9th Annual Skin Symposium

Dr. Conor L. Evans is an Associate Professor at the Harvard Medical School, an Affiliated Faculty member of the Harvard University Biophysics Program, a Faculty member of the Laser Biomedical Research Center, and leads his lab at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Evans received his Bachelors of Science in Chemical Physics from Brown University and his PhD in Chemistry from Harvard University.

Dr. Evans is an academic editor for PLOS One and has written over 100 peer-reviewed publications. He holds 14 patents and patent applications and works to translate his technologies to the clinic. He serves the Wellman Center as Faculty Liaison  the Department of Defense, and focuses his efforts in the areas of Combat Casualty Care and Rehabilitative Medicine. Dr. Evans additionally serves as a faculty member of the Ludwig Center at Harvard
 

Dr. Luis Garza is a Professor & Daniel Nathans Scholar at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Department of Dermatology. He is a physician-scientist who sees Dermatology patients and also conducts research on skin disease. His laboratory is interested in regenerative medicine and innate immunity in the skin. Besides clinical care and research, Dr. Garza is also committed to teaching and is the PI/PD of a T32. Finally, he also works as the Vice-Chair of the department, coordinating research activities.

Emi K. Nishimura is a professor at The University of Tokyo. She is a dermatologist, MD PHD with her post-doc training at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and obtained her professorship at Kanazawa University in 2006, at Tokyo Medical and Dental University in 2009, and at The University of Tokyo in 2021.

Dr. Nishimura was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2022. She is particularly known for her pioneering work in identifying melanocyte stem cells; uncovering stem cell depletion and exhaustion during physiological tissue aging and its contribution to cancer development; and discovering the phenomenon and roles of cell competition among epidermal stem cells in tissue homeostasis, aging and tumorigenesis. She is also co-founder of EADERM Co., Ltd., a company developing new therapeutic drugs for skin disease and other age-associated conditions.
 

Carien Niessen is a molecular cell biologist and full professor at the University Hospital Cologne, University of Cologne. She did her PhD with Arnoud Sonnenberg at the Netherland Cancer Institute, Amsterdam, the Netherlands and her postdoc with Barry Gumbiner at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. After becoming a group leader at the Center for Molecular Medicine Cologne and the Department of Dermatology at the University of Cologne, she became a full professor in 2018. Since 2019, she heads the Department Cell Biology of the Skin and is the speaker of the excellence cluster CECAD focused on Aging and Aging-associated Diseases.

Maria Kasper is Associate Professor at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. She earned PhD in 2006 from the University of Salzburg in human genetics and molecular tumor biology. In 2013, after a 6-year postdoctoral training in Rune Toftgård’s lab in skin biology at Karolinska Institute, she established her research group in skin biology (stem cells, tissue repair, cancer initiation, and single-cell transcriptomics). The Kasper lab studies spatiotemporal processes to investigate how hair growth is coordinated, skin regenerates, wounds heal, and epithelial tumors initiate. Dr. Kasper has received national and international recognitions for her work, such as the Swedish Cancer Society Young Investigator Award, Ragnar Söderberg Fellow in Medicine, and the LEO Gold Award, and she is a coordinator of the Human Cell Atlas skin bionetwork.

Dr. Beronja is a Professor in the Human Biology Division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. My lab is focused on understanding how stem cell renewal and differentiation contribute to initiation of epithelial tumors, using mouse models of skin and head and neck cancer. My group employs a methodology I developed to rapidly introduce RNAi and cDNA molecules into mouse skin, to investigate gene function in epithelial growth. We also adapted this in vivo method to high-throughput gene function studies, thereby extending our experimental toolset to both whole-genome scale and to combinatorial studies, where consequences of functional repression of several genes in a cell can be addressed in vivo.