Speaker Profiles & Lecture Titles

Jian Cao

Northwestern engineering professor and National Academy of Engineering member; leader in advanced manufacturing.

Title: Print, Bend, Intelligence: The Next Industrial Revolution Is Personal

Bio: Cardiss Collins Professor Jian Cao (MIT’95, MIT’92, SJTU’89) specializes in innovative manufacturing processes and systems, particularly in the areas of deformation-based processes and laser additive manufacturing processes. She has been with Northwestern University since 1995 and now serves as an Associate VP for Research. She is the Founding Director of Northwestern Initiative for Manufacturing Science and Innovation (NIMSI). Cao has supervised over 55 doctoral students. Cao was the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Materials Processing Technology.

Prof. Cao is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAA&S). Her major awards include the inaugural ASME DeVor-Kapoor Manufacturing Medal, DoD Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship, SME Gold Medal, and Charles Russ Richards Memorial Award from ASME and Pi Tau Sigma.

Prof. Cao served as President of the SME North America Manufacturing Research Institute, and Program Director at NSF. Cao now serves on the Council of International Academy of Production Engineering (CIRP), SME Board Executive Member, and Board of mHUB – accelerator for hardtech innovation and manufacturing. She has served on a number of boards and consensus studies of National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

Gang Chen

MIT professor and National Academy of Engineering member; pioneer in nanoscale heat transfer and energy conversion.

Title: Data Center Cooling Challenges

Bio: Gang Chen is the Carl Richard Soderberg Professor of Power Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he headed the Department of Mechanical Engineering from 2013 to 2018. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Huazhong University of Science and Technology and his PhD from UC Berkeley in 1993. He taught at Duke University and UCLA before joining MIT in 2001.

Chen’s research centers on nanoscale transport and energy conversion. His group has advanced understanding of heat conduction in nanostructures, thermoelectric materials, thermal radiation, and solar energy technologies, and demonstrated cubic boron arsenide’s exceptionally high thermal conductivity. In 2021, he discovered the photomolecular effect, in which visible light directly cleaves water clusters from water-vapor interfaces. He has published about 470 articles, wrote the first textbook on nanoscale energy transfer, and is an inventor on about 50 granted and pending patents.

Chen is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences, an academician of Academia Sinica, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2022, the US government dropped all China Initiative charges against him; the program ended a month later. He serves on the board of the Asian American Scholar Forum.

Zhijian "James" Chen

UT Southwestern professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator; National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Medicine member. Renowned for discovering the cGAS-STING pathway in innate immunity.

Title: Igniting a Flame with cGAS – How DNA Triggers Inflammation and Causes Many Diseases

Bio: Zhijian Chen, Ph.D., is the George L. MacGregor Distinguished Chair in Biomedical Science and Professor of Molecular Biology at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Genetics of Host Defense. His pioneering research has transformed our understanding of innate immunity, the body's first line of defense against infection and disease.

Dr. Chen is internationally recognized for discovering cyclic GMP-AMP synthase (cGAS), a key DNA-sensing enzyme that detects foreign or misplaced DNA inside cells and initiates immune responses against infections and cancer. This landmark discovery established the cGAS-STING pathway as a central mechanism of immune surveillance and has opened new avenues for the development of therapies for infectious diseases, cancer, and autoimmune disorders.

Throughout his career, Dr. Chen has received many of the world's most prestigious scientific honors. His awards include the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (2024), the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize (2023), the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2019), and election to the National Academy of Medicine (2022). He was also named a Clarivate Citation Laureate and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Widely regarded as a leader in immunology and biochemistry, Dr. Chen's discoveries continue to shape modern biomedical research and advance our understanding of human health and disease.

Guoping Feng

MIT neuroscience professor and McGovern Institute associate director; a leader in research on brain circuits and neurodevelopmental disorders.

