Saltiel Life Sciences Symposium 2025: Building the Next-Generation Genetic Toolkit

The 2025 Saltiel Life Sciences Symposium will examine the next-generation genetic tools that are unlocking new discoveries and understandings of human health and disease, from synthetic biology and protein engineering to epigenomics and genome editing.

Schedule

• 9:00 a.m. | Welcome
• 9:10 a.m. | Mary Sue and Kenneth Coleman Life Sciences Lecture: Tools for probing the assembly and function of ribosomes
  Clifford P. Brangwynne, Ph.D.
  Director of the Omenn-Darling Bioengineering Institute, June K. Wu ’92 Professor in Engineering, Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Princeton University; Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator
• 9:55 a.m. | Editing the epigenomes of human cells with CRISPR
  James Nuñez, Ph.D.
  Assistant Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley
• 10:25 a.m. | Synthetic signaling applications to control patterning and morphogenesis in developmental systems
  Leonardo Morsut, Ph.D.
  Assistant Professor of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, University of Southern California
• 10:50 a.m. | Morning break
• 11:10 a.m. | Programmable technologies for biology, genome editing, and mRNA therapies
  Omar Abudayyeh, Ph.D.
  Assistant Professor, Harvard Medical School; Investigator, Brigham and Women's Hospital
• 11:40 a.m. | A stem cell approach to human genetics: From CRISPR screens to genes, enhancers and diabetes risk variants
  Danwei Huangfu, Ph.D.
  Member, Developmental Biology Program, Sloan Kettering Institute; Professor, Cell and Developmental Biology Program, Weill Graduate School of Medical Sciences, Cornell University
• 12:10 p.m. | Engineering evolution: AI, synthetic biology, and high-throughput insights into developmental networks
  Justin Crocker, Ph.D.
  Group Leader, European Molecular Biology Laboratory
• 12:35 p.m. | Poster session and lunch (view poster session details)
• 2:00 p.m. | Optical control of endogenous proteins 
  Michael Lin, M.D., Ph.D.
  Professor of Neurobiology and Bioengineering, Stanford University
• 2:50 p.m. | Decipher spatial and cellular targets of drug actions 
  Li Ye, Ph.D.
  Abide-Vividion Chair in Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Professor of Neuroscience, Scripps Research; Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator
• 3:15 p.m. | Afternoon break
• 3:35 p.m. | Towards light-guided physiology: Optogenetics and biosensors to probe tissue-scale patterning
  Jared Toettcher, Ph.D.
  Deputy Director of the Omenn-Darling Bioengineering Institute, Associate Professor of Molecular Biology and Bioengineering, Princeton University
• 4:05 p.m. | How do cells create tissue-scale patterns
  Pulin Li, Ph.D.
  Eugene Bell Career Development Professor of Tissue Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Core Member, Whitehead Institute
• 4:35 p.m. | Tools for multiplexed and scalable observations of cell physiology
  Changyang Linghu, Ph.D.
  Assistant Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology and Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering, University of Michigan
• 5:00 p.m. | Closing remarks