Dr. Daniel Drucker is an Endocrinologist and Professor of Medicine in the Division of Endocrinology at University of Toronto. He holds the Banting and Best Diabetes Centre-Novo Nordisk Chair in Incretin Biology. His laboratory is based in the Lunenfeld Tanenbaum Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto and studies the molecular biology and physiology of the glucagon-like peptides.  Dr. Drucker received training in Internal Medicine and Endocrinology from the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and the University of Toronto, followed by a fellowship in molecular endocrinology at Massachusetts General Hospital. His discoveries have enabled development of several new therapies for the treatment of diabetes, obesity and intestinal failure. Drucker has received numerous international awards for his translational science and has been elected to Fellowship in the Royal Society (London) and the National Academy of Sciences (USA).

Margaret (Peg) McCarthy received a PhD from the Institute of Animal Behavior at Rutgers University, Newark NJ, completed postdoctoral training at Rockefeller University and was a National Research Council Fellow at NIH-NIAAA before joining the faculty of the University of Maryland School of Medicine in 1993. She was a Professor in the Department of Physiology before becoming the Chair of the Department of Pharmacology in 2011.

McCarthy has a long-standing interest in the cellular mechanisms establishing sex differences in the brain. She uses a combined behavioral and mechanistic approach in the laboratory rat to understand both normal brain development and how these processes might go selectively awry in males versus females. She has published over 200 peer-reviewed manuscripts and has been cited close to 10,000 times.

Margaret is the inaugural Director of the University of Maryland School - Medicine Institute for Neuroscience Discovery (UM-MIND). She is a Reviewing Editor for Journal of Neuroscience and eLife and a fellow with AAAS and ACNP, former President of Organization for the Study of Sex Differences and current President of the Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology.

François Bénard is a distinguished scientist at the BC Cancer Research Institute and Professor in the Department of Radiology at the University of British Columbia. He holds the BC Leadership Chair in Functional Cancer Imaging. As a clinician scientist, his research interests are in positron emission tomography (PET), nuclear medicine, cancer imaging and radiopharmaceutical therapy. His team developed several new radiopharmaceuticals targeting tumour receptors, notably peptides and small molecule ligands. He initiated the program that developed cyclotron production of ^99mTc, which completed clinical trials at multiple sites in Canada. He has established extensive multidisciplinary collaborations, and he and his colleagues were awarded the 2015 Brockhouse Canada Prize for Interdisciplinary Research in Science and Engineering by NSERC. He is the principal investigator of a new $23.7M Canadian initiative entitled ‘Rare Isotopes to Transform Cancer Therapy’, funded by the New Frontiers in Research Fund - Transformation program.

Stephanie Lheureux, MD, PhD is a Medical Oncologist, Clinician Investigator, Site Lead of Gynecology Oncology and co-director of the Beyond Chemotherapy Program at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. She holds the Westaway Chair in Ovarian Cancer Research and is an Associate Professor of Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto. Her clinical and academic interests are focused in gynecologic cancers and early drug development with an emphasis on translational research and have garnered two ASCO Merit awards. She received the 2019 Career Development Award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and the 2021 Young Investigator Award from University of Toronto Division of Medical Oncology. Internationally, she is co-Chair of the Translational Research Committee and Director representing Princess Margaret Consortium at the international Gynecologic Cancer InterGroup (GCIG). She is also a member of the Gynecologic Cancer Steering Committees at the US National Cancer Institute. In the last five years, she has >60 peer-reviewed publications in widely cited journals such as CA: Cancer Journal for Clinicians, Clinical Cancer Research, JAMA Oncology, Journal of Clinical Oncology, Lancet, Lancet Oncology and Gynecology Oncology. She is principal investigator or co-principal investigator of different clinical trials and in several large-scale peer reviewed funding opportunities from the Canadian Cancer Society Research Institute, Conquer Cancer Foundation/American Society for Clinical Oncology, Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, Ovarian Cancer Canada and Terry Fox Research Institute that converge preclinical and clinical areas of interest.

Dr. Viviana Simon is Professor of Microbiology, Medicine and Pathology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS) in New York CitProfessory, USA. She co-directs the Mount Sinai Center for Vaccine Research and Pandemic Preparedness.

Professor Simon is an international leader in virology and infectious diseases who has the scientific and translational skills needed to tackle big problems in medicine. She is an Elected Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and serves as an Editor for the Journal of Virology.

Professor Simon’s research provides novel solutions to infectious diseases with high public health concern by bridging basic research and translational medicine. Her work has shaped our understanding of HIV persistence, virus-host interactions and immune responses to viral infections. Her group has been at the forefront of SARS-CoV-2 research since the very beginning of the pandemic when NYC emerged as an early epicenter. Her multidisciplinary team has provided and continues to provide much needed knowledge on SARS-CoV-2 immunity in the context of evolving viral diversity.

Dr. Altice is a Professor of Medicine, Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale University where he serves as the Director of Clinical and Community Research, the Community Health Care Van and the HIV in Prisons Program. He leads several domestic and global health research initiatives, including in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and Latin America. Since 2004, he has been leading epidemiological, clinical trials and implementation research efforts to scale-up HIV treatment and prevention in Ukraine. This research has involved scale-up of opioid agonist therapies like methadone and buprenorphine, HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis, and TB treatment and prevention. His research is funded by the National Institutes of Health and has focused on implementation in addiction treatment, primary care, harm reduction and prison settings. The ongoing research efforts include disruptions to service delivery since the first invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2014, the COVID-19 pandemic and continue since the second invasion by Russia on February 24, 2022.