Meet The Speakers

Audrey Tang is Taiwan’s digital minister in charge of Social Innovation.  Audrey is known for revitalizing the computer languages Perl and Haskell, as well as building the online spreadsheet system EtherCalc in collaboration with Dan Bricklin. In the public sector, Audrey served on Taiwan national development council’s open data committee and the 12-year basic education curriculum committee; and led the country’s first e-Rulemaking project.  In the private sector, Audrey worked as a consultant with Apple on computational linguistics, with Oxford University Press on crowd lexicography, and with Socialtext on social interaction design.  In the social sector, Audrey actively contributes to g0v (“gov zero”), a vibrant community focusing on creating tools for the civil society, with the call to “fork the government.” 

Experience:

• Chief Technology Officer, Inforian Inc. (1995-1997) 
• Consultant, BenQ Corp. (1998-2000) 
• President, OurInternet, Inc. (2000-2005) 
• Designer, Platform Specialist and Implementor, Haskell Language (2003-2010) 
• Consultant, S-Team Technology Co. (2004-2008) 
• Designer and Lead Implementor, Perl 6 Language (2005-2008) 
• Consultant, Socialtext Inc. (2008-2016) 
• Consultant on Cloud Services Localization, Apple Inc. (2010-2016) 
• Consultant, Oxford University Press (2014-2016) 
• Consultant, Executive Yuan "vTaiwan" project (2014-2015) 
• Member, K-12 National Curriculum Development Committee, National Academy for Education Research, Taiwan (2015-2016) 
• Minister without Portfolio, Executive Yuan, Taiwan (2016-Present)

Ed Bullmore MB PhD trained in medicine at the University of Oxford and St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London and completed a PhD in brain MRI statistical analysis at the Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London. He moved to Cambridge as Professor of Psychiatry in 1999 and was Head of the Department of Psychiatry from 2014-2021. He is currently Co-Lead of the Brain Mapping Unit, Director of the Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre, and Deputy Head of the School of Clinical Medicine; and a Non-Executive Director of Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Foundation NHS Trust. From 2005-2019, he worked half-time for GlaxoSmithKline, as VP Experimental Medicine, latterly focusing on immuno-psychiatry, as described in his best-selling book “The Inflamed Mind” (2018). He has published more than 500 scientific papers that have been highly cited. He has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and as a Fellow and Treasurer of the Academy of Medical Sciences.

Francesco Benedetti combined his research activities with everyday clinical work in the hospital, with university teaching appointments, and with coordination and leadership of research units in the broad field of psychiatry and clinical neurosciences. His main research interests are within the field of translational and reverse translational research in psychiatry and include brain imaging and neural correlates of psychiatric diseases and therapeutics, psychiatric genetics, chronobiology and chronotherapeutics of mood disorders, developing new treatment techniques based on the administration of environmental stimuli to synchronize the biological clock. Other areas of interest include clinical neuropsychology and animal models of psychiatric diseases

Current positions

(1) Associate Professor of Psychiatry, University Vita-Salute San Raffaele, Italy
(2) Head of the research unit ‘Psychiatry and Clinical Psychobiology at the Division of Neuroscience, Scientific Institute Ospedale San Raffaele, Milano

Hailan Hu is a Professor and Director of the School of Brain Science and Brain Medicine at Zhejiang University. She received a BA in Biochemistry from Beijing University and a PhD in neuroscience (with Corey Goodman) from UC Berkeley. She then did postoc research with Dr. Roberto Malinow at CSHL. Before joining Zhejiang University, she was a principal investigator at the Institute of Neuroscience, the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Her laboratory seeks to understand how emotional and social behaviors are encoded and regulated in the brain, with a main focus on the neural circuitry underlying depression and social dominance. Her team has identified the neural mechanism underlying the winner effect, by which individuals increase their chance of winning after previous victories. Her recent work has uncovered a new model to explain the etiology of depression and the rapid antidepressant actions of ketamine, involving NMDA receptor-dependent burst activity of lateral habenular neurons. Her work has led to the identification of several molecular targets (including T-type calcium channels, Kir4.1 channel, and bCaMKII) for developing new antidepressant drugs. She is a recipient of the IBRO-Kemali International Prize and the L’Oreal-UNESCO for Woman in Science International award.

Masashi Yanagisawa obtained MD (1985) and PhD (1988) degrees from University of Tsukuba with his discovery of endothelin. He started his own lab in 1991 as an HHMI Investigator at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, where he discovered orexin and stayed for 24 years. He started his current lab back in Tsukuba in 2010 funded by the FIRST program from MEXT, and established WPI-IIIS in 2012. He is a member of US National Academy (2003); his awards include the Medal with Purple Ribbon (2016), Asahi Prize, Keio Medical Science Prize (2018), and the Person of Cultural Merit (2019).

Serena is Gilbert H. Glaser Professor of Neurology and Chief, Division of Neurological Infections and Global Neurology at Yale University. Her clinical and translational research explores effects of HIV and other viral infections in the nervous system, focusing on effects of acute infection, antiviral and immune treatments, and cure strategies on viral pathogenesis and persistence in the central nervous system. She collaborates with colleagues of multiple disciplines in studies in the United States and in international settings, exploring questions of inflammation, injury, and viral reservoirs within the central nervous system. She has been active in the NIH-funded International AIDS Clinical Trials Group, co-leads the International NeuroHIV Cure Consortium, serves on the US DHHS Antiretroviral Treatment Guidelines Committee, CROI Program Committee, and currently serves as the Steering Committee Co-Chair for the NIH RECOVER study on long COVID. She also is a neurology physician who cares for patients with viral infections and neurological disorders in clinics at Yale.

Tom lnsel, M.D., a psychiatrist and neuroscientist, has been a national leader in mental health research, policy, and technology. From 2002-2015, Dr. Insel served as Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). More recently, he led the Mental Health Team at Verily (2015-2017); co-founded Mindstrong Health (2017-2019), a start-up building tools for people with serious mental illness; and served as a special advisor to California Governor Gavin Newsom (2019), helping on behavioral health issues. In 2020, he co-founded Humanest Care, a therapeutic online community for recovery. He currently serves on the boards of Foundation for NIH, Fountain House, Schaeffer Center for Health Policy, and the Steinberg Institute (Chair, 2019-2022) as well as being an advisor to several mental health start-ups (including Alto Neuroscience, Cerebral, Compass Pathways, Owl Insights, Koa Health, Valera Health). He is the author of Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health (Penguin Random House, 2022). With journalist co-founders, he recently launched MindSite News (www.mindsitenews.org), a non-profit digital publication focused on mental health issues. Dr. Insel is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and has received numerous national and international awards including honorary degrees in the U.S. and Europe. More info at www.thomasinselmd.com.