Speakers

Serena Nik-Zainal

Professor of Genomic Medicine and Bioinformatics, University of Cambridge, UK

Serena Nik-Zainal is a Professor of Genomic Medicine and Bioinformatics and an NIHR Research Professor at the University of Cambridge. She leads the Genomic Medicine theme at the NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Campus, advancing cancer genomics through computational and experimental approaches. Her work focuses on mutational mechanisms, machine-learning clinical algorithms, and their integration into clinical trials.

Serena pioneered whole genome sequencing (WGS), identifying mutational signatures and phenomena like "kataegis." She has contributed to pan-cancer analyses for the UK 100,000 Genomes Project, interpreting over 15,000 cancer genomes, and uses cellular models like CRISPR-Cas9 to study somatic mutations.

With seven patent filings, she is driving clinical applications of cancer genomics, linking biological insights to therapies.

Serena Nik-Zainal is giving the [BC]² opening lecture on Monday 8 September.

Peer Bork

Director of EMBL Heidelberg, Germany

Peer is the interim Director General of EMBL (European Molecular Biology laboratory), Europe’s only intergovernmental organization in life sciences. Before he served as the Director of the EMBL Heidelberg site and as head of unit (department) for structural and computational biology.

Peer is senior group leader in the areas of computational biology and microbiomics. He currently also serves scientific director of TREC, an EMBL-led multinational project (“Traversing European coastlines”) to study ecosystem interactions, involving 90 institutions. His scientific work has been recognized by honorary doctorates of the universities of Utrecht and Copenhagen as well as by honorary professorships at the universities of Heidelberg and Würzburg and the Fudan university of Shanghai.

Peer received his PhD in Biochemistry (1990) and his Habilitation in Theoretical Biophysics (1995). He has published more than 700 research articles, among them more than 90 in Nature, Science or Cell, and is among the most cited researchers in the world . He is or has been on the editorial board of various journals, including Science and Cell, and functions as founding editor of the journal Molecular Systems Biology.

Peer co-founded five successful biotech companies, two of which went public. More than 70 of his former associates now hold professorships or other group leader positions in prominent institutions all over the world. He received a number of awards, among them the "Nature award for creative mentoring" for his achievements in nurturing and stimulating young scientists, the prestigious "Royal Society and Académie des Sciences Microsoft award" for the advancement of science using computational methods and the Novo Nordisk Foundation Novozymes prize for outstanding contributions to Biotechnology. He further obtained two competitive ERC advanced investigator grants and is elected member of the German national academy of sciences (Leopoldina), the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and the Academia Europaea.

Peer Bork is giving the keynote lecture on Tuesday 9 September.

Julia Merkenschlager

Harvard Medical School, USA

Julia Merkenschlager leads a group at Harvard Medical where they combine approaches from the fields of immunology, virology, and immunogen design to better understand the rules that underpin protective immune responses following vaccination. 

Julia Merkenschlager is giving the closing keynote lecture on Wednesday 10 September.

Aurélie Cobat

Theme leader Computational Genetics, Institut Imagine, France

Aurélie Cobat is an INSERM-appointed Assistant Professor at the Imagine Institute in the Laboratory of Human Genetics of Infectious Diseases (HGID) and Guest Investigator at The Rockefeller University in the St. Giles Laboratory of HGID. Her research focuses on the human genetic contribution to the natural history of mycobacterial and viral infections. She completed a medical degree with a diploma of specialized studies of Public Health at the French Paris Descartes University in 2009. During her medical training, she extended her work to research and joined the HGID laboratory (led by Dr Laurent Abel and Pr Jean-Laurent Casanova) in Paris, France, as a PhD student in Genetic Epidemiology. She began studying the human genetic basis of the early phase of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) infection. During her postdoctoral training at McGill University, Canada, she studied the genetic components of the second most common mycobacterial infection, leprosy. When she returned to the HGID laboratory in 2013, she began to work on viral diseases. In 2016, she was recruited as an INSERM researcher in the HGID laboratory, where she lead a research team focusing on computational genetics of human infections.

