Emmanuelle Marie Charpentier (French pronunciation: [emanɥɛl maʁi ʃaʁpɑ̃tje]; born 11 December 1968) is a French scientist who studies microbiology, genetics, and biochemistry. She worked as a director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin starting in 2015. In 2018, she created a new research institute called the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens.
Jennifer Anne Doudna ForMemRS (born February 19, 1964) is an American biochemist who started important work in CRISPR gene editing and made key contributions to biochemistry and genetics. She won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Emmanuelle Charpentier for developing a method to edit genomes. She holds the Li Ka Shing Chancellor’s Chair Professor position in the chemistry and molecular and cell biology departments at the University of California, Berkeley.
Shuguang Zhang is an American scientist who studies living things. He works at a lab at MIT Media Lab called the Laboratory for Molecular Architecture. His research involves creating and studying biological molecules, especially proteins and peptides.
Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic (Serbian Cyrillic: Гордана Вуњак Новаковић) FRSC is a Serbian American biomedical engineer and university professor. She is a University Professor at Columbia University and also holds the title of Mikati Foundation Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Medical Sciences. She leads the laboratory for Stem Cells and Tissue Engineering at Columbia University.
Robert Samuel Langer Jr. FREng (born August 29, 1948) is an American scientist, engineer, and inventor. He is one of the nine Institute Professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Joseph Vacanti (born October 31, 1948) is an American pediatric surgeon and scientist who leads the Laboratory of Tissue Engineering and Organ Fabrication at Massachusetts General Hospital. He also holds the title of John Homans Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. He is one of the key figures in the development of tissue engineering, working with Robert Langer, Eugene Bell, and Yuan-Cheng Fung.
Anthony Atala (born July 14, 1958) is an American bioengineer, urologist, and pediatric surgeon. He holds the W.H. Boyce professorship in urology, serves as the founding director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and chairs the Department of Urology at Wake Forest School of Medicine in North Carolina.
Robert Lanza was born on February 11, 1956, in Boston, Massachusetts. He is an American medical doctor and scientist. He currently serves as the head of Astellas Global Regenerative Medicine and as the Chief Scientific Officer of the Astellas Institute for Regenerative Medicine.
Shinya Yamanaka (山中 伸弥, Yamanaka Shin’ya) was born on September 4, 1962. He is a Japanese scientist who studies stem cells and has won a Nobel Prize. He is a professor and former director of the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application at Kyoto University.
Sir John Bertrand Gurdon FRS was born on October 2, 1933, and passed away on October 7, 2025. He was a British scientist who studied how living things develop. He is most famous for his important research on moving nuclei between cells and cloning.