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.

Talk
Prof. Simon J. Conn received his Ph.D. from Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. After initially starting his first postdoctoral position as a plant molecular biologist, Conn transitioned to mammalian research in Prof. Ramesh Pillai’s laboratory at the EMBL, France in 2011. From 2016, Conn joined University of SA as an associate professor in the Centre for Cancer Biology and was promoted to Professor 2022 after establishing his laboratory at Flinders University (his alma mater). He explores fundamental and applied aspects of alternatively spliced RNA molecules in Cancer initiation and progression and other human diseases, including pioneering circular RNA research in Australia. He has published a number of seminal articles in Cell, Cancer Cell, Nature Plants, Nucleic Acids Research, Nature Biotechnology, EMBO J over the past 10 years.