Roger D. Kornberg

Roger D. Kornberg is an American biochemist and professor of structural biology at Stanford University School of Medicine. His lab is directed towards the mechanism and regulation of RNA polymerase II transcription. Prof. Kornberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2006 for his studies of the process by which genetic information from DNA is copied to RNA, “the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription.” He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 2009.


Shoucheng Zhang

Shoucheng Zhang is the JG Jackson and CJ Wood professor of physics at Stanford University. He is a condensed matter theorist known for his work on topological insulators, quantum spin Hall effect, spintronics, quantum Hall effect and high temperature superconductivity. Prof. Zhang is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the Guggenheim fellowship in 2007, the Alexander von Humboldt research prize in 2009, the Europhysics prize in 2010, the Oliver Buckley prize in 2012, the Dirac Medal and Prize in 2012, the Physics Frontiers Prize in 2013, the “Nobel-class” Citation Laureates by Thomson Reuters in 2014 and the Benjamin Franklin Medal in 2015. He is identified as one of the top candidates for the Nobel Prize by Thomson Reuters in 2014. He has been elected as the member of the National Academy of Science in 2015.


Michael I. Jordan

Michael I. Jordan is the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests bridge the computational, statistical, cognitive and biological sciences. Prof. Jordan is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has been named a Neyman Lecturer and a Medallion Lecturer by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He received the IJCAI Research Excellence Award in 2016, the David E. Rumelhart Prize in 2015 and the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award in 2009. He is a Fellow of the AAAI, ACM, ASA, CSS, IEEE, IMS, ISBA and SIAM.