Ido Amit
Principal Investigator, Department of Immunology, Weizmann
Institute of Science, Israel.
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Born in Kibbutz Hazor, Ido Amit earned his PhD in biological
regulation at the Weizmann Institute of Science in 2007. He
conducted a four-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Broad
Institute of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, before joining the Weizmann Institute in 2011. He
is the incumbent of the Eden and Steven Romick Professorial
Chair.
Ido Amit is a world leader and pioneer in the fields of
single-cell genomics and clinical big-data analytics. He has
spearheaded the application of these technologies to generate a
comprehensive “google map” of the entire immune system and how
it is perturbed in disease. Ido Amit’s research addresses some
of the most fundamental questions in immunology. His discoveries
are enabling the development of new immunotherapy
strategies,—wotking with the leading biopharma his discoveries
are driving immense innovation in targeted immunotherapy for
autoimmune disorders, neurodegenerative diseases, and cancer –
which will lead to the next generation of immunotheraphy
treatments. In addition, Ido Amit is renowned in the science
community as a leader in immunogenomics, a new field aimed at
detecting and engineering specific immune activity to combat
disease.
Ido Amit is the recipient of numerous awards for academic and
scientific excellence, including the Michael Bruno Memorial
Award from the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2020), the Sanofi-Institute
Pasteur Junior Award (2019), recognition as an International
Research Scholar of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (2017),
the EMBO Gold Medal Award (2016), the Helen and Martin Kimmel
Award for Innovative Investigation (2016), and the Rappaport
Prize (2016) for his work in revealing the function of the
immune system. He was elected as a member of the European
Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 2017.
Ido Amit is presenting in the session
Dynamics of immune processes: from responses to pathogens to
immunotherapy.
Kristy Deiner
Assistant Professor at ETH Zurich and co-founder of SimplexDNA,
Switzerland
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Kristy Deiner holds a PhD in Ecology from the University of
California, Davis (UCD). She also holds a degree certificate
from UCD in Conservation Management. Her dissertation research
focused on applying genetic tools to assess biodiversity in
alpine lakes and endangered vernal pool fairy shrimp. She has a
diverse background working with mammals, birds, fish and
arthropods to understand species distributions and population
dynamics. Her conservation management research focused on what
social, biological and economic pressures predict successful
adoption of strategic conservation plans through an evaluation
of California’s ecosystem based Natural Community Conservation
Planning. She also holds a masters and bachelors degree in
Biology from Sonoma State University. Her current research is
developing environmental DNA detection methods for assessing
biodiversity across all three domains of life from a single
water sample. This new and exciting research area will have
profound implications for monitoring biodiversity in freshwater
systems around the world. She is going to apply this research to
understand whether eDNA cane be used to do biodiversity trend
analysis at a global scale through a recently funded 5-year
grant from the European Research Council (2020-2025). Kristy’s
current research endeavors are allowing her to work with
engaging stakeholders in the process of understanding and
applying scientific knowledge for the management of global
biodiversity.
Kristy Deiner is presenting in the session
Deciphering ecology and evolution with creative genomics
approaches.
Jean Fan
Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering
at Johns Hopkins University - JEFworks Lab, USA
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Jean Fan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of
Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. She was
previously an NCI F99/K00 post-doctoral fellow in the lab of Dr.
Xiaowei Zhuang at Harvard University. She received her PhD in
Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics at Harvard under the
mentorship of Dr. Peter Kharchenko at the Department of
Biomedical Informatics and in close collaboration with Dr.
Catherine Wu at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Jean Fan is presenting in the session
Machine Learning algorithms for advancing spatial biology.
Dominic Grün
Chair of Computational Biology of Spatial Biomedical Systems at
Institute for system biology, University of Würzburg, Germany
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Dominic Grün is director of the Würzburg Institute of Systems
Immunology and holds the chair of “Computational Biology of
Spatial Biomedical Systems” at the University of Würzburg. He
graduated in 2006 in Theoretical Physics at the University of
Cologne and at New York University followed by postdoctoral
periods at the MDC Berlin and the Hubrecht Institute in
Utrecht. From 2015-2021 he led an independent research group
at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics
in Freiburg, Germany.
Since the early days of single-cell sequencing he contributed
novel computational methods with a particular focus on the
analysis of cell fate decision. With these approaches he
discovered novel differentiation pathways of immune cell
populations revealing how the tissue niche shapes cellular
states. He has a particular interest in the cellular
architecture of the liver and studies the interactions across
cell populations in the liver niche in the context of organ
regeneration. More recently, he developed a computational method
for the quantification of gene expression variability at
high-resolution across cell state manifolds and combines this
with spatial transcriptomics to identify intrinsic and extrinsic
sources of cell state variability.
Dominic Grün is presenting in the session
Methods in single-cell data analysis: from pre-processing to
biological inference.
Paola Picotti
Deputy head of Institute for Molecular Systems Biology, ETH
Zurich, Switzerland
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After her PhD at the University of Padua (Italy), Paola Picotti
did postdoctoral research in the group of Ruedi Aebersold at ETH
Zurich, where she developed targeted proteomic technologies
based on mass spectrometry. In 2011, she was appointed Assistant
Professor at the Institute of Biochemistry, ETHZ, and in 2017
tenured Associate Professor at the Institute of Molecular
Systems Biology, ETHZ. Major contributions of the Picotti group
include the development of structural proteomics technologies to
probe in situ protein structural changes, characterization of
the determinants of proteome thermostability, large-scale
identification of protein-small molecule interactions, and the
discovery of regulators of toxic proteins in Parkinson’s
disease. Paola Picotti was awarded the Latsis Prize, the
Cotter Award of US HUPO, HUPO Discovery in proteomics sciences
award, the SGMS award, the EMBO Young Investigator Award, the
Friedrich Miescher Award, the Juan- Pablo Albar award of the
European Proteome Association, ERC Starting and Consolidator
grants, The HUPO Discovery in proteomics award, the Rössler
prize, the EMBO Gold Medal and the Leopoldina and EMBO
memberships.
Paola Picotti is presenting in the session
Proteins in 3D: the dynamics of protein structures and their
interactions.
Sohrab Shah
Chief of Computational Oncology in the Department of
Epidemiology and Biostatistics, at the Memorial Sloan Kettering
Cancer Center, USA
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Sohrab Shah is the Chief of Computational Oncology in the
Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. Sohrab Shah
received a PhD in computer science from the University of
British Columbia in 2008 and developed his research program in
computational biology at BC Cancer Agency and the University of
British Columbia starting in 2010. His research focuses on
developing and using computational methods to understand cancer
evolution and treatment response. This encompasses advanced
machine learning and Bayesian statistical methods to analyze and
interpret large-scale datasets in cancer research. At MSK,
Sohrab Shah is building new and innovative capacity in
computational methods across the spectrum of data-intensive
research activity. This includes multimodal data integration
such as genomics and imaging, high-resolution single-cell
genomics, and transcriptomics. His translational focus lies in
breast cancer and ovarian cancer, in which he has pioneered
discovery of prognostic mutational signatures and has conducted
large-scale studies of mutational landscapes and evolution of
these cancers. Sohrab Shah is a former Canada Research Chair, is
a Komen Scholar, and holds the Nicholls-Biondi Endowed Chair in
Computational Oncology at MSK.
Sohrab Shah is presenting in the session
Precision medicine: harnessing big data for cancer and other
complex diseases.
