Professor Ipsita Roy, Professor of Biomaterials, School of Chemical, Materials and Biological Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Sheffield, is an expert in microbial biotechnology, natural biobased materials, and their biomedical and environmental applications. Professor Roy was awarded the prestigious Inlaks Scholarship to study for her Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge, UK. At Cambridge, she was awarded scholarships including the Churchill College Scholarship and the Cambridge University Philosophical Society Fellowship Award. Her postdoctoral work was at the University of Minnesota, USA. She has published over 100 papers in high ‘Impact Factor’ journals and has an H index of 53. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Biology and the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (IOM3). Her group is focussed on the production of novel natural and sustainable polymers such as Polyhydroxyalkanoates, Bacterial cellulose, γ-Polyglutamic acid, Alginate and their biomedical and environmental applications. She is an editor of Scientific Reports and Biomedical Materials. Her total grant portfolio is more than 14 million pounds. She has many patents, and she has a spin out company called PHAsT, focused on the production of medical grade PHAs for biomedical applications.

Buyong Ma is a professor in the school of pharmacy, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Dr. Ma received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of Georgia at Athens in 1995. He joined NCI/NIH in 1998 and moved to current position in 2020, focusing on protein engineering and biological drug design. Professor Ma has more than 40 years research experiences in polymer chemistry, protein structure and function, and antibody/antigen design. He has published more than 200 papers, with google citation of 24,000 and H-index 71.