Dr. Tomei is the Miami Engineering Career Development Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Microbiology and Immunology, and Surgery, and the director of the Islet Immunoengineering Laboratory at the Diabetes Research Institute (DRI) at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. She holds a MS in Materials Engineering from the Politecnico of Milan (Italy) and a PhD in Bioengineering and Biotechnology from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland).

Dr. Tomei is applying her unique background in bioengineering and immunology to develop novel immunoengineering platforms to prevent rejection after islet transplantation and to promote antigen-specific tolerance for a cure of type-1 diabetes.

Dr. Tomei has secured and successfully administered grants from the NIH, JDRF, Johnson & Johnson, Semma Therapeutics and Sernova Corp. She serves as a standing member for the NIH BMBI study section and as a member of the CIRM grant working group. She is a CTRMS councilor and member of the IPITA education committee. She was awarded the Marc S. Goodman Prize to an Outstanding Young Scientist, the JDRF career development award, the Eliahu I. Jury Early Career Research Award, the Johnson A. Edosomwan Researcher of the Year Award, the CMBE Young Innovator, and the Alexander Orr Excellence in Teaching Award.

Doris Taylor, PhD, FAHA, FACC, FESC, FAIMBE is a global thought leader in regenerative medicine. Although she has held academic positions for over 20 years at Duke, Univ of Minnesota, Texas Heart Institute and Texas A&M University, she recently founded a new biotech company, Organamet Bio Inc. to bioengineer personalized replacement hearts on demand.

Taylor is credited with the first functional scientific repair of injured heart with stem cells in 1998. Her group further transformed the field of organ transplantation science in 2008 by developing a unique cell removal (decellularization) method that makes un-transplantable organs into usable scaffold frameworks for building new organs with stem cells. This was so revolutionary it was recognized as one of the “Top 10 Research Advances” by the American Heart Association and Taylor was nominated as one of “100 most influential people in the world” by Time magazine. That continues commercially today in Organamet Bio (www.organametbio.com). Next, she turned to disease prevention and has begun to develop “cellular signatures” of heart disease and aging that appear to differ by sex race and ethnicity. She has published hundreds of papers, holds over 30 patents, and is the founder of multiple companies.

Taylor is appointed as a Fellow of the American Heart Association, American College of Cardiology, and European Society for Cardiology. She was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree by Mississippi University for Women and the national Distinguished Alumnus Award by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. In 2019 she was elected as a Senior member of the National Academy of Inventors and in 2020, was elected as a fellow to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. Taylor currently serves as CEO of Organamet Bio Inc.

Dr. Humphreys is currently Chief of the Division of Nephrology and the Joseph Friedman Professor at Washington University in St. Louis as well as President-elect for the American Society of Clinical Investigation. In 2021, he joined the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, a unit of the NIH. An internationally recognized investigator in kidney fibrosis, organoids and regenerative medicine, current efforts in his laboratory focus on single cell multi-omics and spatial transcriptomics as approaches to understand and sub-phenotype human kidney disease.