Alta Smit  is the Director of Medical Affairs and Research at Biologische Heilmittel Heel GmbH in Baden-Baden, Germany and has held this position since 2009.  She has also served as Heel’s Head of Medicine and Research since 2005 and as the Director of Medicine and Medical Education since 2007.  Additionally, she is the moderator of Heel’s Scientific Board and serves on the Scientific Board of the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt an der Oder.  She is a founding member of the International Society of Homotoxicology and Homeopathy and is a member of the Institute of Functional Medicine.

Dr. Smit is recognized internationally as an integrative medical doctor and international lecturer, with a focus on bioregulation therapy of modern diseases.  She has extensive experience in various areas of medicine including Rheumatology and Clinical Immunology, and has published in numerous medical journals with special interest in acquired mitochondrial myopathies, atopic disease and functional somatic syndromes.

Dr. Smit, in addition to degrees in physiotherapy and medicine, began her training and practice of complementary modalities in 1992, completing several courses in Homotoxicology, Acupuncture and Neural Therapy in Baden-Baden, Germany.  In 1997 she completed her fellowship in Homeopathy at the Royal College of Homeopathy in London, England.  From 1994-2004 she practiced integrative medicine using the aforementioned modalities as well as orthomolecular manipulation to treat chronic diseases.

Georges St. Laurent III served  as the Scientific Director of the St. Laurent Institute (SLI), a non-profit academic research institute dedicated to systems biology and genomics approaches for understanding the molecular mechanisms of chronic disease.  While at SLI, he has been instrumental in developing international scientific collaborations. He led an international group of 15 scientists using single molecule sequencing to understand the role of ncRNAs in physiological information processing. Since 2009, he had also championed the use of Helicos technology at SLI to unlock the potential of the human transcriptome for disease diagnostics.

St. Laurent is well recognized in the fields of Molecular Biology and Neuroscience, publishing over 40 peer-reviewed research papers since 2006.  Most recently, he had published in BMC Medicine on the role of dark matter RNA in the human genome and disease-associated variants.  His publication on non-coding RNA mechanisms in Alzheimer’s disease was recognized in Nature Medicine’s “Top Ten” list for 2008.  Additional research interests include the systems biology of inflammation, the herbal medicine of Amazonia, and the computational mechanisms of non-coding RNA in the mammalian nervous system.

St. Laurent has served as an Adjunct Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at George Washington University, as a Visiting Professor at S.V. University in Tirupati, India, and at Lanzhou University in Lanzhou, China.  He held executive appointments and memberships with various prestigious Scientific Boards and Committees, including the following:  the Scientific Advisory Board of Heel GmbH in Baden Baden, Germany, and the FANTOM 5 Genomics Consortium at the RIKEN Genomics Institute in Japan. He served on the Executive Committee of the German Duque Foundation in Colombia, South America, and was the Co-Chair of the Genome Regulation and Structure Conference (BGRS) in Russia in 2008.  He earned his B.Sc. in Molecular Biology at Yale University, a Ph.D. from The University of Antioquia in Colombia, and was prepared to defend his second Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular biology at Brown University when he sadly passed away in September 2015.