Dr. DeStrooper graduated from KU Leuven, first as a Doctor of Medicine (1985) and then as a Master’s in biomedical sciences (1987). After obtaining his doctorate in 1991 and completing postgraduate studies in 1999 under the supervision of Fred van Leuven and Carlos Dotti (European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Germany), in which he studied presenilins in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), he started an independent research laboratory at KU Leuven and VIB. His multidisciplinary, international research group has grown to 30 people, and his lab studies both Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. His research spans biochemistry and enzymology of γ-secretase; microRNA biology and expression deregulation; genetic and transcriptomic analysis of AD patients’ brains; generation of novel humanized mouse models for AD; mitochondrial biology; and the development of nanobodies against therapeutically relevant targets. Currently, Dr. DeStrooper is pioneering the application of single-cell genomics-transcriptomics and spatial transcriptomics to the study of Alzheimer’s disease. Since 2017 he has been founding director of the UK Dementia Research Institute.

Dr. Kühnemund obtained a Master’s in biochemistry and cell biology at the Braunschweig University of Technology (Germany) and Lund University (Sweden). He then joined the Nilsson and Landegren labs in Sweden, where he obtained his Ph.D. in molecular medicine from Uppsala University and the Science for Life Laboratory (Sweden). His work on single-molecule analysis and sequencing technologies is now part of the technology portfolio of CARTANA, an in-situ-sequencing (ISS) company spun out from the Nilsson lab. Dr. Kühnemund is a cofounder of CARTANA and head of R&D at the company, which makes ISS technology available to the global research community.

Dr. Oberst did her undergraduate training at the University of Maryland, College Park, and her Ph.D. in Tumor Biology at Georgetown University, Washington D.C. She combined her interests in science and writing by pursuing an M.A. in Journalism from the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park. Dr. Oberst joined Science/AAAS in 2016 as the Assistant Editor for Custom Publishing. Before then she worked at Nature magazine, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, The Endocrine Society, and the National Institutes of Mental Health.