Water and the Environment Symposium

Position: Principal Investigator Lung Diseases and Functional Epigenomics ¨LUDIFE¨ Laboratory, Faculty of Higher Studies Iztacala, National Autonomous University of Mexico

Email: f.avila@unam.mx

Talk: Lung Cancer Epigenome Reprogramming: From Preclinical Studies and Clinical Practice Searching New Actionable Biomarkers in Lung Malignant Tumors

Dr. Federico Ávila-Moreno received his bachelor’s degree as Biologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and both his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute and completed his postdoctoral training at the National Institute of Respiratory Diseases, “Ismael Cosío Villegas”. Since 2011 Dr. Ávila-Moreno is a full Professor and Principal Investigator at the UNAM, and since 2024 named as Deputy-Director of Basic Research, at the National Institute of Cancerology at Mexico City.

His translational research focuses on human non-malignant and malignant lung diseases. He also studies gene transcription and epigenetic regulation mechanisms to detect tumor biomarkers involved in therapy response and prognosis, and in the field of immune response (T cells) in human lung diseases.

Dr. Ávila-Moreno has published 56 manuscripts at indexed international journals. He is a member of the Researchers National System (SNII-National Council of Science and Technology, Level-II “MEXICO”), member of the International Association for the study of Lung Cancer “IASLC” (U.S.A.), and a Member of the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy “ASGCT” (U.S.A.)

Position: Presidential Professor School of Integrated Sciences, Sustainability, and Public Health University of Illinois Springfield

Email: ebond5@uis.edu

Talk: Identification of Developmental Toxicants using Zebrafish

Dr. Maria Bondesson Bolin’s research uses zebrafish to study how environmental pollutants influence early development, with a particular focus on the brain, blood vessels, and skeletal system.

Her work also examines how certain chemicals, so-called endocrine disruptors, affect hormones by altering their levels or interfering with normal hormone signaling pathways, using both genetically engineered zebrafish and cell-based models.

In addition, she applies advanced molecular techniques, including -omics approaches, to analyze changes in gene expression, proteins, or lipids to better understand how environmental pollutants affect biological processes at the molecular level.

Position: Dean of the Carle Illinois College of Medicine and Senior Vice President and Chief Academic Officer for Carle Health University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Email: meddean@illinois.edu

Talk: Growing Bones and Replacing Organs through advanced regenerative medicine technologies: The Future is Now

Mark S. Cohen, MD, FACS, FSSO, MAMSE is Dean of the Carle Illinois College of Medicine at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Senior VP and Chief Academic Officer for Carle Health. He is a tenured Professor of Surgery and Biomedical and Translational Sciences in the College of Medicine, and the Founder Professor of Bioengineering at UIUC. Throughout his career, Dr. Cohen has focused efforts on medical innovation and training the next generation of physicians to be leaders, innovators, and to create impact in their institutions and communities. After completing his BS in Chemical Engineering, his MD, a general surgery residency and a T32 fellowship in Surgical Oncology at Washington University in St. Louis, he was on faculty for 6 years at the University of Kansas, then 10 years at the University of Michigan where he served 3 vice chair roles and directed two centers.

To date, he has helped educate over 350 surgeons and residents in taking innovations from ideas to patient impact including licensing of technologies and several new surgical start-up companies. He has authored 145 peer reviewed manuscripts along with 13 book-chapters and is the author and editor of the first textbook on Surgical Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Academic Surgery published by Springer-Nature. He won the 2019 University of Michigan Faculty Recognition Award for Innovation and the 2021 Provost teaching award for Innovation from the University of Michigan. He was recently elected a fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering as well as into the Academy of Master Surgeon Educators by the American College of Surgeons. He also serves on the Administrative Board of the Council of Deans of the American Association of Medical Colleges.

In addition to six patents and over 100 invited/distinguished/ keynote speaker presentations nationally and internationally, he has held several other national and international leadership positions in surgical societies and is the founding President of the Global Consortium of Innovation and Engineering in Medicine (GCIEM) which now has over 60 international and U.S. medical schools and schools of engineering as members, along with several foreign ministries of health/education, U.S. government agencies, along with several global health and technology corporations.

He launched a highly successful Global Summit on Health Innovation with over 500 delegates, across 16 countries, 34 institutions, and 6 continents here at UIUC in April. Dean Cohen is a practicing Surgical Oncologist treating patients with advanced endocrine malignancies as well as melanomas. He has run a continuously funded NIH-R01 research program in translational oncology for the last 18 years working on developing novel therapeutics and diagnostics for the treatment and staging of advanced cancers.

