Global Speakers

Professor Molly Shoichet holds the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Tissue Engineering at the University of Toronto and is Senior Advisor on Science & Engineering Engagement to President Gertler.  She has published over 500 papers, patents and abstracts and given over 350 lectures worldwide in the fields of regenerative medicine, tissue engineering and drug delivery. She currently leads a laboratory of 30 and has graduated 162 researchers. She founded three spin-off companies and is actively engaged in translational research. She is the only person to be a Fellow of Canada’s 3 National Academies of Science, Engineering, Health Sciences. Dr. Shoichet is the L’Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science Laureate, North America for 2015. She holds the Order of Ontario, is University Professor, and a Foreign Member of the US National Academy of Engineering. She graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1987) and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in Polymer Science and Engineering (1992).

Norman Iscove is a Senior Scientist at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto. He is a pioneer in hemopoietic stem cell research with numerous contributions that advanced the field in both methodology and concept. In recent years his group identified distinct stem cells in the mouse, resolving those that engraft permanently from more abundant multipotent stem cells with prodigious but nevertheless time-limited potential. Current work is focused on mechanisms that enable self-renewal, maintain it in stem cells, and whose artificially sustained expression confers immortality to otherwise non-self-renewing progenitor cells that are lineage-restricted.