Yasmin completed her BSc at University of Surrey and MSc at University of Malaya then received a Chevening scholarship to pursue a Ph.D. in Plant Virology at the John Innes Institute U.K. She joined UM as a lecturer in the Department of Genetics and Cellular Biology and was appointed a full Professor in 2005, an elected member of UM senate since 2017 and the senate representative to the board of UM from 2019 to 2021. She retired offcially from UM in May 2021 and currently continues to serve UM as an honarary Professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies UM. She is also an adjunct professor at IUMW and an honarary fellow of the Tun Ghazali Shafie Institue for Strategic leadership at UCYP. She is  fellow and currently on the council of the Academy of Sciences Malaysia She contiinues to be part of  a dynamic research group and still publishes actively, focusing on utilising modern biotechnology strategies to tackle fundamental problems in agriculture as well on issues related to BioPolicies, Bioethics and Biosafety. Recently  she was involved in ASMs Science Outlook 2020 review and the National Biotechnology Policy II. She has filed more than 10 patents and graduated more than 20 PhD and 25 MSc students. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Sciences Malaysia and listed as in the Top Research Scientist Malaysia database. She was a founding trustee of the National Institutes of Biotechnology Malaysia, a founding member of the Asian Network for Biosafety Education and was a two term expert member on the National Biosafety Board. Yasmin was the first head of the Centre for Research in Biotechnology for Agriculture and chair of the University’s Biotechnology and Bioproduct Cluster (UMBIO). She was also chief editor of the Asia-Pacific Journal for Molecular Biology and Biotechnology. in 2009 she left UM for a 3 year secondment to the Ministry of Science Technology and Innovation Malaysia as Undersecretary of the National Biotechnology Division . During her tenure Malaysia launched the Bioeconomy Initiative Malaysia designed to spur growth of the biotechnology industry. Whilst there, she spearheaded the committee which led to the formation of the National Bioethics Council. She has sat on the Board of Directors of MARDI, the Board of Governors of ICGEB, Trieste and was the National Point of Contact (NPC) for UNESCO’s Microbial Biotechnology Network and SEA-EU-NET (Biotech). Prior to retirement she was  Associate vice chancellor (Industry & Community) & prior to this the  Director of the University of Malaya Centre for Innovation & Commercilisation. In these roles she focused on building the university's entreprenureal ecosystem andd fostering engagement and collaboration with industry and the community.  She is also founding  vice president of the Innovation and Technology Managers Association Malaysia. She has sat on the Board of MaGIC (mymagic.my) and more recently on the boards of UMInnovations SB, UMPlantations SB & UMCapital Berhad. She is now chair of the Boards of Mranti corporation and Xeraya Capital. She is also a fellow of ICDM and a registered technology transfer professional (RTTP).    see also her archival profile in Scientific American World Vision: http://www.saworldview.com/wv/profiles/yasmin-othman/

Dr Helena Varkkey is an Associate Professor of Political Ecology at the Department of International and Strategic Studies, Universiti Malaya. Her areas of expertise include transboundary haze governance in Southeast Asia and global palm oil politics. Her monograph on “The Haze Problem in Southeast Asia: Palm Oil and Politics” was published by Routledge in 2016. Her latest book is a collection of essays on the politics of haze and the environment in Southeast Asia called “The Forests for the Palms” published by ISEAS Singapore in 2021. Dr Helena has almost two decades of experience in qualitative research, including conducting fieldwork, interviews, and focus groups among various government and non-government stakeholders, and has built up extensive research networks in countries across ASEAN. She has edited and produced reports for the Academy of Sciences Malaysia, UNICEF, and the ASEAN Secretariat.

Professor Dr. Lim Kheng Seang, a University of Malaya (Malaysia) graduate in 1999 with MRCP (UK), is a Professor of Neurology in the Faculty of Medicine, University of Malaya, the Head of Neurology Unit, PPUM, and a Consultant Neurologist specializing in epilepsy at the University of Malaya Medical Centre and University Malaya Specialist Centre, Malaysia. He has been trained at the University of Malaya for his neurology subspecialty training (2008), followed by fellowship training in Melbourne (2011) and Cleveland (2017) for epilepsy.  He is the President of the ASEAN Neurological Association (ASNA, 2023-2027), the Chair-elect (2025-2029) and General Secretary (2021-2025) of the Asian and Oceanian Commission, International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE-AO), the chair of the Research Task Force in the commission, the past President of the Malaysian Society of Neurosciences (MSN) and Malaysian Epilepsy Society (PEM), an active member of the Malaysian Epilepsy Council and internationally and ex-chair of the Research Commission in the International Bureau of Epilepsy. He has been involved in many trials of newer treatments (e.g., newer drugs and transcranial magnetic stimulation) in epilepsy. He also specialises in non-invasive and invasive epilepsy surgery assessment, including long-term video-EEG monitoring, intracranial monitoring with stereo-EEG, subdural and depth electrodes, electrocardiography, and cortical stimulation. Other areas of expertise included vagal nerve stimulation, deep brain stimulation, transcutaneous vagal nerve stimulation, repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation, transcutaneous direct current stimulation, corpus callosotomy and radiofrequency ablation.  He is currently the Associate Editor for Neurology Asia, a reviewer for a few academic journals, and an organising committee member of multiple national and international conferences. He has published ≥ 150 original papers with an H-index of 24, in journals including Neurology (IF:8.055), Epilepsia (IF:5.562), Neuron (14.403), and JAMA Neurology (IF:29.91). His research work focuses on the psychosocial aspects of epilepsy, clinical studies, especially epilepsy surgery and seizures in brain tumours, genetics in focal and familial epilepsies, pharmacogenomics and pharmacokinetics of antiepileptic drugs, quantitative EEG and quantitative MRI research, and artificial intelligence. He is active in research, being the principal investigator and co-investigator in many local and international research projects, and has a strong collaboration with Southeast Asia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. He was awarded multiple university and national research grants of more than RM1.5 million, and he has supervised 20 postgraduate students and 30 international neurology fellows.