About the Speakers
Hongkui Zeng, PhD
Executive Vice President and Director
Allen Institute for Brian Science
Hongkui Zeng is Executive Vice President and Director of Allen Institute for Brain Science. Since joining the Allen Institute in 2006, she has led several efforts to develop and operate high-throughput pipelines to generate large-scale, open-access datasets and tools to accelerate neuroscience discovery. Her research interests are in understanding neuronal diversity and connectivity in the mouse and human brain-wide circuits and how different cell types work together to process and transform information. Through her leadership of multiple scientific teams at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, she has built several research programs using transcriptomic, connectomic and multimodal approaches to characterize and classify the wide variety of cell types that constitute the mammalian brain, laying the foundation for unraveling the cell type basis of brain function and diseases. Her work has led to widely adopted community resources and standards, including transgenic mouse lines, Allen Mouse Brain Connectivity Atlas, the Common Coordinate Framework (CCF), and the brain-wide transcriptomic cell type taxonomy and atlas.
Zeng received her Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology from Brandeis University, where she studied the molecular mechanisms of the circadian clock in fruit flies. As a postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she studied the molecular and synaptic mechanisms underlying hippocampus-dependent plasticity and learning. She has received many honors, including the 2016 AWIS Award for Scientific Advancement, the 2018 Gill Transformative Investigator Award, and the 2023 Pradel Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences. She has served on multiple national and international committees and advisory boards, including the Society for Neuroscience Program Committee, the Advisory Board of Cell and Neuron, and the National Advisory Mental Health Council. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine.
Tony Wyss-Coray, PhD
D.H. Chen Professor II
Stanford University School of Medicine
Tony Wyss-Coray is the D.H. Chen Distinguished Professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences and the Director of the Phil and Penny Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience at Stanford University. His lab studies brain aging and neurodegeneration with a focus on age-related cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease. The Wyss-Coray research team discovered that circulatory blood factors can modulate brain structure and function and factors from young organisms can rejuvenate old brains. Current studies focus on the molecular basis of the systemic communication with the brain by employing a combination of genetic, cell biology, and –omics approaches in mice, and humans. Wyss-Coray has presented his ideas at Global TED, the Tencent WE Summit, the World Economic Forum, and he was voted Time Magazine’s “The Health Care 50” most influential people transforming health care in 2018. He co-founded Alkahest Inc. and several other companies targeting Alzheimer’s and neurodegeneration and has been the recipient of an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, a Zenith Award from the Alzheimer’s Association, and a NOMIS Foundation Award.
Adam Salmon, PhD
Associate Director, Sam & Ann Barshop Institute for Longevity & Aging Studies
Deputy Director for the Basic Sciences
Professor, Molecular Medicine
Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies
Dr. Adam Salmon is a Professor with Tenure in the Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies and Department of Molecular Medicine at University of Texas Health San Antonio (UTHSA) with a joint appointment as Research Health Scientist in the Southwest Texas Veterans Health Care System. He currently serves as Deputy Director of the Barshop Institute with oversight over the biology of aging program. He is PI or Co-Leader of the San Antonio Nathan Shock Center, San Antonio Claude D. Pepper Older American Center, and San Antonio Interventions Testing Program. He has research expertise across including mammalian aging models, including rodents and nonhuman primates including marmosets and his lab focuses on understanding the fundamental mechanisms of aging to define potential therapeutic interventions.
Lingyan Shi, PhD
Associate Professor, Bioengineering
UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering
Lingyan Shi is currently a tenured Associate Professor in the Shu Chien Gene Lay Department of Bioengineering at UCSD. She joined UCSD in 2019, following her postdoctoral training in the Department of Chemistry at Columbia University. Her lab at UCSD focuses on developing high-resolution metabolic nanoscopy to study aging processes and related diseases. Notably, she discovered the “Golden Window” (1550nm to 1870nm) for deep tissue imaging and pioneered the “DO-SRS” metabolic imaging platform, which visualizes metabolic dynamics in cellular organelles, and tissues. Her group advanced stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) microscopy into super-resolution multiplex nanoscopy by developing A-PoD and PRM algorithms, revealing various lipid metabolic changes in organ tissues during aging and disease. Dr. Shi holds 10 awarded patents and 8 pending. She won Blavatnik Regional Award for Young Scientists (2018), Nature Light Science & Applications’ Rising Star Award (2021), the Advancing Bioimaging Scialog Fellow Award 2023, the David L. Williams Lecture Scholarship Award (2023), the Sloan Research Fellowship in Chemistry (2023), the BMES-Cellular Molecular Bioengineering Rising Star Faculty Award (2024), the Davos Summit iCANx Young Scientist Award (2024), ICBME Rising Star Award 2024, and IUPS Young Faculty Award 2024, and Featured in the 2025 Optics notebook, women in optics.