International speakers (invitations accepted)
Claude Desplan is the Silver Professor of Biology at New York
University. Prof Desplan was awarded his PhD from Universite Paris
VII before undertaking postdoctoral studies at UCSF as a Fogarty and
EMBO Fellow. He was made an Assistant and then Associate
Investigator and Professor of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Rockefeller University respectively before joining NYU in 1999.
Prof Desplan’s work focusses on understanding anterior-posterior axis formation in insects, patterning and specification of the
Drosophila eye and the processing of visual information in the brain.
He is an elected fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is an associate member of EMBO.
Brigid Hogan is the George Barth Geller Professor of Research in
Molecular Biology and Chair of the Department of Cell Biology at
Duke University. Prof Hogan was awarded her PhD from the
University of Cambridge and undertook postdoctoral studies at the
Department of Biology at MIT. She then established the Laboratory of
Molecular Embryology at the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill in London, and was then the founding director of the Stem
Cell and Organogenesis Program at Vanderbilt University, holding the
Hortense B. Ingram Chair of Molecular Oncology. Prof Hogan has made lasting contributions to our understanding of the molecular and genetic basis of mouse development, with a particular focus on organ development. She is a member of EMBO and is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Cliff Tabin is Chairman of the Department of Genetics at Harvard
Medical School. Prof Tabin was awarded a PhD from MIT and then undertook postdoctoral studies at Harvard University. He was appointed as a Faculty member in the Department of Genetics at
Harvard Medical School rising to Professor and Chairman, his current position. Prof Tabin has a distinguished track record of studying development, combining classical embryology with molecular and genetic techniques to study organisms ranging from salamanders and cave fish to mice and Darwin’s finches. These studies have led to deep insights into hedgehog signaling, organ development, patterning and evolutionary biology. He is an elected member of the NAS, AAS and foreign Fellow of the Royal Society.
Alan Davidson is a Principal Investigator in the Department of
Molecular Medicine and Pathology at the University of Auckland.
A/Prof Davidson established his laboratory at Harvard Medical School.
And in 2011 he returned to his native NZ to take up a post at the
University of Auckland. His group is interested in kidney development and regeneration with a particular focus on the renal progenitor cell populations that are responsible for repairing the damaged adult zebrafish kidney. A/Prof Davidson was awarded a Rutherford distinguished Fellowship by the Royal Society of NZ.

Associate Instructors (attending)
Edwina (Eddy) McGlinn established the first EMBL Australia Partner Laboratory Group, based at the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute (ARMI) at Monash University.
Working alongside regenerative medicine researchers, who investigate the ways in which the human body repairs, replaces, restores or regenerates damaged tissues and organs,
Eddy and her team are studying the development of one particular organ—the skeleton.
Ian Smyth is an NHMRC Senior Research Fellow who heads the Developmental Diseases laboratory at Monash University. His group is interested in renal development and disease with a focus on understanding branching morphogenesis and cloning novels genes which give rise to kidney disease.
Natasha Harvey is an ARC Future Fellow at Centre for Cancer Biology in Adelaide. She heads the Lymphatic Development Laboratory which seeks to understand how the growth and development of lymphatic vessels is controlled during development and in disease states.
Quenten Schwarz is an Australian Heart Foundation Future Leader Fellow at the Centre for
Cancer Biology. His group is interested in understanding the development of the neuronal and vascular systems at the molecular level with a particular focus on studying molecules which are recruited by both systems to coordinate development.