Title: Neurobiological Mechanisms of Autism: From Genes to Circuits

Bio: Dr. Guoping Feng is the Poitras Professor of Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. He is the Director of the Hock E. Tan and K. Lisa Yang Center for Autism Research at MIT and Associate Director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. He is also an Institute Member and Director of Model Systems and Neurobiology of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. His research is focused on understanding the molecular and cellular mechanisms regulating the development and function of synapses and circuits. His lab develops and applies cutting-edge technologies to reveal how synapse and circuit dysfunctions lead to abnormal brain functions and behaviors in neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders, and to explore novel strategies for developing effective therapeutics.

Dr. Feng had his medical training at Zhejiang University School of Medicine in Hangzhou, China, his PhD at State University of New York at Buffalo, and his postdoctoral training at Washington University in St. Louis. He was a faculty member in the Department of Neurobiology at Duke University School of Medicine from 2000–2010. Dr. Feng has received many honors for his scientific research, including Beckman Young Investigator Award, Gill Young Investigator Award, McKnight Neuroscience of Brain Disorders Award, McKnight Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Award, Hartwell Individual Biomedical Research Award, Scientific Innovations Award of Brain Research Foundation. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Medicine, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Shirley Liu

Co-founder and CEO of GV20 Therapeutics; computational biologist advancing cancer research and drug discovery.

Title: AI Drug Discovery and Development

Bio: Dr. Xiaole Shirley Liu is co-founder and CEO of GV20 Therapeutics, a clinical-stage AI-based cancer biotherapeutics company. Its lead program, GV20-0251, targets the novel immune checkpoint IGSF8 and is the world's first AI-designed antibody against an AI-predicted target in the clinic. GV20-0251 advanced from target research to IND in three years and has shown favorable safety and promising monotherapy efficacy in patients with advanced metastatic cancer, validating GV20's STEAD AI platform.

Previously, Dr. Liu was Professor of Biostatistics and Computational Biology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard University. A leading computational cancer biologist, she has published over 270 papers (H-index 134, 119K+ citations), has been a Highly Cited Researcher since 2020, and mentored 30 trainees to independent academic careers. She is a fellow of ISCB and AIMBE, and her honors include the Sloan Research Fellowship and the ISCB Innovator Award. She earned her BA summa cum laude from Smith College, where she now serves as a trustee, and her PhD from Stanford University.

Evelyn Wang

MIT Vice President for Energy and Climate; National Academy of Engineering member and former ARPA-E Director.

Title: Opportunities in Energy-Water-Food Systems to Build Well-Being

Bio: Evelyn N. Wang is the inaugural Vice President for Energy and Climate and the Ford Professor of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She previously served as the director at the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) from 2023 to 2025, where she led the agency’s development, launch, and execution of high-risk, high-reward energy research and development programs. At MIT, she developed technologies for thermal management, energy conversion and storage, and water harvesting and purification. She holds a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University. She also received an MS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from MIT. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, an Honorary Academician of Academia Sinica, and fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Rex Ying

Yale Computer Science Professor; AI researcher and Rising Star Award recipient.

Title: AI with Structure: From Relational Learning to Multimodal Foundation Models

Bio: Rex Ying is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Yale University. His research spans geometric deep learning, multimodal and structured-data foundation models, efficient AI knowledge and memory, trustworthy AI, and AI for science. He develops models that use graphs and geometry to learn expressive, scalable, and interpretable representations, with a growing emphasis on structured memory and reasoning for AI agents and foundation models in non-Euclidean spaces.

Rex also builds multimodal foundation models and their unified efficient AI knowledge and memory systems for applications across science, engineering, medicine, and finance. He has pioneered many widely used geometric deep learning methods, including GraphSAGE, GNNExplainer, HypLoRA, and HELM.

His work has been widely adopted in industry, including production at Google, Meta, TikTok and Snap. His honors include the ACM SIGKDD Doctoral Dissertation Award (2022), the Amazon Research Award (2024), the Frontiers of Science Awards (2025 and 2026), and the NSF CAREER Award (2026). His research is supported by the National Science Foundation, ARPA-H, the Betty Irene Moore Foundation, and industry partners including Amazon, Goldman Sachs, Samsung, Snap Research, Google Research, Rokt, General Atomics and NetApp.