CONFERENCE SPONSORS

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Links within this page: Rob Finn | Syma Khalid

Rob Finn
European Bioinformatics Institute

Dr. Rob Finn heads the Genome Assembly and Annotation Section and is the lead of the Microbiome Informatics team at EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). Rob is also co-lead on Ensembl, and while maintaining scientific oversight for the whole resource, part of his team responsible for the microbial divisions found in Ensembl.  The Microbiome Informatics team also produces MGnify, a world leading resource for the functional and taxonomic analysis and archiving of microbiome derived sequence data.  In addition to making large numbers of datasets available, each processed in a systematic way, the resource allows scientists to upload their own data, either privately or publicly, and assemble and analyse their data. Across the MGnify resources, >400K genomes, >60,000 assemblies and >2.4 billion redundant proteins. Complementing these biological resources, Rob has a small research team that develop algorithms for exploring microbial genomic diversity, as well as gaining deeper insights into the interaction between bacteria and phages. Rob joined EMBL-EBI from the Janelia Research Campus in the US, where he led a group that designed fast, web-based, interactive protein-sequence searches and annotations. Between 2001 and 2010, he was the project leader for Pfam at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the UK. Rob’s academic background is in microbiology and he holds a PhD in biochemistry from Imperial College, London

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Syma Khalid
University of Oxford

Syma graduated with a first class degree in Chemistry from the University of Warwick in 2000. She remained at Warwick to read for a PhD under the supervision of Prof. P. Mark Rodger. After obtaining her PhD in 2003, she moved to the University of Oxford as a postdoc in Prof Mark Sansom’s lab, to study the structure-function relationship of bacterial outer membrane proteins. During her postdoctoral work, she became interested in the application of molecular simulation techniques to problems in bionanotechnology. In 2007, she was appointed as RCUK fellow in chemical biology at the University of Southampton. In 2010, she was appointed to a lectureship at Southampton and promoted to full Professor in 2016. In 2021 she was appointed as Professor of Computational Microbiology at the Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow at St Anne’s College. Syma is the chair of HECBioSim and is on the Council of the Biophysical Society. She currently holds an EPSRC Established Career Fellowship

Current research 

The main theme to the research in my group is the use of computational techniques to explore the structure-function relationships of a range of microbial membranes/cell envelopes, with a particular focus on Gram-negative bacteria. We strive to construct simulation systems that include as much biochemical complexity as is practical such that we see our simulations as computational assays. Using such an approach we are moving towards doing 'Computational Microbiology'. 

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Coming soon.

Abstracts – Talks and Posters

We invite abstracts for research that is topical to bioinformatics and computational biology. Areas may include:

• AI and machine learning in Biology and Medicine
• Bioinformatics resources and infrastructure
• Databases, Ontologies and Biocuration
• Cancer genomics and personalised medicine
• Evolutionary, Comparative Genomics and Phylogenetics
• Metagenomics and Microbiome Analysis
• Multi-Omic Informatics
• Network Biology and Systems Biology
• Protein/RNA Structure Analysis, Prediction and Design
• Single-Cell Analysis
• Drug Discovery and Repurposing
• Bioinformatics Education

Abstract submission opening soon!