Trainer biographies

Christopher Hall – Babraham Institute

Christopher joined the Babraham Institute Flow Cytometry Facility in 2020 having previously been head of Flow Cytometry at EMBL in Rome and a Senior Research Assistant at the Cytometry Core Facility at the Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK. Prior to working in flow cytometry Christopher was involved in the RAGULA clinical trial at King’s College London and worked as a microbiologist at GSK and Findus UK. Christopher has experience in cell sorting, experiment design, data analysis, and flow cytometry troubleshooting. He has practical knowledge of using FlowJo, R, and Python for data analysis, has a YouTube channel dedicated to data analysis, and hosts regular flow cytometry courses though the Babraham Institute. In 2019 he was made an SRL Emerging Leader by the International Society for the Advancement of Cytometry and in 2023 won the RMS Award for services to Flow Cytometry.

ORCID: 0000-0001-6156-4975

Jiawei Wang – EMBL-EBI

I am a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow and EMBO Non-Stipendiary Fellow at European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), and a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, the University of Cambridge. I specialize in using machine learning and deep learning to address complex biological questions, with a background spanning software engineering, computer science, and computational biology. I work with Dr. John Marioni and Dr. Rob Finn at EMBL-EBI on single-cell genomics, multi-omics integration, and their applications to study mammalian embryo development and bacteria population at single-cell level. Concurrently, my collaboration with Dr. Rob Finn and Prof. Trevor Lithgow, at Monash University, focuses on modelling bacteria and phage protein sequences using deep learning to gain insights into interactions among bacteria, hosts, and bacteriophages.

ORCID: 0000-0001-5940-8113

Kalpana Panneerselvam – EMBL-EBI

I am Kalpana Panneerselvam – IntAct project lead at EBI. In IntAct, we work closely with the researchers on their direct submissions and focus on generating tissue/cell specific, disease centric interactomes. We are also interested in perturbants of molecular interactions – mutations, agonist, antagonists. Previously, I have been handling genetic variant data for commercial databases and other custom curation projects.

Kasia Kania – CoSyne Therapeutics

Kasia is a Experimental Biologist responsible for genomics workflows within Cosyne Therapeutics team in Cambridge. Kasia holds a MSc in biotechnology from the University of Agriculture in Krakow (Poland) and has a decade of experience in molecular biology in both academia and industry. Prior to Cosyne, Kasia worked in CRUK CI Genomics Core Facility. She was managing single cell sequencing service for the University of Cambridge and the Cambridge Biomedical Campus where she developed her expertise in implementing new scRNAseq technologies. Kasia is driven by scientific geekiness, thrives in a the continuously changing field of multiomics and devotes her avidity for learning to make a greater impact on her team.

Katrien Quintelier – University of Ghent

Katrien Quintelier is in her final year as a PhD student in the VIB-UGent Data Mining and Modeling for Biomedicine group (Ghent, Belgium) and the Department of Pulmonary Diseases of the Erasmus Medical Center (Rotterdam, The Netherlands). She is working on a computational pipeline to analyze high-dimensional flow cytometry data of lung cancer patients and to predict response to immunotherapy. Since she is working with clinical data, her main research focus is on the preprocessing of the data including quality control, batch detection and normalization.

ORCID: 0000-0001-5306-5615

Krishna Tiwari – EMBL-EBI

Krishna currently works as Scientific Database Curator for Molecular connections group focusing primarily on pathway curation and mathematical models curation related to Immune-oncology, Cancer signalling etc. Krishna brings a vast experience in pathway modelling/analysis and translational research.

ORCID: 0000-0002-3699-0937

Liora Vilmovsky – EMBL-EBI

I am a scientific curator experienced in single cell gene expression and RNA localisation biology. I did my PhD in the group of Jeffrey Gerst at the Weizmann Institute of science, where I developed a novel method to track endogenous mRNA and proteins in living cells. Using this method, I was able to identify the localization of different groups of hundreds of mRNAs and proteins localised to different structure/organelles. This was followed by a postdoctoral position in the group of Sarah Teichmann at the EBI-EMBL. I used several methods of single cell sequencing and analysis to identify the transcriptomics of ex-vivo and in-vitro T cells in different type 2 immunity mouse models. I then joined the John Marioni group in collaboration with Cornelius Gross at EMBL Rome, where I produced transcriptomics data from thousands of single cells of the mouse ventromedial hypothalamus to characterise the cell subpopulations that compose this structure. Currently, I am working as a scientific curator at the Gene Expression team in EBI-EMBL. I curate data for ArrayExpress, Expression Atlas and Single Cell Expression Atlas resources.

ORCID: 0000-0001-9342-749X

Louisse Mirabueno – EMBL-EBI

Louisse Mirabueno completed her Bachelor’s degree in Genetics and Cell Biology at Dublin City University, and graduated with an MPhil. at the University of Reading. She has worked in both academic institutes and industry. Her experience ranges from genomic analyses in vertebrates and bacterial populations, high-throughput screening in biotech and early-stage drug discovery, and research and development in long-read sequencing.

ORCID: 0000-0003-2497-9607

Teng Heng – Sanger Institute

I am an aspiring clinician-scientist interested in genetics and immunology. I completed medical school at the National University of Singapore, and am currently a final-year PhD student at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the University of Cambridge, supervised by Dr Hilary Martin and Dr Gosia Trynka. Profile on the institute website: https://www.sanger.ac.uk/person/heng-teng-hiang/

ORCID: 0000-0001-5465-6951

Wanseon Lee – Sanger Institute

Wanseon is a senior staff scientist in Davenport group at Wellcome Sanger Institute. She has extensive experience in diverse types of NGS data. Her current work focuses on understanding how human genetic variability affects immune response against disease using multimodal single-cell data. She is interested in integration and functional relationships of HLA polymorphisms, immune repertoire, and transcriptional profiles.

ORCID: 0000-0002-2881-8184

Yvan Saeys – University of Ghent

Yvan Saeys obtained his PhD in computer science from Ghent University. After spending time abroad at the University of the Basque Country (Spain) and the University of Lyon (France) he returned to Belgium and established the Data Mining and Modeling for Biomedicine (DAMBI) group at the VIB Center for Inflammation Research (IRC) in Gent. As of 2015, he is a professor at Ghent University and a principal investigator (group leader) at VIB, where he is heading an interdisciplinary research team of 25 people, consisting of mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers and bioinformaticians. The Saeys lab studies the design and application of novel data mining and machine learning techniques for high-dimensional single-cell omics data, including methods to model cell developmental trajectories and intercellular communication. At the methodological level, the lab studies the robustness and interpretability of machine learning models.

ORCID: 0000-0002-0415-1506