Elly Tanaka received her AB at Harvard, her PhD at UCSF and post-doctoral work at University College London. She became groupleader at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics Dresden then Professor at the TU Dresden and since 2016 Senior Group Leader at the Institute for Molecular Pathology, Vienna. Since April 2024 she is Scientific Director of the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA), Vienna. She is interested in how to reconstitute and regenerate complex tissues. She uses natural models of regeneration such as the axolotl, as well as patterning processes in embryonic stem cell derived organoids.

Dr. Tomancak studied at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, before completing his Ph.D. in developmental biology at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany. He conducted his postdoctoral work at the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently a senior research group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden, Germany, and the Director of the Central European Institute of Technology (CEITEC) Consortium in Brno, Czech Republic. Dr. Tomancak’s laboratory has been utilizing genomics approaches to investigate the role of tissue-specific gene expression regulation in the development and evolution of Drosophila embryos. His laboratory has developed molecular imaging and image analysis techniques (Fiji project) to describe the dynamic patterns of gene expression during development with high spatial and temporal resolution, utilizing SPIM technology (OpenSPIM) as a cornerstone of their research. Currently, the Tomancak lab is expanding the range of model species to study by quantitative imaging methods to understand the evolution of morphogenesis.