Invited Speakers
Ankur Singh is a Carl Ring Family Professor of George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology and Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. He serves as the Director of the Center for Immunoengineering at Georgia Tech. Before Georgia Tech, he was a faculty at Cornell University. His laboratory develops human immune organoids and enabling technologies to understand healthy and diseased immune cells and translate therapeutics. He has received funding from the National Institute of Health, National Science Foundation, Wellcome Leap HOPE, Department of Defense, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the Curci Foundation, and the Lymphoma and Leukemia Society. He has published >70 articles in peer-reviewed journals, including Nature Materials, Nature Methods, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Immunology, Nature Communications, Nature Reviews Materials, Nature Protocols, Science Advances, Cell Reports, PNAS, Blood, and Advanced Materials. He has written multiple editorials for Science Translational Medicine. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER, Society for Biomaterials Young Investigator Award, CMBE Young Innovator Award, CMBE Rising Star Award, 3M Faculty Award, DoD Career Award, Cornell’s Teaching Excellence Award, and Cornell’s Research Excellence Award. His immune organoids were identified among the Top 100 Discoveries of 2015 by Discover Magazine. He is the Founder and past Chair of the Immune Engineering SIG at the Society for Biomaterials and Controlled Release Society. He currently serves as the Associate Editor for Science Advances, Biomaterials, and Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering.
May Griffith is a Full Professor at the Department of Ophthalmology and Biomedical Engineering at Université de Montréal. She holds the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Biomaterials and Stem Cells in Ophthalmology and the Caroline Durand Foundation Research Chair in Cellular Therapy. May is also the Director of Emerging Technologies of the Quebec Vision Science Research Network. Her team pioneered the development of cell-free biomimetic materials that regenerated the human cornea in clinical trials for the first time, discovering that the adult human cornea is capable of regeneration. This world’s first achievement garnered worldwide media attention. It led to the current growing area of in-situ tissue regeneration attempts in the cornea and other organs in biomaterials and regenerative medicine. Her team was also the first to achieve stable regeneration in high-risk patients who reject conventional cornea transplantation by developing biomaterials with inflammation-suppressing properties. She is currently working on a simple-to-use liquid version of her corneal implants that can be delivered in all settings instead or requiring an operating room, to increase accessibility to the technology. Her injectable “LiQD Corneas” have been successfully tested in rabbits and mini-pigs. A PCT patent has been filed for these novel materials, and we have been able to convert them into bioinks for direct bioprinting into tissues.
Bruce Randall is the Director General of the Medical Devices Directorate (MDD) in the Health Products and Food Branch (HPFB) at Health Canada. In this role he is responsible for the evaluation and surveillance of medical devices in Canada. Bruce began his public service career as a biotechnology industry analyst at Industry Canada. He joined HPFB in 2006 as a Regulatory Project Manager working with the Oncology Division, and over the years, held increasingly senior positions, including Director of the Bureau of Product Review and Assessment in the Natural and Non-Prescription Health Product Directorate (NNHPD), acting Director General of NNHPD Director of the Bureau of Pharmaceutical Sciences, and Senior Executive Director in the Pharmaceutical Drugs Directorate (TPD). TPD is Canada’s regulator of prescription pharmaceuticals for human use. Bruce also led the launch of the Centre for Regulatory Innovation in the Regulatory Affairs Sector of the Treasury Board Secretariat. In this role, he was responsible for developing processes and guidance to support a whole of government approach to regulatory experimentation. This involved working with departments to respond to regulatory challenges being created by advanced technologies.