Links within this page: Tanya Berger-Wolf | Layla Hirsh Martinez | José Arturo Molina Mora | Andres Moreno-Estrada
Tanya Berger-Wolf
Ohio State University
Untied States
Dr. Tanya Berger-Wolf is a Professor of Computer Science Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology at the Ohio State University, where she is also the Director of the Translational Data Analytics Institute. She is leading the US National Science Foundation funded Imageomics Institute and the US-Canada funded AI and Biodiversity Change (ABC) Global Climate Center. Berger-Wolf is a member of the US National Academies Board on Life Sciences, US National Committee for the International Union of Biological Sciences (IUBS), and the Advisory Committee for the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI) AI and Biodiversity working group, among many others. She has received numerous awards for her research and mentoring and is in high demand speaker for both technical research as well as general public audiences. Berger-Wolf is also a director and co-founder of the AI for conservation non-profit Wild Me (now part of Conservation X Labs), home of the Wildbook project, which has been chosen by UNSECO as one of the 100 AI projects worldwide supporting the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Prior to coming to OSU in January 2020, Berger-Wolf was at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She received her PhD from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2002.
AI for Nature: From Science to Impact
Computation has fundamentally changed the way we study nature. New data collection technologies, such as GPS, high-definition cameras, autonomous vehicles under water, on the ground, and in the air, genotyping, acoustic sensors, and crowdsourcing, are generating data about life on the planet that are orders of magnitude richer than any previously collected. Yet, our ability to extract insight from these data lags substantially behind our ability to collect it. The need for understanding is more urgent than ever and the challenges are great. We are in the middle of the 6th extinction, losing the planet's biodiversity at an unprecedented rate and scale. In many cases, we do not even have the basic numbers of what species we are losing, which impacts our ability to understand biodiversity loss drivers, predict the impact on ecosystems, and implement policy. The talk will discuss how AI can turn these data into high resolution information source about living organisms, enabling scientific inquiry, conservation, and policy decisions. It will introduce a new field of science, imageomics, and present a vision and examples of AI as a trustworthy partner both in science and biodiversity conservation, discussing opportunities and challenges.
Layla Hirsh Martinez
Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru
Peru
Qualified as Researcher CONCYTEC.Level III. PhD in Bioscience and Biotechnology at the University of Padua, Italy. Computer Engineer, with Master of Computer Science. Senior lecturer at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP) since 2008 in all university-level courses. He collaborates with the Institute of European Bioinformatics (EMBL-EBI) and research laboratories in Argentina, Italy, Germany, among others; He focused his research on repetitive protein structures by updating RepeatsDB, a database of repeated protein structures. In 2021 she was recognized with the L'oreal-Unesco-Concytec-ANC National Award "For Women in Science" category : Talents on the rise.
José Arturo Molina Mora
University of Costa Rica
Costa Rica
Dr. José Arturo Molina Mora (Ph.D.) is a Full Professor and scientific researcher at the University of Costa Rica. He has a multidisciplinary background in Microbiology and Clinical Chemistry, Mathematics, and holds both a Master’s and a Ph.D. in Bioinformatics. He has coordinated and contributed to more than 40 projects in research, teaching, and training, focusing on data analysis in biosciences, pathogens—particularly antimicrobial resistance—and human genomics. His work
has resulted in over 75 scientific publications.
He collaborates as a researcher with the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in London, United Kingdom, and the Human Phenome Institute in Shanghai, China. His contributions to research and education have been recognized with national and international awards for professional excellence and innovation, particularly for his pioneering role in advancing bioinformatics and artificial intelligence in biosciences across Costa Rica and Latin America. He currently serves as the Latin American coordinator of the BiotrAIn project, which focuses on the application of AI in bioscience research.
Bioinformatics and Artificial Intelligence Applied to Biosciences and Health: A 15-Year Journey in Research and Training
This talk presents our experience in implementing Bioinformatics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in biosciences and health through a range of research and training initiatives developed over the past 15 years in Costa Rica and Latin America.
Beyond generating scientific contributions in areas such as pathogen genomics, antimicrobial resistance, and human diseases, our work has also focused on strengthening local capacities and promoting active engagement as equal partners
within the international scientific community.
The presentation will highlight selected case studies, including the development of pathogen data portal, efforts to expand the representation of Latin American genomic data in global databases, and the optimization of molecular diagnostic tools. In addition, we will showcase AI-driven approaches to integrate genomic and phenotypic data, with applications in priority antimicrobial-resistant bacteria and biomarker discovery in cancer and other chronic diseases.
Overall, this talk provides an overview of initiatives that have had a significant impact at both local and regional levels in Costa Rica and across Latin America, driven by collaborative research and capacity-building programs.
Andrés Morena-Estrada
Human Evolutionary and Population Genomics Lab
Mexico
Andrés Moreno-Estrada is a Mexican scientist specialized in population genetics, human evolution, and medical genomics. He is a Medical Doctor by training (University of Guadalajara, 2002) and pursued a PhD in Evolutionary Genetics in Barcelona (Pompeu Fabra University, 2009), where he was trained in human population genetics and biomedical research. Dr. Moreno completed postdoctoral training at Cornell University (New York) and Stanford University (California) from 2009 to 2012. He later became Research Associate of the Genetics Department at Stanford University until 2014. In 2015, Dr. Moreno returned to Mexico as the Head of the Genomics Core Facility of the National Laboratory of Genomics for Biodiversity (LANGEBIO) and he is currently the Principal Investigator of the Human Population Genomics Lab at the Advanced Genomics Unit of CINVESTAV.
His work integrates genomics, anthropology, and evolution to study the genetic diversity of underrepresented populations, particularly from indigenous communities across Latin America and the Pacific. He authored the most detailed work of the genetic structure of the Mexican population, including the first genomic characterization of 20 diverse indigenous groups throughout Mexico (Science 2014), as well as numerous genomic studies in South America (PLOS Genetics 2015, AJHG 2022), the Caribbean (PLOS Genetics 2013), and Polynesia (Nature 2020, Nature 2021). He also studied the genetic impact of trans-Pacific Asian migrations into Mexico during colonial times (Phil B 2022), which have shaped the genetic architecture of present-day populations and the cultural mosaic of our society. He currently heads the Mexican Biobank project, producing the most complete genomic database of national scale in Mexico, which was recently published in Nature and highlighted in the cover of the magazine in October 2023. Overall, these studies have contributed to improving the representation of understudied populations in catalogs of human genetic variation.
For his work in Latin America, he was awarded the “George Rosenkranz Prize for Health Care Research in Developing Countries” in 2012. He has trained more than a dozen international students both in the United States and in Latin America. He has authored more than 55 publications with more than 32,000 citations, including high-impact journals such as Science, Nature, PNAS, AJHG and PLOS Genetics, among others. He is the co- founder of the Latin American Alliance for Genomic Diversity (LatinGenomes), coordinator of the Human Cell Map of Latin American Diversity (LatinCells), and member of the Executive Committee of the International Common Disease Alliance (ICDA).