Zhejiang University
Professor Zhiying Wu is a Qiushi Distinguished Professor at Zhejiang University and Director of the Department of Medical Genetics and Rare Disease Center at the Second Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine. She received her M.D. from Fujian Medical University, her Ph.D. in Neurology from Tongji Medical University, and completed postdoctoral training at Columbia University, USA.
Professor Wu has devoted more than 30 years to the study of rare and neurogenetic disorders, with research focusing on the genetic mechanisms and precision diagnosis and treatment of neurogenetic, rare, and neurodegenerative diseases. She has led the discovery of four disease-causing genes—PRRT2, TMEM151A, COX20, and SREBF2—which have become internationally recognized diagnostic markers for their respective disorders. As corresponding or senior corresponding author, she has published more than 170 SCI-indexed papers in leading journals, including Nature Genetics, Brain, Neurology, Movement Disorders, Molecular Neurodegeneration, Cell Reports, Cell Discovery, and The Innovation.
Professor Wu is a recipient of the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars and currently leads a National Key Innovation Team under the Ministry of Science and Technology of China. She serves as Vice President of the Chinese Neuroscience Society and holds leadership positions in several national and provincial academic organizations in neurology, neurogenetics, and rare diseases. She has received numerous prestigious honors, including the State Council Special Government Allowance, the China Young Scientist Award, the China Young Women Scientists Award, the National Outstanding Science and Technology Worker Award, and the Outstanding Contribution Award for Chinese Neurologists.
Erasmus MC
Personal Statement
Effective Sept 1, 1985, I started my career in the lab of Jan Voogd in Rotterdam where I received my philosophical degree (PhD) in 1990 in medicine Cum Laude. Following my medical studies at the University of Amsterdam and University of Rotterdam I got my medical degree (MD) one year later, again Cum Laude. As a first-year PhD-student at my first international lecture in Turin, Italy, I surprised the international community by showing a new technology, by which one could demonstrate for the first time simultaneously the connectivity of nerve fibers and the identity of their neurotransmitters. This new technology led to numerous discoveries of new functional connections in the brain. Together with two other major technical developments in the field of neuro-anatomy that I introduced in my thesis, I provided a basis for deciphering neural networks at the ultrastructural level. After obtaining my PhD, I received the prestigious Huygens Science Award – fellowship from the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts & Sciences (KNAW), which allowed me to move to New York (Rodolfo Llinas) and enter the field of neurophysiology. Here, I unraveled the circuitry of the vestibulocerebellum underlying eye movement control and I showed that this part of the brain generates predictions required for motor learning. In the meantime, I discovered a new cell organelle, the dendritic lamellar body, which is widely distributed in the brain and implicated in functional control of electrical synapses, forming one of the main substrates of communication between neurons in the nervous system. My desire to use transgenics for elucidating brain function inspired me to move, once again, to another field, the field of molecular biology (Frank Grosveld). In this field I discovered new genes, one of which was CYLN2, which turned out to be implicated in Williams Syndrome; today, diagnostic screens for translocations of this gene are used worldwide. In 1998 I was invited to start up the Dept. of Neuroscience that I have been chairing since. Over the past decades the Dept. of Neuroscience has flourished in that it gained about ten times more scientists and staff, and that many of the postdocs and faculty received important awards and fellowships. For example, in the VENI, VIDI and VICI program of NWO and ZonMw, the main Dutch grant agencies, my Dept. alone received more than 50 fellowships, of which more than 30% were ranked number 1 in the country in the fields of medicine and life sciences. My department was also the first of Erasmus MC and Erasmus University to receive a EURYI Award. More than 150 PhDs successfully defended their thesis and more than 15 young scientists already left the Dept. to become chair and/or full professor elsewhere. By participating actively in the lab, I have been trying to not only inspire my students to become successful, but to also receive personal awards and prestigious grants by myself. In 2001, I received the PIONIER Award of NWO and ZonMW, being ranked number 1 of the medical scientists in the Netherlands. In 2006, I received personally from Her Majesty, Queen Beatrix, the so-called Beatrix Award, which was given to the Dutch scientist with the best performance in the field of neuroscience over the 50-year period from 1956 to 2006. In 2007 I became, next to being chairman at Erasmus MC, co-director of the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience to determine its new scientific focus and start up a new group on cerebellar cognition. In 2011 I received an ERC-Adv grant and in 2014 I was elected as a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts & Sciences. In 2018 I received the international Casella Prize in Italy for my work on motor planning. I obtained many grants from many national and international science agencies such as NWO, ZonMw, FES, HFSP, EU, LSH, Medical Delta and KNAW, and I have been presiding over national and international consortia governing multimillion-Euro programs such as the NeuroBSIK Mouse Phenomics and NeuroBasic Pharma Phenomics programs for valorization of animal models for brain disorders and pharmaceutical products in the Netherlands, the European SENSOPAC program for Bio-Inspired networks supporting Robotics control, an NWO-Groot investment grant on a national Center for functional Ultrasound Brain-imaging at Erasmus MC (CUBE), as well as LSH-INTENSE and NWO-Gravitation grants on Brain-Machine-Interfacing. Many of the technologies I developed for academic neuroscience research have become commercially available via Neurasmus BV or BlinkLab, the two companies that I founded. I presented well over 250 international lectures, published 3 books on cerebellar function, and I wrote over 400 papers in all disciplines of neuroscience ranging from molecular neurobiology up to computational modeling, Brain-Machine-Interfacing and Artificial Intelligence, as well as neuro-epidemiology, accumulating into well over 35.000 citations and an HR index above 100. These include papers in many major journals including Nature, Cell, Science, Nature Genetics, Nature Reviews, Nature Neuroscience, Nature Cell Biology, Nature Communications, Neuron, Cell Reports, eLife, New England Journal of Med, TINS, TICS, Brain, Current biology, PloS Biology, Annals of Neurol, JAMA, J Clin Invest, EMBO, Science Adv and PNAS. My research has led to unprecedented insights of how the brain, in particular the cerebellum, may control sensorimotor learning. Now it is my ambition to study how deficits in basic function of retinal circuits can explain eye movement disorders such as nystagmus, how the vestibulocerebellum can compensate for these deficits, and how we can prevent further decay, paving the way for a novel therapeutic design. As analyzed by ExpertScape (www.expertscape.com), De Zeeuw is currently ranked number 1 in the world for the field of cerebellum.
