KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Christine Orengo, PhD. University College London (UCL)
CATH structural and functional data for hundreds of millions of proteins has enabled studies that revealed essential universal proteins and their biological roles, and extended characterisation of biological systems implicated in disease e.g. in cell division, cancer and ageing. CATH functional sites have revealed protein residues implicated in enzyme efficiency and bacterial antibiotic resistance. This data also identified genetic variations likely to be driving human diseases and the drugs that can be repurposed to offset the pathogenic effects.
Christine is a Vice President of the International Society of Computational Biology (ISCB). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology and Elected member of EMBO since 2014, and a Fellow of ISCB since 2016. She is a founder of ELIXIR 3DBioInfo.
Natasa Przulj, PhD. Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS)
Prof. Przulj is recognized for initiating extraction of biomedical knowledge from the wiring patterns (topology, structure) of large real-world molecular (omics) networks. She designs new algorithms for mining and integrating the wiring patterns of systems-level, heterogeneous omics networks. She applies them to uncover new biological and medical information and gain deeper biomedical understanding.
She is an elected academician of The Academy of Europe, Academia Europaea, and a Fellow of the British Computer Society. She is an ICREA Research Professor at Barcelona Supercomputing Center. She has been a Professor of Biomedical Data Science at University College London (UCL) Computer Science Department since 2016. She received two prestigious European Research Council (ERC) grants, the ERC Consolidator grant titled “Integrated Connectedness for a New Representation of Biology” (2018-2023) and the ERC Starting Independent Researcher Grant titled “Biological Network Topology Complements Genome as a Source of Biological Information” (2012-2017). She was awarded the British Computer Society Roger Needham Award in 2014 for a distinguished research contribution in computer science by a UK based researcher within ten years of their PhD. She held a prestigious NSF CAREER Award for the project titled “Tools for Analyzing, Modeling, and Comparing Protein-Protein Interaction Networks” in 2007-2011 at University of California Irvine.
Prof. Przulj is a member of the Editorial Boards of Bioinformatics (Oxford Journals), Scientific Reports (NaturePublishing Group) and Frontiers in Genetics (Frontiers), an Associate Editor of the Journal of Complex Networks (Oxford Academic) and BMC Bioinformatics (BioMed Central), a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI / Braunschweig, Germany), and the Proceedings / Area Chair / COSI Lead of Protein Interactions, Molecular Networks and Network Biology tracks at the ISMB/ECCB 2015, ISMB 2016 and ISMB/ECCB 2017, ISMB 2018 and ISMB/ECCB 2019.
Marie-Christine Sawley, PhD. Intel
Marie-Christine joined Intel France in December 2010 as the Exascale Lab Director in Paris, and since then, of the collaboration with Barcelona Supercomputing Center.
She completed a PhD in plasma physics at CRPP-EPFL in 1985 on analytical and numerical studies of the coupling phenomena between electromagnetic waves and magnetically confined plasmas. In 1997, she joined the “Mastering the Technology Enterprise” curriculum at IMD in Lausanne.
Active in HPC and scientific computing for the last two decades, Marie-Christine has been the director of CSCS, the Swiss national supercomputing centre for five years 2003 - 2008, before joining CMS Computing at CERN. Prior to this, she was one of the proponents and drivers for establishing the Vital-IT centre of the Swiss Institute for Bioinformatics in 2002 in partnership with HP and Intel.
Marie-Christine has also conducted a number of prominent activities in the area of scientific and technology, such as for the EPFL CRAY collaboration in 1994-95, EPFL Alinghi project in 2002-03, Swiss TX cluster at EPFL and promotion of ETH Zurich and Swiss industries in the building of the CMS detector at CERN in 2008.
CONFERENCE CHAIRS
Janet Kelso - Group leader, Minerva Research Group for Bioinformatics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany.
Alison Kennedy - Director, STFC Hartree Center, UK.
Núria López Bigas - ICREA Research Professor and Group leader, Biomedical Genomics Research Group, Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona), Spain.
SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE
LEARNING FROM BIOLOGICAL SEQUENCES
Ana Rojas - Group leader, Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Group at the Andalusian Center for Developmental Biology, CSIC, Spain.
Marta Melé - Group Leader, Transcriptomics and Functional Genomics Lab, Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Spain.
Cristina Marino-Buslje - Group Leader, Structural Bioinformatics, Fundación Instituto Leloir, Argentina.
Eva Novoa - Group Leader, Epitranscriptomics and RNA Dynamics, Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG), Spain.
Anjali Gupta Hinch - Postdoctoral Researcher, Prof Peter Donnelly's group, Oxford University, UK.
Marina Marcet-Houben - Postdoctoral Researcher, Comparative Genomics Lab, Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona), Spain.
Cinta Pegueroles - Postdoctoral Researcher, Comparative Genomics Lab, Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona), Spain.
MACHINES SPEEDING UP RESEARCH
Fiona Reid - Data Scientist and HPC Expert, HPC Consultant.
Michele Weiland - Project Manager, Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC), University of Edinburgh, UK.
Dawn Geatches - Project Scientist, Science and Technology Facilities Council, STFC Daresbury Laboratory, UK.
Laura Schulz - Head of Strategic Development, Leibniz-Rechenzentrum (LRZ), Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Germany.
WHEN COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY MEETS MEDICINE
Milana Frenkel-Morgenstein - Group Leader, Cancer Genomics and BioComputing lab (lab's website), Bar-Ilan University, Israel.
Vera Pancaldi - Group Leader, Centre de Recherches de Cancerologie de Toulouse (CRCT), Inserm, France.
Laura Inés Furlong - Miguel Servet researcher and head of the Integrative Bioinformatics group, Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB), IMIM-UPF, Spain.
Valentina Boeva - Group Leader Computational (Epi-) Genetics of Cancer group, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) & Institut Cochin, Inserm, France.
Fatima Al-Shahrour - Head of Bioinformatics Unit, Spanish National Cancer Research Center (CNIO), Spain.
Anaïs Baudot - Group Leader Networks and Systems Biology for Diseases group, CNRS Researcher, Marseille Medical Genetic Unit (MMG), Aix Marseille Univ, Inserm, France.
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Mar Albà - ICREA Research Professor and Head of Group, Evolutionary genomics group, Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics (UPF/IMIM).
Eva Alloza - Training and Support Officer, Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute (INB), Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC).
Rosa Maria Badia - Manager, Workflows and distributed computing group, Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC).
Nataly Buslón - Postdoctoral Researcher, Social link analytics life sciences group, Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC).
Osnat Hakimi. Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, Biomaterials, Biomechanics and Tissue Engineering Group (UPC).
Alba Jené - Research Manager, Bioinformatics coordination unit, Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC).
Eva Navarrete - Director Assistant, Life Sciences Department, Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC).
María José Rementería - Head of Unit, Social link analytics life sciences group, Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC).