Ben Myers is an Associate Professor at the University of Utah School of Medicine in Salt Lake City, UT, and an investigator with the Huntsman Cancer Institute. Ben’s research focuses on Smoothened and other class F GPCRs which play essential roles in embryonic development and in cancer. His group studies the unusual signaling mechanisms employed by these atypical 7-transmembrane receptors, combining biochemical and structural approaches with cell biology and in vivo models. These studies have revealed new and unexpected ways for membrane lipids to regulate GPCR activity and for GPCRs to control intracellular kinases. More recently, Ben’s lab has begun studying GPCR signaling pathways that operate within the primary cilium, a tiny antenna-shaped structure at the cell surface with critical links to development, physiology, and disease. Ben studied developmental and cancer signaling as a postdoctoral fellow with Philp Beachy at Stanford University. Prior to that, Ben received his Ph.D. from UCSF in 2008, where he worked with David Julius on the structure, function, and physiology of ion channels and GPCRs in the nervous system.

Vaishnavi Ananthanarayanan is an EMBL Australia Group Leader at Single Molecule Science (SMS), Dept of Molecular Medicine, School of Biomedical Sciences. She graduated with a PhD in Biophysics from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden, Germany in 2014. She started her independent group in 2014 at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore with her Dept. of Science and Technology (India) INSPIRE Faculty Award. She transitioned to an Assistant Professor position in the same institute in 2017. In 2019, she was inducted to the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) as a Young Investigator and was granted the Wellcome Trust/DBT India Alliance Intermediate Fellowship. Most recently, her work was recognised with the American Society for Cell Biology (WICB) Junior Award for Excellence in Research 2021 and Royal Microscopical Society (UK) Award for Life Sciences 2025. In June 2020, she co-founded BiasWatchIndia, an initiative to document representation of women, and to combat gender-biased panels at Indian science conferences. She moved to Australia in Nov 2020 to set up her lab at SMS, UNSW. Her lab’s research seeks to understand how stochastic and rare interactions give rise to complex intracellular organisation, with a particular focus on the cytoskeleton and motor proteins.