Anne-Ruxandra Carvunis
USA
Anne-Ruxandra Carvunis, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computational and Systems Biology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Born and raised in Paris, France, she received a BS in Biology/Biochemistry and a Masters in Molecular Neurosciences from Université Paris VI and the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Paris and a second Masters in Interdisciplinary Approaches to Life Sciences from Université Paris VII. She graduated with a Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from Université de Grenoble in 2011, having done most of her graduate research work on the mechanisms and dynamics of protein interaction network evolution in the Center for Cancer Systems Biology at Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. After a brief postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Carvunis went on to study the evolution of transcriptional networks at the University of California, San Diego. She established an independent research group in Pittsburgh in December 2016 to study the molecular mechanisms of change and innovation in biological systems. Dr. Carvunis has received a number of distinctions including a Medal of honorable doctoral work, the national L’Oreal-Unesco Award for Women in Science, the NIH Pathway to Independence Award, the Searle Scholars award, the Trailblazer award from the Ladies Hospital Aid Society, the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, the NSF CAREER award and the University of Pittsburgh Chancelor’s Distinguished Award for Research.
Abdoulaye Baniré Diallo
Canada
Abdoulaye Baniré Diallo is Professor and director of the bioinformatics lab at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and researcher at the Center of Excellence of Research in Orphan Diseases-Fondation Courtois. He is Well-E Research-Innovation Chair holder. He is also cofounder and Chief Scientist of My Intelligent Machines, a startup integrating Genomics, bioinformatics and Artificial Intelligence (AI). He has held research position at UQAM, McGill University, BroadInstitute of MIT/Harvard, and Computer Science and AI Laboratory of MIT. He is leveraging bioinformatics and Artificial Intelligence to accelerate precision in agriculture and precision in lifestock farming. The research topics are around domain knowledge acquisition, machine learning, and forecasting in live sciences. He is leading the Canadian dairy welfare and AI initiative including data from 6500 farms and 1.5 million cows. His research also involves realtime pathogens surveillance in farming and agriculture, Quebec soil health analyses using AI, wheat regulation. Abdoulaye has been featured by MIT Technology Review among the professionals who predict the future as living in 2020. He received multiple awards including the Next Einstein Fellows.
Celia Greenwood
Canada
Celia Greenwood, PhD, is Senior Investigator at the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research (www.ladydavis.ca), and James McGill Professor at McGill University (www.mcgill.ca/
Claudia Kleinman
Canada
Dr Claudia Kleinman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Human Genetics, Faculty of Medicine, at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. She is a fulltime Investigator at the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research, an Associate Member of the McGill Centre for Translational Research in Cancer, and a researcher at the Ludmer Centre for Neuroinformatics & Mental Health. Her research exploits genome-wide technologies and data science to understand mechanisms of gene expression. She has an interdisciplinary training that combines molecular biology, computer science, statistics and evolutionary biology, which she applies to the study of pathological transcriptional and RNA processing events, focusing particularly on pediatric brain tumors. She has received awards from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), Fond de Recherche du Québec – Santé (FRQS), Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and currently holds a career award from the Fond de Recherche du Québec – Santé (FRQS). She is the recipient of the Bernard and Francine Dorval Prize, for her work mapping the development of the human brain at the single cell level to define the origins of pediatric brain tumors.
Jérôme Waldispühl
Canada
Jérôme Waldispühl is an associate professor of Computer Science at McGill University. He holds a PhD from École Polytechnique (France), and previously was an instructor in Applied Mathematics at MIT (2006-2009). Jérôme conducts research in RNA structural bioinformatics and cheminformatics. He also pioneered the use of video games to engage the public in genomic research with Phylo (2010), Colony B (2016), Borderlands Science (2020) and Project Discovery Phase 3 (2020), which he presented at the White House OSTP (2013), Québec Parliament (2016) and French Academy of Science (2018).
