Dr. Sheng Xu is a tenured professor and the inaugural Director of Emerging Technologies in the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine at Stanford University, with a courtesy appointment in Electrical Engineering. He earned his B.S. degree in Chemistry from Peking University and his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Subsequently, he pursued postdoctoral studies at the Materials Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Dr. David Cox is an Assistant Professor of Genetics and by courtesy of Medicine (Hematology) at Stanford University and Principal Investigator of the Cox Lab (coxlab.bio). He is also a ChEM-H Institute Scholar and Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator.

Dr. Yaochun Yu's research focuses on functional environmental microbiology and environmental analytical chemistry to uncover and harness microorganisms for chemical biotransformation. Dr. Yu's lab integrates high-resolution mass spectrometry, meta-omics sequencing, molecular microbiology and biochemistry, and computational modeling to identify the functional microbes, genes, and enzymes that drive these processes. Building on these mechanistic insights, they aim to develop environmentally benign chemicals and novel biosolutions for bioremediation and waste-to-resource recovery.

Dr. Stefano Ermon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University.

Dr. Robert Hawkins is interested in the cognitive mechanisms that allow people to flexibly communicate, collaborate, and coordinate with one another in social interactions. He received his PhD in Psychology from Stanford University in 2019 and was a C.V. Starr Fellow at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute prior to starting as an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Stanford in 2024.

Dr. Luis Hernandez-Nunez's lab seeks to uncover the fundamental principles of brain–body communication and whole-organism homeostasis. They combine genetics, optical physiology, systems neuroscience, engineering, and computational modeling to reveal how neural circuits across the body coordinate physiology and behavior.

With a primary focus on high-dimensional data, Dr. Mohammad Shahrokh Esfahani has significant expertise in developing machine learning tools. Much of his work involves constructing Bayesian models, which effectively convert 'prior knowledge', either inherent in the dataset or obtained from external sources, into mathematical terms—more specifically, prior probabilities.

Dr. Li Wang is a developmental neurobiologist with interdisciplinary training in genomics, proteomics, and neuroscience. His research seeks to understand how cellular and synaptic diversity arises during human brain development and evolution, and how these same mechanisms may be hijacked in diseases such as brain cancer.

Dr. Asiri Ediriwickrema, MD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Medicine (Hematology) at the Stanford University School of Medicine. His clinical focus is on the diagnosis, evaluation, and management of patients with myelodysplastic neoplasms and clonal hematopoiesis. 

The brain is a fascinatingly complex and delicate system of biomolecules, cells, and dynamic interactions that must be carefully maintained to support human health. When this balance is disrupted, disease can arise. Neurodegenerative dementias including Alzheimer’s disease are highly prevalent and profoundly devastating, yet remain largely untreatable or incurable.