Dr. Robert Fisher is a Medical Director at CTI Clinical Trial & Consulting and previously Chief Medical Officer at SP Global. Prior to entering the business world Dr. Fisher was Chief of Transplant Surgery and The Transplant Institute at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and a named Harvard Peter Medawar Professor of Surgery. He was the H.M. Lee Endowed Chair Professor of Surgery at the Medical College of Virginia and previously a surgical instructor at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center & Children’s Hospital. Dr. Fisher served with distinction in the United States Navy as an attending surgeon in the Naval Hospital Philadelphia and was later awarded a Navy Achievement Medal for his service as a Fleet Surgeon on the USS Forrestal in the Persian Gulf. He earned a medical degree from Baylor College of Medicine, completed a surgical residency at Case Western Reserve and an ASTS Transplant Fellowship at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center & Children’s Hospital.

Dr. Fisher’s general research interests include, gene therapy, thrombophilia, experimental tolerance models, hepatology, inborn errors of metabolism, regenerative medicine, and solid organ transplant, including preservations systems.

Dr. Fisher has authored more than 200 scientific publications and participated in nearly 75 clinical trials. He has held office in several professional organizations including President of the American Foundation for Donation and Transplantation and the Cell Transplant and Regenerative Medicine Society. He has been recognized for his service in the Navy and for his service to the US Department of Veterans Affairs.

Dr. Ewa Ellis has a Ph. D. in Experimental Medicine from the Karolinska Institute where she works as the Director for the Liver Cell Laboratory at Division of Transplantation Surgery. Dr. Ellis is specialized in human hepatocyte isolation, hepatocyte cultures and hepatocyte transplantation. Current research projects include: Hepatocyte Transplantation for metabolic liver disease. Large scale production of human liver spheroids, bioreactor cultures and proliferation of primary human hepatocytes. Cold storage of cells and tissue. Tracking transplanted hepatocytes. Studies on humanized FRGN mice. Dr Ellis is the past president of the CTRMS and she has been a council member since 2011.

Anthony Atala, MD, is the G. Link Professor and Director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and the W. Boyce Professor and Chair of the Department of Urology at Wake Forest University. His work focuses on growing human cells, tissues and organs. Fifteen applications of technologies developed in Dr. Atala's laboratory have been used clinically in human patients.

Dr. Atala was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Sciences (now the National Academy of Medicine), to the National Academy of Inventors as a Charter Fellow, and to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. Dr. Atala is a recipient of the US Congress funded Christopher Columbus Foundation Award, bestowed on a living American who is currently working on a discovery that will significantly affect society; the World Technology Award in Health and Medicine, for achieving significant and lasting progress; the Edison Science/Medical Award; the Fast Company World Changing Ideas Award; the R&D Innovator of the Year Award; and the Smithsonian Ingenuity Award.

Dr. Atala’s work was listed twice as Time Magazine’s top 10 medical breakthroughs of the year, and as one of 5 discoveries that will change the future of organ transplants. Dr. Atala’s work was ranked in 2019 by the Project Management Institute as one of the top 10 most impactful biotech projects from the past 50 years. Dr. Atala was named by Scientific American as one of the world’s most influential people in biotechnology, by U.S. News & World Report as one of 14 Pioneers of Medical Progress in the 21st Century, by Life Sciences Intellectual Property Review as one of 50 key influencers in the life sciences intellectual property arena, and by Nature Biotechnology as one of the top 10 translational researchers in the world.

Dr. Atala has led or served several national professional and government committees, including the National Institutes of Health working group on Cells and Developmental Biology, the National Institutes of Health Bioengineering Consortium, and the National Cancer Institute’s Advisory Board. He was a Founder of the Tissue Engineering Society, the Regenerative Medicine Society, the Regenerative Medicine Foundation, the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine, the Regenerative Medicine Development Organization, the Regenerative Medicine Manufacturing Society, and the Regenerative Medicine Manufacturing Consortium. Dr. Atala works with several journals and serves in various roles, including Editor-in-Chief of Stem Cells Translational Medicine; Therapeutic Advances in Urology; and BioPrinting. He is the editor of 25 books, has published more than 800 journal articles and has applied for or received over 250 national and international patents.