Nuno C. Santos was born in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1972. He graduated in Biochemistry from the Faculty of Science, University of Lisbon, in 1995, and received his PhD in Theoretical and Experimental Biochemistry in 1999 from the same University, although all the experimental work was conducted at Instituto Superior Técnico (Technical University of Lisbon) and University of California (Santa Barbara). Currently, he is Associate Professor with Habilitation of the Faculty of Medicine, University of Lisbon, and Head of the Biomembranes & Nanomedicine Lab at the Gulbenkian Institute for Molecular Medicine (GIMM), which was created in 2024 upon the merging between Instituto de Medicina Molecular (iMM), where he was previously Group Leader, and Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (IGC). Among other distinctions, his work was awarded with the Gulbenkian Prize for young researchers (2001), Dr. José Luis Champalimaud Prize – Basic Research (2004), Dr. José Luis Champalimaud Prize – Applied Research and Technology (2005), the UL – Caixa Geral de Depósitos Prize (2017 and 2023), and the FMUL Teaching Merit Prize (2025). He is (co)author of 201 articles in per-reviewed international journals, which received more than 12 600 citations (h-index 60 and i10-index 166, publishing since 1996), presenting a Journal Citation Reports impact factor sum of 1127.1 (average 5.7 per article). In addition to these publications, he (co)authored 10 articles in Portuguese scientific journals, 15 book chapters (mostly published outside Portugal, in English), 3 books (editor, published by Wiley, Springer and MDPI) and 3 international patents. Among different National and International research projects, he was the coordinator of a European Union-funded consortium including 10 different research groups from Europe and Brazil. He is member of the Executive Committee of the European Biophysical Societies’ Association (EBSA) since 2019, Vice-President of the Academic Council of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon since 2024, and Director of the M2B-PhD Doctoral Program in Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics (involving 5 different institutions) since 2016. He was President of the Portuguese Biophysical Society from 2015 to 2021. He has supervised 18 completed PhDs, 11 as main supervisor and 7 as co-supervisor.
Dr. Xing Wang is a Bioengineering professor, affiliated with the Chemistry Department, Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB), Holonyak Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory (HMNTL), and Cancer Center at Illinois (CCIL) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He received a Ph.D. from New York University, working with Dr. Ned Seeman to build biofunctional DNA motifs. He did his postdoc training at Princeton University with a focus on nucleic acid engineering and RNA biology. At UIUC, Dr. Wang directs the Nucleic Acids Programming Lab (NAPL), and his research group utilizes nucleic acid and protein engineering to evolve new molecular ligands for targeted drug delivery and create designer DNA nanostructure-based “plug-and-play” platforms for the applications in disease diagnosis and treatment. Dr. Wang is a recipient of Mikashi Award in 2021. He was selected as a Fellow of Y Combinator Founder Cohort in 2021. He received a Spoke Award in 2024. Dr. Wang’s research group is mainly supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF).