Speaker

Ye Yin is CEO of BGI Group. He is PhD from Copenhagen University, Senior Scientist in genomics research, Adjunct Professor in Dalian University of Technology, Member of Expert Panel on Human Genetic Resources Management in China, Committee Member of Chinese Society for Measurement in Biology, Standing Committee Member of CACA Committee on Cancer Public Education, Director-General of Guangdong Innovation and Technology Alliance of IVD (ITA-IVD), Director-General of Shenzhen Life-tech Industry Alliance and Director-General of Shenzhen Association of Standardization.

As the Associate Director of Therapeutics at HKSTP, Dr. Weng Li leads the account management of Therapeutics companies and Advanced Therapy Products (ATP) initiatives. She is also spearheading the Clinical Translational Catalyst programme, which aims to drive the clinical translation of biotech companies through funding support and more effective engagement with comprising clinicians, CROS, etc., through the HKSTP Clinical Professional Network. Weng Li sits on the HKSTP Clinical Research Ethics Committee and Joint Management Committees with HKU and CUHK ATP collaboration to establish PIC/S GMP facilities. Weng Li obtained her PhD in Pharmaceutical Technology from University College London and MBA from Imperial College London. She then worked at GlaxoSmithKline in the United Kingdom, serving as Lead Chemometrician in the New Product Development division. Weng Li was the Senior Research Director at Athenex HK prior to joining HKSTP.

Jingyi Yu is an OSA Fellow, IEEE Fellow, and ACM Distinguished Scientist. He directs the MoE Key Lab of Intelligent Perception and Human-Machine Collaboration and is the Inaugural Chair Professor at ShanghaiTech University, where he also serves as Vice Provost and Dean of the School of Information Science and Technology. He received his B.S. with honor in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics from Caltech (2000) and a Ph.D. in EECS from MIT (2005). Yu’s research spans computational imaging, computer vision, computer graphics, and bioinformatics. His honors include the NSF CAREER Award, AFRL Young Investigator Program Award, and the Shanghai Magnolia Memorial Award. He has won multiple top-venue awards, including the 2025 ACM SIGGRAPH Best Paper Award, the 2025 SIGGRAPH Best in Show (Emerging Technology), and a 2024 SIGGRAPH Best Paper nomination. His group earned the 2024 CVPR Best Student Paper Award. He pioneered the use of large visual models in chip design, earning DAC Best Paper Honorable Mentions in 2024 and 2025. He has served on leading journal editorial boards, was Program Chair for CVPR 2021 and ICCV 2027, and General Chair for ICCV 2025.

Max Yu is a member of National Association for Hong Kong and Macau Studies and was the former chairman of CRCP Life Science Fund. He was the senior strategy expert and senior deputy general manager at the Strategic Management Department of China Resources Group. He was also a director of China Shanxi Fenjiu liquor (SSE), China Resources Pharmaceuticals (HKSE), and China Resources Building Materials Technology (HKSE). Max has over thirty years of experience in corporate strategy, investment, international trade, and financial management.

Dr. Yangyu Wu is the Chief Scientist of Shuimu Biosciences, specializing in cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) for membrane protein structure determination and drug discovery. He earned his Ph.D. in Biology from Tsinghua University and completed postdoctoral training at Yale University School of Medicine under Prof. Fred Sigworth, a pioneer in cryo-EM and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Wu has over a decade of experience in membrane protein structural biology, with publications in leading international journals and presentations at major scientific conferences. His work has successfully resolved challenging membrane protein targets, providing critical insights for structure-based drug development. Since returning to China, Dr. Wu has led the establishment and optimization of Shuimu’s cryo-EM platform, with a focus on practical and efficient workflows for sample preparation, data collection, and processing. He has advanced the development of electrospray-based vitrification and its integration with graphene grids, improving data quality and resolution. Currently, he is building scalable cryo-EM solutions to accelerate structural studies of key therapeutic targets, including GPCRs, ion channels, and transporters, driving AI-enabled innovation in life sciences.

Dr. Yuan obtained his PhD in neurobiology at Yale University. He then completed his postdoctoral training at Stanford University. Dr. Yuan started his own laboratory at Fudan University on 2021. He is an expert of in vivo optical microscopy and his work primarily focuses on combining high-performance imaging of neuron activities, mathematical modeling, and single-cell manipulation to understand and dissect the principles underlying information representation and neurocomputation. He is also interested in figuring out the information-level abnormality in pathological conditions. Dr. Yuan has published numerous high-profile papers and has been cited for more than 4000 times. His work includes the following: Science 2025; Nature 2022; Nature Methods 2020; Neuron 2016, 2015; Nature Communications 2023, 2015; eLife 2024; Journal of neuroscience 2019, 2016; PNAS 2017; Biological Psychiatry 2018.

Professor Zeng received her MD/PhD and postdoctoral training at the University of Pennsylvania, School of Medicine. She is a fellow of the Academic Advisory Committee of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, a Changjiang Scholar, and a chief scientist of the National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program). She is currently Distinguished Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Director of the Shanghai Institute of Medical Genetics. Her research focuses on human genetics and developmental biology, particularly the diagnosis and treatment of genetic diseases, stem cell biology, and embryonic development. She has published in leading journals such as Nature and PNAS and has been recognized with awards including second prize of National Prize for Natural Sciences, first prize of Natural Science Award of the Ministry of Education, and inaugural Young Women Scientist Award from TWOWS. She chairs the Human and Medical Genetics Committee of the Genetics Society of China and also serves as Secretary-General of the International Stem Cell Foundation.

Ao Zhang is currently a Distinguished Professor and Dean of the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China. His research interests are focused on small-molecule drug discovery based on medicinal chemical biology. He has co-authored over 200 publications in prestigious journals and holds over 100 patents. Three candidate drugs developed initially by his group have now been investigated in phase I-III clinical trials.

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.

Professor Daisy Dexing Zhang ‘s research interests are mental health and community primary care, mainly including the evaluation of mental health interventions (such as various mindfulness-based interventions) and comprehensive health interventions, as well as epidemiological studies and systematic reviews of common physical, mental and social health problems. Professor Zhang has received more than 40 grants as PI, Co-I and main project coordinator in the past ten years, including several large-scale charitable community comprehensive service projects. She has published over 100 peer-reviewed research papers (Google Scholar h-index=28, i10-index=63; Scopus h-index=21), a book chapter in the Oxford Textbook of Public Mental Health, and is also an editorial board member of SCI journals such as Nursing Report and BMC Public Health.