He was awarded in 2022, the first NSF-funded IUCRC(industry university collaborative research center) in extended reality for medical innovation which he co-founded as a partnership with Michigan, Maryland, Illinois, and 12 leading companies in this field including the FDA. His current research also involves new programs in tissue engineering (including having developed the world’s first tissue engineered thyroid from a patient’s own fat cells that can be a permanent cure for hypothyroidism), AI and machine learning in health care decision-making, and use of extended reality technologies in teaching, skills development, and health-care delivery.

Position: Division Director and Professor Community Health Sciences, School of Public Health Center for Research on Health and Aging University of Illinois Chicago

Email: benshaw@uic.edu

Talk: Neighborhood Features and Cognitive Function: Moderating roles of Individual Socioeconomic Status

Benjamin Shaw, PhD, MPH, is a Professor and Director of the Division of Community Health Sciences at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health. Prior to coming to UIC (in 2021), he was a Professor of Health Policy, Management, and Behavior - and Associate Dean for Research - at the University at Albany (SUNY) School of Public Health.

His research focuses on social and behavioral determinants of health across the life course, with a emphasis on aging populations. He is a Fellow in the Gerontological Society of America and currently serves on three editorial boards: Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences (since 2008), the Journal of Aging and Health (since 2006), and Research on Aging (since 2016). From 2015-17, he served as Director of an NIH-funded Population Center (the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis) at UAlbany.

Since 2011, he has been an invited Guest Researcher at the Karolinska Institute’s Aging Research Center, in Stockholm, Sweden, on multiple occasions. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan School of Public Health in 2002, and a BA in Psychology from Colgate University in 1993.

Position: Principal Investigator, Tumor Immunology Laboratory, Biomedical Research Unit, Faculty of Higher Studies Iztacala, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM)

Email: soleonca@comunidad.unam.mx

Talk: Sweet but Dangerous? How Perinatal Sucralose Weakens Antitumor Immunity

Dr. Sonia Andrea León Cabrera earned her degree from the National University of Colombia and completed her Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), graduating with honors. Dr. León Cabrera has authored 37 peer-reviewed articles in international journals. She is a Level II member of Mexico’s National System of Researchers and holds a PRIDE Level D distinction from UNAM for academic productivity. Currently, she serves as a Full Professor (Titular B) and leads the Tumor Immunity Laboratory at the Unit of Biomedicine (UBIMED), Faculty of Higher Studies Iztacala.

She was awarded the L’Oréal-United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, and National Council of Science and Technology, UNESCO- National Council of Science and Technology CONACYT-Mexican Academy of Sciences Fellowship for Women in Science and received the Talento EDOMEX Award for Young Scientific Researchers in the Health Sciences category. She has taught over 50 undergraduate courses focused on the endocrine system and the development of diagnostic biomarkers.

Position: Robert Schaefer Professor, Dept. of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering Program Leader, Cancer Center at Illinois. Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Email: bharley@illinois.edu

Talk: Building Tissues: Engineering Complexity through Biomaterial Design

Dr. Brendan Harley is the Robert W. Schaefer Professor in the Dept. of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as well as Program Leader in the Cancer Center at Illinois. He received a B.S. in Engineering Sciences from Harvard University, a Sc.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and performed postdoctoral studies at the Joint Program for Transfusion Medicine at Children’s Hospital Boston.

His research group develops tissue engineering technologies for musculoskeletal regeneration, hematopoietic stem cell biomanufacturing, as well as to investigate endometrial pathologies and invasive brain cancer. Dr. Harley co-founded a regenerative medicine company, Orthomimetics Ltd., to commercialize an osteochondral regeneration technology.

Dr. Harley has received several awards and honors including a National Science Foundation CAREER award, the Young Investigator Award and the Clemson Award for Basic Research (2021) from the Society for Biomaterials, as well as university research, teaching, and promotion awards (U. Illinois).

Position: Assistant Professor at the Biomedical Research Unit. Faculty of Higher Studies Iztacala, National Autonomous University of Mexico

Email: aperezlopez@iztacala.unam.mx

Talk: Role of the Receptor CCR3 in Lung Inflammation during Influenza A Infection

Dr. Araceli Perez-Lopez has been an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Higher Studies Iztacala, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), since 2020. She obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Pharmaceutical Biological Chemistry from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, followed by a Master’s and PhD in Molecular Biomedicine at Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute, where she investigated the mechanisms by which Salmonella modulates B cell responses and innate immune activation.

