales, and Head of the Genomic Cancer Medicine Laboratory at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research. He is also CEO of Omico, a not-for-profit company he established to lead a national precision medicine program for patients with rare and early onset cancers. As a clinician-scientist, his focus is on the application of genomic technologies to the understanding and management of cancer, particularly sarcoma. He has over 200 research publications, including lead or senior author papers in Science, Cancer Cell, Journal of Clinical Investigation and Lancet Oncology.