Conference Chairs


Christine Orengo

Conference Co-chair: Christine Orengo
University College London
Department of Structural and Molecular Biology
United Kingdom

Tandy Warnow

Conference Co-chair: Tandy Warnow
Department of Computer Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
United States


Gary Stormo

Honorary Chair: Gary Stormo
Washington University Medical School in St Louis
Division of Biology and Biomedical Sciences
United States


Conference Co-chair: Christine Orengo

University College London
Department of Structural and Molecular Biology
United Kingdom

Christine Orengo’s research has focused on how proteins function and evolve – how do relatives in a family acquire new functions and how do they evolve to operate in different biological contexts. Her group established the CATH classification of protein domains which is a partner resource in InterPro and widely accessed. They also develop methods for predicting protein functions and analyse functional genomics data to learn how protein networks rewire under different biological conditions. Orengo was awarded an MRC Senior Fellowship, 1995-2005, and became Professor of Bioinformatics at UCL, in 2002. Orengo has collaborated with over 30 groups worldwide including experimental groups characterising development, neuropathic pain, ageing and cancer. She became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology in 2014, an elected member of EMBO in 2014, and a Fellow of ISCB in 2016. She has been on the board of ISCB since 2011 and a Vice president of ISCB since 2013.

Website: http://orengogroup.info


Conference Co-chair: Tandy Warnow

Department of Computer Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
United States

Tandy Warnow is the Founder Professor of Computer Science, a member of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, an affiliate in the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and in six departments at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Tandy received her PhD in Mathematics in 1991 at the University of California at Berkeley under the direction of Eugene Lawler. She received postdoctoral training with Simon Tavaré and Michael Waterman at the University of Southern California from 1991-1992, and at Sandia National Laboratories from 1992-1993. Tandy was on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania from 1994-1999 and at the University of Texas from 1999-2014, before joining the faculty at the University of Illinois in 2014. Tandy received the National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award in 1994, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Award in Science and Engineering in 1996, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship in 2006, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for 2011. She was elected a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 2016 and of the International Society for Computational Biology in 2017. Her research combines mathematics, computer science, and statistics to develop improved models and algorithms for reconstructing complex and large-scale evolutionary histories in both biology and historical linguistics. Her current research focuses on phylogeny and alignment estimation for very large datasets (10,000 to 1,000,000 sequences), estimating species trees and phylogenetic networks from collections of gene trees, and metagenomics.

website: http://tandy.cs.illinois.edu


Honorary Chair: Gary Stormo

Washington University Medical School in St Louis
Division of Biology and Biomedical Sciences
United States

Gary Stormo is the Joseph Erlanger Professor in the Department of Genetics and the Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis. He received his B.S. degree in biology from the California Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He remained at the University of Colorado as a faculty member in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology until joining the faculty at WUSM in 1999. Beginning with his graduate thesis work he has combined experimental and computational approaches to understanding gene regulation. Most of that work has focused on identifying, modeling and predicting regulatory sites in DNA and RNA and their contributions to regulatory networks that control gene expression in vivo.

Website: http://genetics.wustl.edu/gslab/