Bio
Prof. Dr. George A. Calin received both his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees at Carol Davila University of Medicine in Bucharest, Romania. After working in cytogenetics as an undergraduate student with Dragos Stefanescu in Bucharest, Calin completed cancer genomics training in Massimo Negrini’s laboratory at the University of Ferrara, Italy, and in 2000, he became a postdoctoral fellow in Carlo Croce’s laboratory at Kimmel Cancer Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In June 2007, Calin joined MD Anderson as an associate professor in the Experimental Therapeutics department and was promoted to Professor with tenure in 2013. He explores new RNA therapeutic options for cancer patients and studies the roles of microRNAs and other non-coding RNAs in cancer initiation and progression, as well as the mechanisms of cancer predisposition.

Bio
Maite Huarte obtained her PhD from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid at the National Center of Biotechnology. Later worked in Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute, initiating studies of long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) in gene regulation. She now leads a research group at CIMA (University of Navarra, Spain) that investigates the contribution of lncRNAs and other type of RNAs to epigenetic and non-epigenetic regulation in cancer cells. They have showed that lncRNAs play key roles in the regulation of several cancer pathways, influencing gene expression and genomic integrity.