Trainer biographies

Cagatay Turkay | University of Warwick

Cagatay Turkay is a Professor at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick, UK and a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute, London, UK. His research investigates the interactions between data, algorithms and people, and explores the role of interactive visualisation and other interaction mediums such as natural language at this intersection. He designs techniques and algorithms that are sensitive to their users in various decision-making scenarios involving primarily high-dimensional and spatio-temporal phenomena, and develops methods to study how people work interactively with data and computed artefacts.

Jan Aerts | Hasselt University

Jan Aerts started his career in genomics and bioinformatics, doing research at the Roslin Institute and the Welcome Trust Sanger Institute. In 2010, he took an assistant professorship position at Leuven University in Belgium and transitioned into the field of (biological) data visualisation and visual analytics. After a period at the University of Hasselt (Belgium) setting up their new Data Science Institute, he will be back in Leuven as a full professor on the topic of data analytics in precision agriculture. His research focusses on giving expert users the necessary context to make well-informed and data-driven decisions.

The research group headed by Jan Aerts has won several awards in international competitions on interactive data visualisation and visual analytics.

Jelmer Bot | Hasselt University

Jelmer is a PhD student at the Data Science Institute at UHasselt. He studies how topological data analysis techniques can be applied and extended to simplify obtaining interesting insights from data. Before starting his PhD, Jelmer studied Artificial Intelligence at the University of Groningen for his bachelor (2016) and master (2019). There, he became interested in combining machine learning and visual analytics to improve the understanding of complex data.

Nikiforos Karamanis | EMBL-EBI

I am a Senior User Experience (UX) Designer at EMBL-EBI who enjoys spending time with users, developers and other stakeholders and helping them work together to achieve their goals using Lean UX methods.

Ryo Sakai | GSK

Director of AI/ML Visualisation Engineering, leading a small team of visualisation designers and engineers to help scientists accelerate drug discovery and development.

Sahil David | GSK

I’m a Software Engineer with more than 10 years of experience. I specialise in developing data visualisation and full stack web applications.