2025 Plenary Speakers

Andrés Moreno-Estrada is a Mexican scientist specialized in population genetics, human evolution, and medical genomics. He is a Medical Doctor by training (University of Guadalajara, 2002) and pursued a PhD in Evolutionary Genetics in Barcelona (Pompeu Fabra University, 2009), where he was trained in human population genetics and biomedical research. Dr. Moreno completed postdoctoral training at Cornell University (New York) and Stanford University (California) from 2009 to 2012. He later became Research Associate of the Genetics Department at Stanford University until 2014. In 2015, Dr. Moreno returned to Mexico as the Head of the Genomics Core Facility of the National Laboratory of Genomics for Biodiversity (LANGEBIO) and he is currently the Principal Investigator of the Human Population Genomics Lab at the Advanced Genomics Unit of CINVESTAV.
His work integrates genomics, anthropology, and evolution to study the genetic diversity of underrepresented populations, particularly from indigenous communities across Latin America and the Pacific. He authored the most detailed work of the genetic structure of the Mexican population, including the first genomic characterization of 20 diverse indigenous groups throughout Mexico (Science 2014), as well as numerous genomic studies in South America (PLOS Genetics 2015, AJHG 2022), the Caribbean (PLOS Genetics 2013), and Polynesia (Nature 2020, Nature 2021). He also studied the genetic impact of trans-Pacific Asian migrations into Mexico during colonial times (Phil B 2022), which have shaped the genetic architecture of present-day populations and the cultural mosaic of our society. He currently heads the Mexican Biobank project, producing the most complete genomic database of national scale in Mexico, which was recently published in Nature and highlighted in the cover of the magazine in October 2023. Overall, these studies have contributed to improving the representation of understudied populations in catalogs of human genetic variation.
For his work in Latin America, he was awarded the “George Rosenkranz Prize for Health Care Research in Developing Countries” in 2012. He has trained more than a dozen international students both in the United States and in Latin America. He has authored more than 55 publications with more than 32,000 citations, including high-impact journals such as Science, Nature, PNAS, AJHG and PLOS Genetics, among others. He is the co- founder of the Latin American Alliance for Genomic Diversity (LatinGenomes), coordinator of the Human Cell Map of Latin American Diversity (LatinCells), and member of the Executive Committee of the International Common Disease Alliance (ICDA).

Eduardo Tarazona Santos is Full Professor of Human Genetics at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, one of the largest public Universities in Brazil. He leads the Laboratory of Human Genetics Diversity, focusing on the study of the genetics of Latin American populations, and the genetic basis of rare and common diseases in these populations. 

Sandra Sanchez-Roige is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California San Diego and at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Her work integrates human genetic data, electronic health records, and cross-species models to identify causal mechanisms and therapeutic targets for substance use disorders and related conditions. She co-chairs the PsycheMERGE and Latin American Genomics Consortium Substance Use Disorder Workgroups, and is an active member of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium and the Externalizing Consortium. Her work is supported by the Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program and NIH NIDA/NIAAA/NIMH, including a DP1 Avenir Award, and has received several early-career awards, including the ACNP Harry June Award, the NARSAD Young Investigator Award, the NIDA-NIAAA Early Career Investigator Award, the RSA Young Investigator Award, the IBANGS Early Career Achievement Award, and the SOBP A.E. Bennett Award. 

Peter M. Visscher FRS is a Dutch-Australian-British geneticist and professor of Quantitative Genetics at the University of Oxford and the University of Queensland. The focus of his research is to better understand the causes and consequences of human trait variation. Visscher and colleagues have developed statistical methods and analysis software tools to estimate and dissect genetic variation for complex traits, including common disorders, and successfully applied these to a range of diseases, including psychiatric disorders. He was among the first to promote, model and apply the use of whole-genome genetic data to make personalized predictions of complex traits, and has contributed to the development of advanced statistical methods to make such predictions. Visscher is married to Naomi Wray, who is Professor of Psychiatric Genetics at the University of Oxford. 

Dr. Alexander Charney is a physician-scientist and academic leader at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where he holds professorships in Artificial Intelligence, Psychiatry, Genetics, and Genomic Sciences. As Vice Chair of the Windreich Department of AI and Human Health, Director of the Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine, Deputy Director of the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Health, and Executive Director of the Blau Center for Mental Health, Dr. Charney plays a central role in shaping the future of medicine at Mount Sinai and beyond.
Dr. Charney’s work bridges psychiatry, neuroscience, genomics, and artificial intelligence. He is renowned for developing large-scale, high-impact research programs—including the Mount Sinai Million Health Discoveries Program and the Living Brain Project—that are redefining how complex diseases are studied and treated. He has served as principal investigator on multiple major NIH grants and leads research efforts into schizophrenia genetics, long COVID, and the integration of AI in medical science. His leadership in the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium has resulted in major advances in understanding the genetic underpinnings of mental illness.
As an educator and mentor, Dr. Charney has trained numerous students, fellows, and junior faculty, many of whom now hold leadership positions in academia and research. He also played a formative role in redesigning Mount Sinai’s research-track psychiatry residency program, laying the foundation for a new generation of physician-scientists.
In his administrative leadership roles, Dr. Charney has driven transformative change—securing major philanthropic and federal funding, launching first-in-human clinical trials (including gene therapy for schizophrenia), expanding institutional partnerships, and recruiting top-tier faculty. His ability to translate scientific discovery into clinical and societal impact has established him as a leader in precision medicine, digital health, and translational neuroscience. 

Professor of Genetic Epidemiology and Statistics at King’s College London. She serves as Executive Director of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, where she previously co-chaired the Major Depressive Disorder Working Group. She leads the Wellcome-funded AMBER study, which aims to identify the causal mechanisms of antidepressants through genomic, informatic and cellular approaches. With over 400 publications, her research focuses on characterising the genetic contributions to human health, particularly in the areas of psychiatry, polygenic scores and pharmacogenetics.