The 10th UBC Annual Symposium
"Bioinformatics in Utrecht:
Past 10 years and the future"
Wednesday, October 7, from 8:30h at the Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology
Wednesday, October 7, from 8:30h at the Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology
We are happy to announce that the 10th UBC annual symposium will take place at the Princess Máxima Center (Utrecht Science Park) on Wednesday, October 7, 2024. The theme of this year’s edition is “Bioinformatics in Utrecht: Past 10 years and the future”. We will reflect on the compliments of the past decade and look forward to the innovations that lie ahead.
At this yearly event, we aim to bring the bioinformatics community working at the Utrecht Science Park together to exchange knowledge and expertise and discuss the latest progress in the field of bioinformatics.
We strongly encourage you to register (for free) and submit an abstract for a poster presentation at the symposium, to promote your bioinformatics research, gain more exposure, and win a cash prize of 150 euros!
Location:
6th Floor of the Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology
Heidelberglaan 25
3584 CS Utrecht
08:30 – 09:00 Registration
09:00 – 09:15 Welcome by the UBC Executive Committee and Prof. dr. Isabel Arends (Chair of the Life Sciences Deans)
09:15 – 10:00 Keynote talk by Prof. dr. Berend Snel
10:00 – 10:30 Coffee break and poster presentations
10:30 – 12:00 Pitch talks Sequencing and Bioinformatics
12:00 – 13:30 Walking lunch and poster presentations
13:30 – 14:15 Keynote talk by Prof. dr. Ana Conesa
14:15 – 15:45 Pitch talks Modelling and Machine Learning
15:45 – 16:15 Break and poster presentations
16:15 – 17:00 Keynote talk by Prof dr. Erik van Nimwegen
17:00 – 18:00 Closing ceremony followed by drinks
Abstract (TBA)
Berend Snel studied biology at the university of Utrecht specialising in Theoretical Biology and Bioinformatics. He did his PhD project on comperative genome analysis and genome evolution in the group of Peer Bork at EMBL (Heidelberg, Germany). Subsequently he first worked as a normal post-doc and then as a VENI post-doc in Martijn Huynen’s Comparative Genomics group at the CMBI / NCMLS in Nijmegen, Holland. In 2006 he moved to Utrecht University as an Associate Professor. In Utrecht he leads the Evolutionary Genomics and Integrative Bioinformatics group as part of Theoretical Biology and Bioinformatics in the Department of Biology. As of June 2014 he was appointed Professor in Bioinformatics and chair of the Executive Committee of the Utrecht Bioinformatics Center. In 2016 Berend Snel was awarded a VICI grant. Berend has co-authored more than 110 peer reviewed papers which have been cited more than 15.000 times resulting in an H-index of 52.
Abstract (TBA)
Ana Conesa is a senior scientist in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology and a Professor in Bioinformatics at the University of Florida leading the Genomics of Gene Expression Lab. She is also co-founder of Biobam Bioinformatics, a spin-off company specialised in user-friendly software of biologists. She holds an Engineering degree from the Polytechnical University of Valencia (1993) and a PhD in Molecular Microbiology from Leiden University in The Netherlands (2001). Ana has built a scientific program in the development of algorithms and bioinformatics solutions for the analysis of Big Genomics Data, particularly gene expression and their impact on the phenotype. She has conceived and lead the creation of over a dozen of bioinformatics tools that apply to all kind of species, model and non-model organisms, plants, microbiomes, and humans. These include Blast2GO, maSigPro, NOISeq, Paintomics, SQANTI and TAPPAS. Her tools have tens of users world-wide and have received over 25,000 scientific citations. Ana has published over 135 scientific papers and lead international EU (STATegra, DEANN) and US (UF-TEDDY) projects. Currently, her research focus lies in the analysis Single Molecule and Single Cell sequencing technologies, and in the integration of multi-omics data for precision genomics applications.
Abstract (TBA)
After studying theoretical physics in Amsterdam, Erik van Nimwegen moved to the United States in 1995, performing his PhD studies at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and receiving his PhD from the Faculty of Biology at Utrecht University in 1999. After a year of post-doc studies at the SFI, he spent three years as a fellow at the Center of Studies in Physics and Biology at the Rockefeller University, in New York. Since 2003 he has been a Professor of Computational Biology at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel, and group leader at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics since 2004. His main research topics concern genome evolution and the function and evolution of the regulatory networks by which cells control gene expression. He develops mathematical models for analyzing how regulatory networks evolve and function, and computational methods for the reconstruction of such networks from large biological data-sets.
| Title | Speaker | PI |
|---|---|---|
| Detecting tRNAs and their modifications in single cells | Mees van der Ent (Hubrecht Institute) | Prof. dr. ir. Alexander van Oudenaarden |
| Searching for robust protein biomarkers in human plasma | Isabel Houtkamp (UU) | Prof. dr. Sanne Abeln |
| NanoRCS: Multimodal genome-wide cfDNA sequencing and analysis | Liting Chen (UMCU) | Dr. ir. Jeroen de Ridder |
| Comparative transcriptomics reveals a conserved immune response in six mushroom-forming fungi during interaction with their competitors | Marieke van Maanen (UU) | Dr. Robin Ohm |
| Fungal biocontrol agents for Striga weed eradication | Dr. Khyati Mheta Bhatt (Westerdijk Institute) | Dr. Jérôme Collemare |
| Bioinformatic approaches to decipher lettuce innate immunity | Dr. Iñigo Bañales Belaunde (UU) | Prof. dr. Guido Van den Ackerveken |
| Title | Speaker | PI |
|---|---|---|
| Modelling of C. elegans M lineage cell fate decision making reveals a missing spatial signal | Dr. Benjamin Planterose Jimenez (UU) | Prof. dr. Kirsten ten Tusscher |
| Decomposing plasmid evolution using pangenomic language modelling | Dr. Weizhen Xu (UMCU) | Dr. Anita Schürch |
| Methodology for biomarker discovery with reproducibility in microbiome data using machine learning | David Rojas-Velazquez (UU) | Dr. Alejandro Lopez-Rincon |
| M&M: An RNA-seq based Pan-Cancer Classifier for Pediatric Tumors | Fleur Wallis (PMC) | Dr. Patrick Kemmeren |
| Exploring the diversity of fungal plant biomass conversion | Dr. Jiajia Li (Westerdijk Institute) | Prof. dr. ir. Ronald de vries and Dr. Mao Peng |
| RNA splicing as novel immune regulator | Dr. Alejandra Bodelon (UMCU) | Dr. Julia Drylewicz |
