Leonard I. Zon, MD, is the Grousbeck Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Stem Cell Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator, and Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard University.

A hematologist/oncologist, Dr. Zon is recognized internationally for his groundbreaking work in blood stem cell biology and cancer. Dr. Zon pioneered the use of the zebrafish as an effective model for the study of the biology of blood formation, or hematopoiesis. His lab created a zebrafish model of melanoma, which has been used to define the early stages of cancer formation, mechanisms associated with melanoma, and the study of the cancer niche.

Dr. Zon is former president of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the founder and past president of the International Society of Stem Cell Research, and chair of the Executive Committee of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.

Dr. Vijay G. Sankaran is the Lodish Family Chair in the Division of Hematology/Oncology, Boston Children's Hospital; Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School; Attending Physician in the Dana-Farber/ Boston Children's Cancer and Blood Disorders Center.

He received a B.A. and M.S. from the University of Pennsylvania in biochemistry, an M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge in biochemistry, and earned his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard Medical School. He subsequently did a residency in pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital and Boston Medical Center, followed by a fellowship in pediatric hematology/oncology at Boston Children’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Dr. Sankaran has received a number of awards for his work on using human genetics to better understand the process of blood cell production, including most recently the 2018 Gale and Ira Drukier Prize in Children’s Health Research and the 2019 Seldin-Smith Award for Pioneering Research from the American Society of Clinical Investigation.

John Strouboulis was appointed Professor and Chair in Molecular Erythropoiesis at King’s College London in 2018. He is an expert in the transcriptional and epigenetic regulation of red blood cell differentiation (or erythropoiesis) using proteomic, genomic and functional approaches. He has made important contributions in our understanding of human globin gene regulation in vivo and of key transcription factor functions in erythropoiesis. Together with clinical colleagues and human geneticists, John Strouboulis is developing a translational research programme in sickle cell disease and other red cell disorders at King's.

John did his PhD at the MRC-National Institute for Medical Research in London on the developmental regulation of the human β-globin locus and a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institutes of Health on Polycomb Group. Subsequently, John joined the Department of Cell Biology at the Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands, as a Marie Curie Fellow and later as a senior staff scientist. Prior to his appointment at King's, John Strouboulis was Research Professor at the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology-FORTH in Heraklion, Crete, Greece and, prior to that, he was a senior group leader at the “Alexander Fleming” Biomedical Sciences Research Center in Athens, Greece. He has been awarded EMBO and HFSPO postdoctoral fellowships and a Wellcome Senior Research Fellowship. His research is presently funded by the MRC, The European Union and Action Medical Research. His research lab has also received support by the Chartwell Cancer Trust and KCH Charity.

Jian Xu, PhD., is a Member in the Department of Pathology at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. His laboratory pioneers a multidisciplinary approach to understand the transcriptional, epigenetic, and metabolic programs that control normal and malignant hematopoiesis. Dr. Xu received his PhD from UCLA and postdoctoral training with Dr. Stuart Orkin at Harvard Medical School as a Helen Hay Whitney-HHMI fellow. His studies with Dr. Orkin provide the first in vivo evidence that genetic inactivation of BCL11A is sufficient to ameliorate sickle cell disease (SCD) in preclinical models, laying the groundwork for ongoing development of gene therapies to target BCL11A for treating patients with the major hemoglobin disorders such as SCD and β-thalassemias.