The people behind the talks

Speakers

Researchers and practitioners from across academia and industry, each digging into a method or challenge they know inside out.

Dr Claire Dunican

Dr Claire Dunican

Postdoctoral researcher
3 March 2026
"Predicting trajectories of acute illness using RNA velocity of whole blood: aka the last 8 years of my life"
  • What is "proof of principle"?
  • Transparency in results reporting
  • Know your algorithm's limits

Slides & papers from this talk ↗

Dr Daniel Luque Duque

Dr Daniel Luque Duque

Postdoctoral researcher
17 March 2026
"Estimating T cell proliferation rates using deuterium: using math to answer biological questions"
  • Common coding mistakes and how to avoid them
  • Basic biological questions still have a lot left to learn and do
Dr Joshua Moore

Dr Joshua Moore

Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Oxford
31 March 2026
"Quantitative Biology Across Scales: interpretable methods for analyzing complex biological systems"
  • Mathematical perspectives on spatial analysis
  • A toolbox for interpretable & scalable spatial analysis
  • Translating methods into biological discovery
Dr Marton Olbei

Dr Marton Olbei

Teaching Fellow, Imperial College London
28 April 2026
"Cytokine networks: a systems perspective on immune regulation"
  • What are cytokine interactions?
  • How they differ from cell–cell interaction & communication analysis
  • What they reveal about a condition and immune regulation

Slides & papers from this talk ↗

Ilan Gold

Ilan Gold

Software developer & core team member, scverse
12 May 2026
"Working with AnnData Objects Effectively, at Scale, and Across Modalities"
  • How AnnData powers everything from scRNA-seq to proteomics
  • Best practices and settings to get the most performance
  • Scaling AnnData objects to larger-than-memory datasets, including for AI training
Michelle Li

Michelle Li

Assistant Professor, Carnegie Mellon University
26 May 2026 · joining remotely from Boston
"Controllable Sequence Editing for Biological and Clinical Trajectories"

Introducing CLEF, a framework for editing longitudinal trajectories with control over when a condition takes effect and which variables it affects — leaving the rest of the sequence untouched. Evaluated on cellular reprogramming and patient health data, including zero-shot generation of counterfactual clinical trajectories shifted toward healthier outcomes.

Read the paper ↗ · LinkedIn ↗ · X/Twitter ↗

Owen Queen

Owen Queen

PhD student in Computer Science, Stanford University
9 June 2026
"Accelerating biomedical discovery with agentic AI"
  • An introduction to agentic AI
  • Biology-specific agentic systems already accelerating discovery
  • Evaluation, transparency, and the future of these tools
Dr James Boot

Dr James Boot

Senior Bioinformatician, The Francis Crick Institute
23 June 2026
"Better Models, Better Science: responsible AI/ML in spatial transcriptomics"
  • Using LLMs responsibly when analysing spatial data
  • Automating cell-type annotation in Xenium data with ML models
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Dr Stephanie Strohbuecker

The Francis Crick Institute
21 July 2026
"Experimental design considerations for single cell analyses"
  • Best practices in single cell analyses