Dr. Dario Fauza received his M.D. from the University of São Paulo Medical School, in São Paulo, Brazil, where he also received a PhD-equivalent degree. While at the University’s Hospital of Clinics, he completed an internship and residencies in both general and pediatric surgery. He then moved to the United States, where he completed different clinical and research fellowships, as well as postdoctoral training, at Boston Children's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. He has an extensive bibliography as well as a patent portfolio. His research is directed at developing original, more effective ways to repair birth defects, both pre- and post-natally. To that end, he has pioneered and explored a variety of approaches, including fetal tissue engineering.
Dr. Mahmud Bani received his Ph.D. in neurodevelopment from the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology at the University of Western Ontario in Ontario, Canada. He completed an NSERC postdoctoral fellowship in the Neural Stem Cell Laboratory at Robarts Research Institute in Ontario, Canada. He is currently a senior research officer in the Department of Translational Biosciences at the National Research Council Canada in Ottawa, Canada, and an adjunct professor in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of Ottawa in Ottawa, Canada. Dr. Bani's ongoing research is to better understand the cellular and molecular mechanisms of neurogenesis and to develop neuroprotection and neuroregeneration strategies for the injured brain.