Dr. Perez-Lopez has authored multiple peer-reviewed publications, including original research articles and invited reviews in journals of immunology, microbiology, and host–pathogen interaction. Her projects have been supported by funding from national and international science agencies, including SECIHTI, internal UNAM funding, and National Institutes of Health.

Position: Professor of Nutrition Associate Dean, Graduate College Associate Director, CRTEC, Cancer Center at Illinois, Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Email: zmadake2@illinois.edu

Talk: Metabolomics on Breast Cancer

Dr. Zeynep Madak-Erdogan improves the quality of life for postmenopausal women and breast cancer survivors by understanding how diet and nutrition affect hormone action.

Her lab uses multiscale modeling of omics data from patient samples, animal models, and cell lines to understand the molecular basis of metabolic regulation by nuclear receptors and therapy resistance.

Areas of Research: Breast Cancer, Cancer Survivors, Food Science, Genes, Genomics, Health Disparities, Human Nutrition, Lung Cancer, Metabolomics, Nuclear Receptors, Stress Research Program, and Theme Program: Cancer Engineering and Biological Systems Theme: Mechanistic and Quantitative Biology.

Position: Full-Time Career Professor, Rank C, Tenured Oncogenomics Laboratory, UBIMED, Faculty of Higher Studies Iztacala, National Autonomous University of Mexico

Email: carlos.pplas@unam.mx

Talk: The Role of lncRNA HOTAIR in Sustaining the Tumor Phenotype

Dr. Pérez-Plasencia’s academic career has been dedicated to understanding the genetic, epigenetic, and metabolic alterations that drive the development and progression of cancer, particularly cervical, breast, ovarian, and colorectal tumors. To explore these disease mechanisms from a systemic perspective, he has employed genomics, molecular biology, and bioinformatics approaches to uncover how tumor cells evolve and respond to their environment. After completing of his postdoctoral training, he joined the Faculty of Higher Studies Iztacala, National Autonomous University of Mexico in 2010, where he currently leads the Cancer Genomics Laboratory in the Biomedicine Unit.

He has published more than 150 peer-reviewed articles in high-impact international journals, which have been cited over 5,000 times, resulting in an H-index of 37. He has been recognized at Level III, the highest category within Mexico’s National System of Researchers. He received first place in the National Clinical Research Award from the National Health Foundation and the Ministry of Health for identifying BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations in Mexican breast cancer patients with hereditary predisposition.

Position: Associate Professor School of Integrated Sciences, Sustainability, and Public Health University of Illinois Springfield

Email: jmadri1@uis.edu

Talk: Environmental Exposure to Carcinogenic Industrial Air Emissions and Risk of Cancer

Dr. Madrigal joined the School of Integrated Sciences, Sustainability, and Public Health in the College of Health, Science, and Technology at the University of Illinois Springfield in August 2025.

She received her Ph.D. in epidemiology from the University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health, followed by a fellowship at the U.S. National Institutes of Health National Cancer Institute.

Over the last decade, Dr. Madrigal has developed a research program focused on identifying inequities in exposure to environmental contaminants (e.g., industrial pollution, pesticides, metals) and the investigation of these agents as etiologic risk factors for cancer, cardiovascular and kidney diseases, and asthma among adults and children.

Position: Dean, College of Applied Health Sciences Professor, Kinesiology, and Nutrition College of Applied Health Sciences, University of Illinois Chicago

Email: ccrespo@uic.edu

Talk: Reflections on Health Disparities in the Mexican American Population

Carlos J. Crespo, Dr. P.H., M. S., FACSM. Dean College of Applied Health Sciences, University of Illinois, Chicago; member of the Board of Directors for the National Latino Education Initiative and Humboldt Park Health.

Earlier in his career he worked for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institutes of Health. His area of research is physical activity and public health. He lists more than 100 peer-review publications and contributed to more than 20 government reports, including the Surgeon General’s Report on Physical Activity and Health.  He received the 1997 U.S. Secretary of Health Award for Distinguished Service, and in 2003 became a Health Disparities and Minority Health Scholar from the NIH.  Recently, he served in the Planning Committee on Health Equity Approaches to Obesity Efforts of National Academies of Sciences.

He is a Fellow of the American College of Sports Medicine.