IRB-SIG '15

Confirmed invited speakers

Nicole Meisner-Kober, PhD

NIBR Senior Investigator, Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research.

Nicole's group focuses on discovery of new medicines targeting RNA pathobiology, and exploiting chemical biology to resolve basic mechanistic questions related to RNA therapeutics, RNA silencing biology and pathological RNA dysregulation. Nicole is also interested in the biology of extracellular microvesicles such as exosomes in their transfer of RNA cargo between different cells and tissues.

Mar Alba, PhD

ICREA Research Professor, Hospital del Mar Research Institute (IMIM), Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Barcelona.

Mar is interested in understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying the evolution of living beings. The lab uses RNA sequencing and comparative genomics to learn about the regulation of gene expression and the role of pervasive trasncription/translation in the formation of novel functional genes.

Cathal Seoighe, PhD

Stokes Professor of Bioinformatics, University of Ireland

Cathal's group is interested in sources and consequences of variation in genomics data, including the origins of variation themselves (genetics, sample composition etc.) as well as the development of methods to analyze high throughput data from heterogeneous samples. The group also has interests in diverse areas of molecular evolution from probabilistic modeling of viral sequence evolution to evolutionary aspects of gene expression regulation and mRNA splicing.

Magnus Rattray, PhD

Professor of Computational and Systems Biology, The University of Manchester.

Magnus's group works in how to learn models and make inferences given evidence from high-throughput biological datasets. The models that they develop range from mechanistic differential equation models of the cell to more abstract probabilistic latent variable models that can be used uncover interesting structure in high-dimensional data. Magnus and his team are particularly interested in hybrid models that combine aspects of mechanistic and probabilistic models.

David Elliot, PhD

Professor of Genetics, University of Newcastle.

David works on alternative splicing and gene regulation in normal development and disease, particularly cancer. David's group uses a combination of transcriptome-wide studies, mouse genetics and cell culture..