Prof. Cimi Ilmiawati, MD, PhD is a faculty member of the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, Faculty of Medicine, Universitas Andalas, Indonesia, where she has served since 2008. She currently holds the position of Head of the Master’s Program in Biomedical Sciences at the same faculty. She obtained her medical degree from Universitas Andalas in 2006 and completed her Ph.D. in Environmental Health and Preventive Medicine at Jichi Medical University, Japan, in 2014. Dr. Ilmiawati has undertaken postdoctoral research in Japan supported by the Takeda Science Foundation (2016) and in the United States as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar (2021). Dr. Ilmiawati teaches at undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral levels in medicine, biomedical sciences, and public health. Her expertise lies in environmental toxicology, with molecular biology and epidemiological approaches. Her research has been published in reputable international and national journals and presented at numerous scientific conferences. Currently, her work focuses on potentially toxic compounds in cosmetics and their health impacts on women of reproductive age.

Hongkang Wu completed a Bachelor of Biomedicine (Degree with Honours) at the University of Melbourne in 2021, conducting his Honours research at The Florey. He continued his graduate studies within the same group under the supervision of Professor Akhter Hossain, Professor Ross Bathgate, Professor John Furness, and Dr Ruslan Pustovit. His doctoral research focuses on developing next-generation therapeutics based on the insulin/relaxin superfamily of peptides, with particular emphasis on simplified insulin-like peptide 5 (INSL5) analogues as colon motility regulators. By integrating solid-phase peptide synthesis, medicinal chemistry, receptor pharmacology, and structure-activity relationship studies, he designs drug-like analogues with enhanced potency and selectivity to modulate relaxin family peptide receptors (RXFPs). Hongkang has published first-author papers in high-impact journals such as the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. He is passionate about bridging the gap between discovery and application in peptide science and welcomes interdisciplinary collaborations in peptide drug design, GPCR biology, and therapeutic innovation.

Dr. Zhao earned her Ph.D. in Pharmacology from Lund University, Sweden, and has authored over 100 publications on gastrointestinal pharmacology. She is recognized for her groundbreaking discovery that denervation suppresses gastric tumorigenesis (doi:10.1126/scitranslmed.3009569), a landmark finding that helped establish the emerging field of Cancer Neuroscience. She has held top-level researcher and professor positions at NTNU and is a lifetime member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters (Det Kongelige Norske Videnskabers Selskab, DKNVS).

Vladimir Matchkov is a Professor of Cardiovascular Physiology at Aarhus University, Denmark, where he leads the Neurovascular Coupling Group. He received his PhD from Lomonosov Moscow State University in 1998 and his DMSc from Aarhus University in 2010. His research focuses on cardiovascular function and membrane ion transport, with 124 peer-reviewed publications. He organized and for several years led the Vascular Special Interest Group and currently serves as Secretary-General of the Scandinavian Physiological Society. He also leads the Phenotyping Core Facility at the Department of Biomedicine, with a primary focus on cardiovascular and metabolic disturbances in rodent models. Prof. Matchkov is an active and dedicated teacher of medical physiology.