Bart VAN MEERBEEK obtained his DDS (dentist) in 1988 and his PhD in 1993 at KU Leuven (University of Leuven) in Belgium. He continued his research activity abroad for one year at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, Texas, and later also during 3 months at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. In 1995, he became Assistant Professor (‘Docent’) at KU Leuven and since then teaches Dental Biomaterials Science. In 1998 and 2002, he was promoted respectively to Associate Professor (‘Hoofddocent’) and Professor (‘Hoogleraar’), and in 2005 to Full Professor (‘Gewoon Hoogleraar’). From August 2020, he serves as elected Chair of the KU Leuven Department of Oral Health Sciences (‘Departementsvoorzitter’;

Oral Health Sciences , as one of the 14 departments of the Biomedical Sciences Group of KU Leuven, for the next four years. He founded BIOMAT, the Biomaterials Research group Biomat which focusses on diverse kinds of biomaterials with orofacial application, and encompasses fundamental material science and biological cell culture, micro-organism and animal research, as well as applied laboratory and clinical research. His primary research interest involves studies related to the broad field of Adhesive Dentistry, including fundamental as well as clinical research regarding dental adhesive technology in particular.

Newer research lines deal with Dental Ceramics, Additive Manufacturing, Cariogenicity & Biocompatibility of Dental Materials, Bioactive Materials and Pulp-preservation Material Technology. His research work has been published in more than 500 peer-reviewed journals, having resulted in an h-index of 87Web of Science/129Google Scholar. He (co-)authored 8 papers that were listed in the top-100 most cited papers in the Journal of Dental Research, including the 5th highest cited paper (JDR 2019, 98:1425-1436), and 4 papers in the top-100 most cited dentistry overall papers, including the 22nd highest cited paper (Healthcare 2021, 9, 356). He has served as promoter/co-promoter of 14/4 PhDs (+ 5/2 ongoing).

He has been honoured with several awards such as the 1996 triennial Robert Stock Award for best PhD dissertation in Biomedical Sciences, the 1997 Albert Joachim Award, the 1998 Biomedical Sciences Award of the Research Council of KU Leuven, the 2000 IADR Young Investigator Award, the 2003 Academy of Operative Dentistry Buonocore Memorial Lecturer, the 2008 CED-IADR (Continental European Division of IADR) Robert Frank Lecturer, the 2014 IADR/AADR William J. Gies Award for the best 2014 JDR paper in the Biomaterials & Bioengineering Research category, the 2015 IADR Wilmer Souder Award (IADR Distinguished Scientist award for Dental Materials), the 2020 EFCD (European Federation of Conservative Dentistry) Award of Excellence and the 2022 IADR Distinguished Service Award. Since 2003, he has been appointed as holder of the Toshio Nakao Chair for Adhesive Dentistry.

He was President of the Pan-European Federation of IADR in 2006-2007 and served as Secretary of CED-IADR for 12 years (2009-2021). In September 2019 (Madrid), he was elected as President Elect of CED-IADR, and became CED-IADR president in September 2020 and organized the 2021 CED-IADR/NOF Oral Health congress in Brussels (September 16-18, 2021: https://ced-iadr2021.com/), and finally retired from the CED-IADR board as Past-President in September 2022. Since 2004, he is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Adhesive Dentistry.

Ophir Klein serves as the inaugural executive director of Cedars-Sinai Guerin Children’s and the David and Meredith Kaplan Distinguished Chair in Children’s Health. He is also Adjunct Professor of Orofacial Sciences and Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where he was previously the Larry L. Hillblom Distinguished Professor in Craniofacial Anomalies and the Charles J. Epstein Professor of Human Genetics. Until 2022, he served as Director of the Institute for Human Genetics, Chief of the Division of Medical Genetics, Chair of the Division of Craniofacial Anomalies, and Director of the Program in Craniofacial Biology at UCSF. Dr. Klein was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a B.A. in Spanish Literature. He subsequently attended Yale University School of Medicine, where he received a Ph.D. in Genetics and an M.D. He then completed residencies at Yale-New Haven Hospital in Pediatrics and at UCSF in Clinical Genetics. Dr. Klein has received several honors, including a New Innovator Award from the NIH and the E. Mead Johnson Award from the Society for Pediatric Research. Dr. Klein was elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the American Association of Physicians and the National Academy of Medicine, and he is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Klein’s research focuses on understanding how organs form in the embryo and how they regenerate in the adult, with a particular emphasis on the processes underlying craniofacial and dental development and renewal as well as understanding how stem cells in the intestinal epithelium enable renewal and regeneration.