The Annual Meeting Program Highlights the Breadth of Global Talent

Developing the ISSCR Annual Meeting program has been both a privilege and a responsibility. Together with an incredible team of dedicated colleagues we have committed to highlight the entire breath of our field in partnership. The annual meeting is a time during which the ISSCR community comes together to be nourished by meaningful content and to learn from colleagues who may be at different stages of their careers, have different personal histories, come from different parts of the world, or come from different subfields of interest within the regenerative and stem cell field. Creating an Annual Meeting to make this possible involved recruiting program chairs and a program committee that complemented and expanded my view and embraced the process of working together as a team to reach our aspirations.  

Thus, to develop the content for the ISSCR 2025 Annual Meeting, I started by sharing with Eugenia Piddini the aspiration I had. Once she accepted the role of program chair, she started to connect with a large number of colleagues and identified Kathy Cheah as her partner and co-chair for the program. Eugenia and Kathy were joined by the incredible ISSCR team composed of Liz Weislogel, Erika Kowalczyk, Shuangshuang Du, and Ayesha Kahn, who had long-standing competence in assembling annual programs. They subsequentially reached out to many colleagues across the globe to create a comprehensive list of talented scientists from a variety of backgrounds and fields. From these consultations they identified colleagues who generously committed to become program committee members: Vivian Gama and Tina Mukherjee oversee the area for Pluripotency and Development, Takanori Takebe and Alessandro Aiuti for Clinical Application, Kirsten Sadler Edepli, and Joseph C. Wu for Disease Modeling and Drug Discoveries, Angela R. Wu and Lygia Pereira for Organ Generation and Regeneration, and Richard J. Gilbertson and Lijian Hui for Somatic Stem Cells and Cancer. Eugenia and Kathy encouraged all of them to contribute beyond their assigned areas and into those of their colleagues, to build a more integrated and compelling program.

Eugenia and Kathy, in partnership with the committee members, expanded well beyond existing networks in a global search for talented scientists as speakers, many of whom we have yet to hear from at an ISSCR meeting.

As a result of the 2025 Annual Meeting Program Committee’s commitment, 70 percent of our invited speakers are first-time ISSCR speakers. Members of our global community are coming together to nourish each other with inspiring science. We are all eager to hear from them. These scientists come from 22 different countries, spanning North America, Asia, Europe, Latin America, Middle East, and Africa, will explore 16 different tissue types, and cover 11 model systems.

ISSCR's communications and marketing team members Kym Kilbourne and Megan Koch recently conducted a Q&A with Kathy Cheah and Eugenia Piddini, and I wanted to share just a few reflections from that conversation that highlight the collective work we did throughout the last year.

Q: Describe the program committee’s approach?

EP: I think one way to highlight the outstanding contribution of the 2025 Program Committee is the team spirit and how hard they work to bolster each other working seamlessly across the natural boundaries of their tracks to suggest names and topics and speakers for the benefit of the whole program.

Q: What really stands out to you about the 2025 program?

KC: I hope that this meeting has something for everyone who is working in stem cell research and would perhaps come to an ISSCR meeting for the first time because they see the breadth and the spectrum of speakers that we have. We had a strong vision of wanting to include excellent scientists at different career stages from across the world.

EP: The idea of stem cell science as something all-encompassing that goes from basic developmental biology to cell therapy and translation and everything that is in between. We wanted to capture that breadth because we think it is important for the field, because that diversity can help foster new interdisciplinary science and collaboration but also because we wanted every member of the ISSCR to see themselves reflected in the program. I think breadth and inclusivity permeate all aspects of how we shaped the program.

KC: We hope this annual meeting will foster and accelerate new collaborations especially between East and West and South. And thereby expand the diversity of the ISSCR community.

Q: Valentina, what inspired you when designing the Presidential Symposium?

VG: My inspiration comes from listening to a global community of scientists who carry multiple perspectives as these perspectives provide a source of insights necessary to solve problems in the areas of regenerative and stem cell biology. Having multiple perspectives at once within one session is a recognition of the complementarity we must seek in order to tackle important questions in the field. The integration of subjects – from basic research to clinical application to equity and justice – is the unifying message I wanted to send.

I look forward to seeing you and learning more about your work in Hong Kong.

Valentina

Acknowledgements. Each of these ISSCR committee volunteers also works on other ISSCR committees – they are incredibly generous members of our scientific community, and we are deeply grateful for the time they dedicated to us all.