Jan Aerts | KU Leuven

Jan Aerts began his research career in genomics and bioinformatics, contributing to the cattle genome sequencing project at the Roslin Institute, and later to the 1000 Genomes Project and the first exome sequencing experiments at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton. In 2010, he joined KU Leuven as assistant professor, shifting his focus to biological data visualisation and visual analytics. He is now full professor in data analytics for precision agriculture at KU Leuven, where his research empowers expert users-particularly in the biosciences and agriculture-with tools to explore complex, multi-modal data and make informed decisions. Alongside his academic roles, he founded the Data Science Institute at the University of Hasselt (Belgium) and served as its first director. His group has received several international awards for interactive data visualisation and visual analytics.

Peiyang Huo | KU Leuven

My name is Peiyang Huo. I am a PhD student in the AIDA Lab in the Department of Biosystems at KU Leuven. My research interests focus on visual analytics and customized visualization in biology and agriculture, with a current emphasis on microbiome data. I will assist Prof. Aerts to deliver training at Data Visualization for Biology 2025 from 24/06/2025 to 26/06/2025 at EMBL-EBI. ORCID : https://orcid.org/0009-0003-8360-9611

Helena Jambor | University of Applied Sciences of the Grisons

Helena completed a PhD at EMBL, then worked with multi-dimensional datasets, images and genome-scale data at the Max-Planck in Dresden and as adjunct professor for bioinformatics (Berlin) and data visualisation scientist (Medical Faculty Dresden). HKJ now is associate professor for data visualization in Chur/Switzerland. She remains a member at the Medical Faculty Dresden.

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.

Pooja Wakchoure | KU Leuven

Pooja Wakchoure is a PhD researcher at KU Leuven’s Department of Biosystems, where she focuses on integrating visual analytics and multi-layer network approaches to study the eco-evolutionary dynamics of Daphnia magna. By analyzing complex multi-modal datasets spanning genomics, microbiomes, and environmental factors, the project aims to unravel the intricate interactions between genetic, microbial, and ecological layers in heterogeneous landscapes. She has a Master’s in Bioinformatics (2018-2020) and a Bachelor’s (2015-2018) in Biotechnology from Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune, India. Her experience in omics analysis and bioinformatics intrigues her to explore the world of visual analytics in biological systems.

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.

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.

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.