Speaker

Dr Tim Hirst is the Chairman and CEO of GPN Vaccines Inc. (https://gpnvaccines.com) a US biotechnology company with an Australian subsidiary conducting clinical trials of a new vaccine against the world’s foremost bacterial pathogen, Streptococcus pneumoniae. He is an entrepreneur and investor with extensive expertise in the life sciences, executive management and venture capital investment. He was previously CEO of ANU Connect Ventures, a $30M pre-seed VC fund based in Canberra, the Vice President and Deputy Vice Chancellor for Research & Innovation at The University of Sydney and Professor & Head of Microbiology at the University of Bristol, UK. He is an active angel investor working with investment groups throughout Australia and US to assist early-stage companies to raise capital and develop their innovative technologies. He is a Trustee Director of Griffin Accelerator Holdings Pty Ltd, Canberra’s leading business incubator. In 2022, TechBoard named him, Australian Angel Investor of the Year. Tim also holds positions as Non-Executive Chairman of Brain Changer Pty Ltd, Flex-G Pty Ltd, Dentroid Pty Ltd and Gamma Vaccines Pty Ltd, and as Director of PPB Technology Pty Ltd. He is also an Honorary Adjunct Professor at the University of Adelaide.

Yong Liu, PhD., Deputy Dean, School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Dr. Yong Liu is a professor at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications. He received his PhD from the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA) in 2008 and obtained his MSc from Beijing University of Technology in 2005. From June 2008 to January 2021, he worked at CASIA as an assistant/associate/full professor. He was a visiting scholar from April 2011 to March 2012 in the Brain Mapping Unit at the University of Cambridge.

To date, Dr. Yong Liu has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed journal articles (including Science Advances, eClinicalMedicine, Advanced Science, Brain, Biological Psychiatry, Science Bulletin) and has an h-index of 55. In recent years, Dr. Yong Liu’s work has focused on studying generalizable, reproducible, and neuroscientifically interpretable imaging biomarkers for Alzheimer’s Disease based on multi-center and multi-modal imaging.

Ir Tommy Lam serves as a Senior Engineer of the Medical Device Division in the Department of Health of the HKSAR Government.  He is mainly responsible for the implementation of the Medical Device Administrative Control System and management of relevant IT services, with a view to facilitating the development of a long-term statutory regulatory framework for medical devices in Hong Kong.  Drawing on a background in electronics and biomedical engineering, Ir Lam previously worked in various divisions at the Electrical and Mechanical Services Department, including hospital engineering, innovation, and technology and media relations.  His work there focused on adopting artificial intelligence and digitalization in engineering services, an area of knowledge he now applies to the medical device regulatory field.

Dr. Yu Rong, an IEEE Senior Member and recognized high-level overseas talent by Shenzhen, serves on the AI for Good Technical Advisory Committee of the International Telecommunication Union. He received his Ph.D. from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2016. He joined Tencent AI Lab in 2017 as a principal researcher and moved to Alibaba DAMO Academy in 2024 to lead research on scientific multimodal models.

His work centers on graph learning and large language models, focusing on structural data modeling, cross-modal systems, and applications in drug discovery, healthcare, and materials science. He has over 11,000 Google Scholar citations (H-index 42). Two papers were were selected as the most influential papers by PaperDigest. He is listed among Stanford/Elsevier’s Top 2% Scientists, ranked second in the mainland China machine learning subfield of the AMiner Rising Star list (2020–2023), and was nominated as a Spotlight Recipient of the 2025 WAIC Yunfan Award.

At Tencent, he built the molecular property prediction module for the iDrug platform and led the championship team in the NeurIPS 2022 Open Catalyst Challenge. At DAMO, he led development of the “Lingchu” medical multimodal large model, surpassing the proprietary models such as GPT-4 in medical multimodal question answering.

Huang Zhiwei, Director of the faculty of Life Science and Medicine at Harbin Institute of Technology, is a recipient of the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars and a Changjiang Scholar Distinguished Professor of the Ministry of Education. He earned his Ph.D. in 2008 from China Agricultural University and the National Institute of Biological Sciences, Beijing. From 2009 to 2012, he conducted postdoctoral research in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at Harvard University in the United States. In March 2012, he returned to China and established his laboratory at Harbin Institute of Technology. Professor Huang Zhiwei is dedicated to systematic research on fundamental scientific questions in human adaptive immunity (T and B cells) and prokaryotic adaptive immune mechanisms. Professor Huang has received numerous grants and awards, including the New Cornerstone Investigator Program, the National Key R&D Program Project, the Science Exploration Award(XPLORER PRIZE).

