Professor Francine Marques is a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Emerging Leader, Viertel Charitable Foundation, and National Heart Foundation Fellow. She completed a PhD in genomics at the University of Sydney in 2012, followed by postdoctoral training supported with NHMRC and Heart Foundation fellowships. Since 2018, Prof Marques leads the Hypertension Research Laboratory at Monash University, currently based at the Victorian Heart Institute, where she serves as Deputy Director (Discovery). Her team aims to build exceptional scientists that help improve cardiovascular health, using translational approaches to lower blood pressure via the gut microbiome. Her research program has attracted over $12 million in competitive funding and resulted in over 140 peer-reviewed papers and 34 awards, including the 2019 American Heart Association Hypertension Council Goldblatt Award, the 2020 High Blood Pressure Research Council of Australia and 2021 International Society of Hypertension Mid-Career Awards, the 2021 Australian Academy of Science Gottschalk Medal, and the 2024 Australian Society of Medical Research Peter Doherty Leading Light Award.

Prof Seth Masters is Centre Head of the Centre for Innate Immunity and Infectious Disease at the Hudson Institute of Medical Research (Australia). He has uncovered the genetic basis for several autoinflammatory diseases and continues to manage the associated Australian Registry, AADRY. Mechanistically this work has defined the innate immune pathways driving inflammation as a result of aberrant proteasome function, retrograde transport and mitochondrial homeostasis. This has led to improved understanding of innate immune pathways in complex disorders such as inflammatory bowel disease and motor neuron disease. Prof Masters is a Scientific Advisor for NRG Therapeutics (UK) and Odyssey Therapeutics (USA) and was appointed as a Fellow of the Viertel Foundation, HHMI-Wellcome Trust and the NHMRC.