San Raffaele University
Flavia Valtorta studied Medicine at the University of Milan and trained as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of the Nobel laureate Paul Greengard at The Rockefeller University in New York. She holds board certifications in Anesthesiology and Intensive Care and in Psychotherapy.
She is currently Professor of Pharmacology and Vice Rector for International Affairs at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Milan. Likewise, she is head of the Research Unit of Neuropsychopharmacology at the San Raffaele Scientific Institute. Previously, she was Member of the Adjunct Faculty at The Rockefeller University (New York), Director of the Division of Neuroscience at the San Raffaele Scientific Institute and President of the National Committee on Doping and Health Protection in Sports of the Italian Ministry of Health.
Flavia Valtorta has been working for all her academic career in neuroscience, contributing to the elucidation of the molecular mechanisms that underlie the phenomena of synaptic maturation and neurotransmitter release in health and disease. She has contributed a relevant body of information concerning some of the key molecules involved in these processes, whose mutations cause neurological or psychiatric disorders (synaptopathies).
University of California, San Francisco, UCSF
Dr. Louis Ptáček has used the tools of human genetics in the study of patients with an impressive range of human phenotypes. He pioneered the field of “Channelopathies” which encompasses a large group of episodic/electrical disorders of muscle, heart, and brain. Subsequently, his group has done extensive work in characterizing the functional consequences of disease causing mutations. In another line of work motivated by a family with an interesting phenotype, he embarked into the challenging field of behavioral genetics. He and his colleague, Ying-Hui Fu, study the genetics of human sleep phenotypes. Familial advanced sleep phase (FASP), is manifest as a lifelong trait of extremely early sleep times and early morning awakening (1 am – 4 am). Ptáček and Fu have gone on to characterize mutations in a growing list of genes that underlie the phenotype in ~15% of FASP families. Furthermore, they’ve gone on to model human mutations in Drosophila and mice. In vitro and in vivo experiments focused on regions harboring the human mutations has led to novel insights in fine tuning of circadian period regulation by phosphorylation and other post translational modifications. They have show an important effect in some of the human sleep mutations in increasing risk for migraine or metabolic disease and further show that Familial natural short sleep mutations are protective for neurodegeneration. He serves on a number editorial boards including Neurogenetics, eLife, and the Journal of Clinical Investigation. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Association of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Science of the USA.
University of Mons
Mario Manto is Neurologist, Professor of Neuroanatomy, Neurology and Pathophysiology of the Nervous System (UMons and HELB, Belgium). He is the founding Editor of The Cerebellum (Springer Nature) and current Editor of the Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation (BioMed Central). He is head of the Department of Neurology at Humani. He is author or editor of 15 books. His research focuses on the cerebellum and cerebellar disorders. He has received grants from the NIH, the EC, FNRS, FWO and others.
Yokohama City University
Cardiff University
Dr Tom Massey initially studied Biochemistry at Cambridge University in the UK before completing a PhD in the mechanisms of DNA repair at Oxford University. He then studied Medicine before specialising in Neurology. He currently holds a Clinician Scientist Fellowship from the Medical Research Council in the UK and is a Group Leader in the UK Dementia Research Institute. His research is focused on Huntington's disease and related conditions and draws on data and techniques from a wide range of life sciences, including clinical phenotyping, human genetics, stem cell biology, molecular assays and protein biochemistry. The overarching aim is to identify and prosecute new drug targets where there is currently none.
Local Contact：Dianfu Chen，13282800341，chendianfu@zju.edu.cn
International Contact：Wanqing Xu，+86 17816860699，evaxuwanqing@zju.edu.cn
Registration Contact：Hui Denghui，021-64080051，denghui@cns.org.cn
© Copyright Chinese Neuroscience Society All Rights Reserved 沪ICP备20006284号-1