Professor Dr. Jens C. Schwamborn is an expert in stem cell biology and in vitro disease modelling. In particular, he focused on the mechanisms that regulate neuronal differentiation. Furthermore, from about five years he is working on in vitro models of Parkinson’s disease using human induced pluripotent stem cells and brain organoid technology. Over the last years, he filed several patents and published more than 50 manuscripts. Some of his papers are published in leading journals in the field including Cell, Cell Stem Cell, Stem Cell Reports and Nucleic Acids Research.

Gemma Gomez Giro is a passionate scientist whose work is focused on neurodevelopment and neurodegeneration. She received her B.Sc. in Biomedicine from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and continued her studies there to receive her M.Sc. at the Pompeu Fabra University. Directly after her master’s, she moved to Germany to intern at the German Centre for Systems Biomedicine, to gain primary hands-on experience in the field of Alzheimer’s disease. Her academic interests in the neuroscience field motivated her to pursue doctoral studies, receiving her PhD by the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Münster, Germany, for her work focused on a rare form of dementia in children, in 2019. After, Gemma became a postdoctoral researcher at the Luxembourg Center for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) in Luxembourg within the CONNECT-FET-proactive project, working together with an interdisciplinary team of researchers in multiple universities across Europe to develop an on-chip in vitro model of the brain-to-gut axis and use it to study its involvement in Parkinson’s disease, until 2023. She currently holds a Project Lead Scientist position at OrganoTherapeutics, a biotech company in Luxembourg which uses cutting-edge human-specific organoids for the discovery and development of effective drug candidates targeting Parkinson’s disease. She will use her expertise in on-chip models and will be in charge of generating the brain cyborganoids within the NAP project: twin-on-a-chip brains for monitoring individual sleep habits.