Gaia Novarino is a full professor of neuroscience at IST Austria and one of three vice presidents. Her focus is on genetics and molecular mechanisms of neurodevelopmental disorders. She has published groundbreaking studies in prestigious journals such as Science, Cell, Nature Neuroscience. She was one of the first to describe a genetic form of autism and epilepsy that can be treated and reversed through nutritional supplementation. She is a Simons Foundation SFARI investigator, ERC Starting and Consolidator grant holder (2017-2022, 2023-2028), FENS Kavli Network Fellow, and recipient of the Boehringer Ingelheim FENS Research Award. She has an intrinsic motivation and enthusiasm to bring excellent and novel research developments to benefit patients, with a keen interest in translational medicine and entrepreneurship. Gaia Novarino is a co-founder and scientific advisor of Neurolentech. Her national and international network among scientists and clinicians will be important to Neurolentech´s lasting success. She, also, co- founded Solgate, a pre-clinical drug development company focused on SLC transporters with currently ~20 employees.

Christoph Bock is a Principal Investigator at the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and Professor of [Bio]Medical Informatics at the Medical University of Vienna. His research combines experimental biology (high-throughput sequencing, epigenetics, CRISPR screening, synthetic biology) with computational methods (bioinformatics, machine learning, artificial intelligence) – for cancer, immunology, and precision medicine. Before coming to Vienna, he was a postdoc at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (2008-2011) and a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics (2004-2008). Christoph Bock is also a informatics group leader at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Rare and Undiagnosed Diseases (LBI-RUD), coordinator of an EU Horizon 2020 project that contributes single-cell sequencing of human organoids to the Human Cell Atlas, and fellow of the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS). He has received important research awards, including the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society (2009), an ERC Starting Grant (2016-2021), an ERC Consolidator Grant (2021-2026), and the Overton Prize of the International Society for Computational Biology (2017). He has been included in the global list of “Highly Cited Researchers” by Clarivate Analytics (ISI Web of Science) in each year since 2019. He co-founded Myllia Biotechnology, a Vienna-based startup company that develops and applies single-cell methods for high- throughput biology and drug discovery (currently ~40 employees). Christoph Bock is a co-founder and scientific advisor of Neurolentech. He contributes key expertise in high-throughput technology, bioinformatics and machine learning, as well as a strong global network in the field of single-cell biology. Beyond his computational research on human diseases, Christoph runs a sequencing core facility and engages in enhancing “genetic literacy” in the Austrian population through teaching, outreach and advocacy (e.g., https://nature.com/articles/537009a).