Aurélie Cobat is presenting in the session Bioinformatics in infectious diseases: tackling challenges from hosts to pathogens.

Elodie Laine

Laboratory of Computational, Quantitative, and Synthetic Biology, Sorbonne University, Paris, France

Elodie Laine works at the Laboratory of Computational, Quantitative, and Synthetic Biology at Sorbonne University. Her research focuses on the protein sequence-structure-dynamics-function relationship. How do proteins fold, move, and associate? What mechanisms cause their dysfunction? How have highly specialized proteomes diversified through evolution? With her research team, she has developed efficient, scalable, and interpretable computational and AI methods for deciphering the complexity of protein surface interactions with multiple partners, describing conformational ensembles and transitions, assessing the functional impacts of protein mutations, and mapping proteoform diversity in evolution.

She is a Professor at Sorbonne University and a junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. She completed her PhD in life sciences at Institut Pasteur and conducted her postdoctoral research at École Normale Supérieure de Cachan, France.

Elodie Laine is presenting in the session Protein design and modeling molecular assemblies: breakthroughs and applications in computational structural biology.

Eline Lorenzen

Professor of Molecular Natural History, Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Eline Lorenzen is a molecular ecologist at the University of Copenhagen's Globe Institute, where she investigates the intricate relationships between climate change and biodiversity. She combines cutting-edge molecular techniques with traditional natural history to understand how species respond to environmental change. Her interdisciplinary approach has earned her numerous prestigious accolades, including the 2023 Elite Research Prize from the Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science. Beyond her research achievements, Eline holds key advisory positions with international conservation organizations including the IUCN Species Survival Commission and WWF Denmark. Her work has been featured in major biology textbooks and recognized by UNESCO-L'Oreal's For Women in Science program. As a passionate advocate for interdisciplinary research and scientific storytelling, Eline leads a diverse research group of international scientists and emphasizes the importance of communicating complex scientific findings in compelling ways. Her innovative research provides crucial insights into how species adapt to changing environments—knowledge that is increasingly vital in our era of rapid global change.

Eline Lorenzen is presenting in the session Integrative bioinformatics for evolutionary and environmental processes

Païvi Östling

Associate Professor, Karolinska Institute, Sweden
Scientific Lead of Precision Medicine, SciLifeLab

Päivi Östling has more than 10 years of research experience in the field of precision cancer medicine (PCM) research. As of 2016, she has been responsible for establishing a functional precision medicin (fPM) platform at SciLifeLab through the Olli Kallioniemi research group where she also acts as a co-principal investigator. The groups research focuses on individualized drug profiling including multi-omics in acute myeloid leukemia, ovarian and bladder cancer as well as pediatric tumors.

Since June 2021, she is one of the Scientific Leads of Precision Medicine at SciLifeLab that aims to enable next generation precision medicine and define a strategic roadmap towards this. In addition, she has key positions of trust within the Swedish Life Science sector including the board of PCM Program at KI, Cancer Research KI, SWELife and Genomic Medicine Sweden.

Through her research focus, her experience in establishing research infrastructure for precision medicine and her commissions of trust she is uniquely placed to provide valuable insights into the complex landscape of precision medicine.

Païvi Östling is presenting in the session Clinical data science: advancements in diagnostics and patient care.

Itay Tirosh

Professor, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
Group's webpage

Itay Tirosh obtained his PhD in computational biology from the Weizmann Institute of Science. From 2012 to 2017 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Regev and Golub labs at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where he pioneered the application of single cell RNA sequencing to human tumors. Since 2017 he has been a PI at the Weizmann Institute of Science. The Tirosh lab is applying single cell and spatial technologies to clinical tumor samples, and combines that with extensive computational analysis to understand the diversity of cells within human tumors and the implication of such diversity. The lab studies multiple tumor types but is primarily focused on glioma and head and neck cancer.

Itay Tirosh is presenting in the session Bioinformatics for cancer research.