Keynote Speakers

Prof Walter Kolch is Director of Systems Biology Ireland () at University College Dublin and the Precision Oncology Ireland Consortium (). Trained as an MD he worked in experimental clinical research, pharmaceutical industry, and basic biological research. Before moving to Dublin to establish SBI he held a Chair for Molecular Cell Biology at the University of Glasgow and was a Senior Group Leader at the Beatson Institute for Cancer Research in Glasgow, Scotland.  He is best known for his work in oncogene signal transduction, proteomics, systems biology, and precision medicine. He has made salient contributions to elucidating the function of the RAS-RAF pathway, and more recently to understand network wide effects of oncogenes. His current research interest focuses on understanding molecular mechanisms of malignant transformation, network mediated drug resistance in cancer, and the construction of Digital Twins for personalized cancer diagnosis and therapy. He serves on several editorial boards and scientific advisory boards and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy.

is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Data Science and a member of the Center for Computational Molecular Biology at Brown University.  develops machine learning methods with the goals of data integration and model interpretation for biological and biomedical applications. Prior to joining Brown, she was a post-doctoral researcher in the Noble Lab at the University of Washington. She completed her Ph.D. in 2018 from the University of Virginia with Dr. Yanjun Qi as her advisor. 

Ritambhara has received the NHGRI Genomic Innovator Award and Brown University’s Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Award for developing deep learning methods to integrate and model genomics datasets. She has also received the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching at Brown. She recently received the NSF CAREER award for developing integrative and explainable machine learning methods for heterogeneous health-related datasets.

Dr. Kwang-Hyun Cho is a Professor in the Department of Bio and Brain Engineering at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and a director of the Laboratory for Systems Biology and Bio-inspired Engineering (). He was the recipient of IEEE/IEEK Joint Award for Young IT Engineer, National Young Scientist Award and National Engineer's Award both from the President of Korea, Walton Fellow Award from Science Foundation of Ireland, and Cheney Fellow Award from University of Leeds, U.K. He started systems biology by his own idea of combining control engineering and biological experiments from 1999 and has published over 229 papers in high-profile international journals. He has been challenging to develop innovative therapeutic approaches for reverting cancer and aging on the basis of systems biology, and co-founded biorevert, Inc. to realize these therapeutics. He is the Editor-in-Chief of (Springer).

holds positions as the Director of Challenges and Benchmarking at . He specializes in the design, development, and application of novel data-driven computational approaches to accelerate the diffusion of genomics and biomedical data into translational research and education. Dr. Mangul is a passionate advocate for promoting transparency and reproducibility in data-driven biomedical research, as well as for making bioinformatics education accessible to all. Dr. Mangul’s work is dedicated to advancing the principles of reproducibility, data sharing, and software usability, with the ultimate goal of shaping a more equitable and impactful future for the field of bioinformatics. Dr. Mangul received his Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from Georgia State University and holds a B.Sc. in Applied Mathematics from Moldova State University, Chisinau, Moldova. He completed his postdoctoral training in computational genomics with Prof. Eskin at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Dr. Mangul is the recipient of the prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER and Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program awards. He serves as a mentor for the NIH AIM-AHEAD Leadership Fellowship and NCATS Training Program in Advanced Data Analysis.