Dr. Yi Shi currently works as a principal investigator and full-time professor in the Guangzhou National Laboratory, China. He has graduated from Zhejiang University in 2006, and then moved to the Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) to continue his PhD training under the supervision of Prof. George Fu Gao. He has obtained his PhD degree in 2011, and then he worked as assistant professor and associate professor in different institutions of CAS. Since 2016, he started to work independently as principal investigator and full-time professor in the Institute of Microbiology, CAS, and from March 2025, he moved to the Guangzhou National Laboratory. His expertise mainly focuses on the molecular mechanisms of emerging virus infection and regulation by the host, especially how the virus breakthrough the host barrier to infect humans, and the development of broad-spectrum antivirals and vaccines against different emerging viruses. He has made remarkable progress on a range of important human pathogens including influenza virus, Ebola virus, ZIKV, arenaviruses, coronaviruses and mpox virus. He has published more than 100 refereed papers in the international academic journals including Cell, Nature, and Science.

Dr. Ben Zhao, with over 20 years of experience at FDA, Abbott, and Shanghai Pharma, specializes in targeted delivery, siRNA, and liposomes. He served as a senior FDA CDER reviewer, focusing on CMC and cGMP, and developed nanomedicine guidelines. Holding FDA Level III certification, he received the FDA Special Achievement Award. In 2014, he founded Haichang Biotech for RNA drugs and 505(b)(2) products. Currently, he is Vice Chairman of PhIRDA and leads the IFPMA ICH Q1 Expert Group, promoting global regulatory harmonization.

Dr. Qiangfeng Cliff ZHANG is a tenured Associate Professor at the School of Life Sciences, Tsinghua University, and a Principal Investigator at the Tsinghua-Peking University Joint Center for Life Sciences. His research lies at the nexus of structural biology, genomics, and AI-informed big data analysis. His lab has co-invented high-throughput methods for analyzing intracellular RNA structures and designed AI algorithms for single-cell genomics, spatial transcriptomics, and structural biology data analysis. As a corresponding author, he has published in Cell, Nature Genetics, and other leading journals. He leads multiple research projects, including the National Outstanding Young Scientist Fund, the key projects from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the National Key R&D Project. Dr. ZHANG’s honor include the X-Explorer Award for 2024, the Fifth Promega Biochemistry Award in 2022, and the Sanofi-Cell Research Outstanding Paper Award in 2021. His work was selected as one of the Top Ten Advances in Bioinformatics in China in 2019, 2021 and 2024. He is Director of the Artificial Intelligence and Life Sciences Committee of the China Society of Bioinformatics (under preparation) and serve on the editorial board of Molecular Cell, Cell Systems, and Genomics Proteomics & Bioinformatics.

Dr. Wayne Lee earned his PhD in Pharmacology from The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in 2009, followed by postdoctoral training in Orthopaedics and Traumatology at CUHK, specializing in cell therapy. With over 127 publications in peer-reviewed international journals and a Scopus H-index of 36, his research is supported by prestigious grants, including RGC, HMRF, ITF, InnoHK, and ASBMR. Dr. Lee serves on the Youth Committee of the Journal of Orthopaedic Translation and is Co-Director of the CUHK-Nanjing University Joint Scoliosis Research Society. From 2022 to 2025, he was the Site Authorized Person at the ATP GMP Center, Hong Kong Institute of Biotechnology, securing the first local institution-led ATP manufacturing license and releasing several CAR-T products for clinical trials. His work focuses on GMP-compliant advanced cell therapies and novel drug interventions for musculoskeletal disorders. In 2024, Dr. Lee co-founded Trilateral Biopharmaceutical, a spin-off from the InnoHK Center for Neuromusculoskeletal Restorative Medicine, driving innovation in regenerative medicine to improve patient outcomes.

Dr. Du Xin, the CEO of Shenzhen Eglion Pharmaceuticals Co., Ltd. and a former FDA review expert, obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Florida and completed his postdoctoral training at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He has worked at the FDA and several pharmaceutical companies. Currently, he serves as the CEO of Shenzhen Eglion Pharmaceuticals Co., Ltd. Dr. Du Xin has extensive experience in biopharmaceuticals and small molecule products, and possesses unique regulatory experience combining FDA and industry perspectives. He is well-versed in the regulations of the FDA and globally regarding drug development, production, quality management, clinical design, and trials.