Invited speakers

Keynote Speaker 1 : Vera Pancaldi

Vera Pancaldi was trained as a physicist at Imperial College London and has 13 years experience in computational biology. Since 2018 she leads a team at the Cancer Research Center of Toulouse (CRCT) as the recipient of the Chair for bioinformatics in Oncology of the CRCT, working on modelling cancer and, in particular, cellular interactions in the tumour microenvironment. She also holds a joint part-time appointment at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center through the Bioinfo4Women programme, obtained a permanent position as a CR in 2020 and defended her HDR (license to supervise PhD students) in 2021.
She has worked on various projects on stress response in fission yeast and prediction of protein and protein-RNA interactions (in the group of Jurg Bahler at Sanger Institute/University College London), epigenomics and hybrid vigour in plants (with David Baulcombe at Cambridge University) and integrative epigenomics in cancer (with Alfonso Valencia at CNIO, Madrid and Barcelona Supercomputing Center), developing novel approaches to study chromatin with network theory. She also supervised projects on networks medicine, including using network theory to study disease comorbidities and is a co-organiser of yearly international workshops in network medicine. Her main current focus is relating heterogeneity of tumour infiltrating immune and stromal cells to patient prognosis in different cancers, through integrative multi-omics approaches.

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Keynote Speaker 2 : Matthieu Foll

 After studying applied mathematics and computer science, Matthieu Foll completed a Ph.D. in population genetics and bioinformatics. During this time, he gained a strong expertise in statistical genetics and bioinformatics methods, and wrote several software programs now widely used in the field. After his Ph.D., he moved to the University of Berne (Switzerland) (co-affiliated with the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics) as a postdoctoral researcher where he started working more specifically on large human genomic data. He developed several Bayesian models to identify genetic variants associated with phenotypes (e.g. Pygmies, Andeans, and Tibetans) observed in different human populations or ethnic groups, as a consequence of local adaptation. In 2012, Matthieu Foll was recruited as a Staff Research Scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne (co-affiliated with the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics), where he worked on new statistical and bioinformatics methods for analyzing Next Generation Sequencing data. In September 2014, he was recruited as a staff scientist in the section of Genetics to develop computational cancer genomics projects and to coordinate the bioinformatics efforts in the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC-WHO). He is particularly involved in the molecular characterization of rare thoracic tumors like lung neuroendocrine tumors and malignant mesothelioma, and since 2021 he has been co-leading the IARC Rare Cancers Genomics team together with Dr. Lynnette Fernandez-Cuesta.