Dr. Benhur Lee is a Professor of Microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS). Prof. Lee also holds the Ward-Coleman Chair in Microbiology. He obtained his M.D. from Yale University School of Medicine (1995) and completed his clinical as well as post-doctoral training at the University of Pennsylvania (1995-2001). Dr. Lee is board-certified in Clinical Pathology. Prior to 2014, he was a Professor in the Dept of Microbiology, Immunology & Molecular Genetics, and the Dept of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA (2001-2013). Dr. Lee is a scientific advisor to the Standards Working Group (SWG) of the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM, 2014-present), and was an appointed member of the NIH Director's Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee (RAC ), more recently reconstituted as theN ovel andEx ceptionalT echnology andR esearchA dvisoryC ommittee (NExTRAC ) (2016-2022). He is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and Councilor for Medical Virology (American Society for Virology, 2022-2025). He is also a paramyxovirus study group member of the International Committee on the Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) and served on the WHO R&D Blueprint pathogen prioritization scientific review group for paramyxovirus (2023-2024). Dr. Lee has a special interest in emerging RNA viruses, with a focus on molecular viral-host interactions. His lab has made significant contributions to the study of paramyxovirus entry, budding and pathogenic mechanisms. His guiding principle is to translate insights gained from basic studies on host-pathogen interactions into anti-viral therapeutics. Dr. Lee has published over 200 peer-reviewed articles and reviews, and serves on multiple editorial boards. His work has been cited more than 15,000 times and he has ah-index of 68 as of 2024. His research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health (USA), the National Science Foundation (USA), the Department of Defense (USA) as well as private and public research foundations. Dr. Lee has trained more than a dozen post-doctoral fellows, 18 graduate students, and has served on more than 60 PhD dissertation committees between UCLA and Mount Sinai.

Professor Martin Beer works at the Institute of Diagnostic Virology, Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut, Germany