Trainer biographies

Helena Cornu

Helena Cornu is the Outreach Officer for Open Targets. In this role, she is responsible for both internal and external communications, including running the Open Targets social media accounts, writing and commissioning content for the blog, and training. She is always looking for opportunities to collaborate, so please don’t hesitate to get in touch. 

Aurelien Dugourd

In 2013, I graduated from my Master degree in Genetic, Genomic and Biotechnology at the University de Bretagne Occidentale. My master thesis was on the development of new way of administration of Therapeutic agents in the context of Cystic Fibrosis.

Then, I did a second Master degree in Computational Biology at the University of Nantes. The subject of my master thesis, which I performed at the Institut Curie was the development of a mathematical model of the interplay between autophagy and apoptosis.

After I graduated from my Computational Biology master’s degree in 2015, I joined Julio Saez-Rodriguez team at the JRC COMBINE lab in Aachen as a PhD student. I worked on the development of an hybrid mechanistic model, integrating gene regulation, signaling pathways and metabolomics data to explain disease phenotypes, help find new therapeutic targets and predict their potential effect based on a specific patient profile. This project was part of the collaborative SyMBioSys ITN project, financed by the European Marie Sklodowska-Curie actions. I am currently a postdoc in the lab working primarily in the SMART-CARE consortium to apply mass-spectrometry-based systems medicine to cancer.

Shila Ghazanfar

Dr Ghazanfar is currently a Royal Society Newton International Fellow and Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute. In May 2022, she will open her lab as a Lecturer and Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Fellow at The University of Sydney, Australia, where she completed her undergraduate and doctoral studies in pure mathematics and statistics, and statistical bioinformatics respectively. Dr Ghazanfar’s lab will focus on designing statistical approaches for analysis of spatial single cell genomics data, alongside building techniques for effectively integrating spatial molecular-resolved genomics data with dissociated single cell transcriptomics and multiomics data types.

Johannes Griss

Elena Lukyanova

I am a computational postdoctoral fellow at Wellcome Sanger Institute in immune genomics group.

The main focus of my research is trying to gain an insight into the immune system biology of patients with rare form of primary immunodeficiency – Omenn Syndrome – using multi-omics single cell technologies and trying to reveal undisclosed mechanisms underlying the disease development and progression.

I am particularly passionate about genomics, immunology and cancer biology.

Dezso Modos

Dezso completed his medical degree at Semmelweis University. During his studies he got interested in computational systems biology. He studied computational biology and mathematical modelling in Pazmany Peter Catholic University. His PhD was focused on networks of cancer cells and understanding the role of paralogues in signalling. Besides, he was also involved in the development of multiple databases such as Autophagy Regulatory Network and SingaLink 2. His work concentrated mostly on the transcription factor target layers.

He spent his first postdoc in Cambridge Department of Chemistry under Dr Andreas Bender where he was involved in researching synergy in anticancer drugs and traditional Chinese medicine. He learned machine learning and cheminformatics (https://www.ch.cam.ac.uk/group/bender/).

In the recent few years, he worked in the Korcsmaros Group in the Quadram Institute and Earlham Institute Norwich. He was involved in the group’s effort to understand the SARS-CoV2 – host interactions and cytokine responses. His main project is focused on understanding ulcerative colitis pathogenesis and on deciphering host-microbe interactions in the different cell types of the gut using various network biological methods.

Dezso lectured physiology in the Semmelweis University, and led bioinformatics practical in the Eötvös Lóránd University. He was a guest lecturer in Systems Biology in University of Cambridge and he is mentoring at the Introduction to Multiomics Data Integration and Visualisation course second time.

Marton Olbei

My name is Marton Olbei, I’m a postdoctoral research scientist in the group of Tamas Korcsmaros. I study how cytokines can affect other cytokines with network biology tools. I finished my PhD last year, where I created and analysed multi-layered interaction networks for the pathogen Salmonella. Looking forward to working with you all!

Sandra Orchard

Sandra Orchard is Team Leader for Protein Function Content, with a strong background in protein annotation. Her team is primarily responsible for the curation of UniProt at EMBL-EBI, and annotation of the Gene Ontology. Sandra and her team support professional training in data resources for exploring protein function, sequence analysis, interactions and pathways. She is active in a number data standardisation effort, for example through the Human Proteome Organisation Proteomics Standards Initiative.

Gaurhari Dass

Gaurhari Dass is a Senior Cloud Architect in OmicsDI from past 5.5 years. He has very strong expertise in IT sector. He has worked on different technologies during his career and now working on development of OmicsDI from infrastructure deployment to coding.

Britta Velten

Britta Velten is a postdoctoral researcher at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Division of Computational Genomics and System Genetics.

Originally trained as mathematician, Britta obtained her PhD at the interface of statistics and computational biology, working with Wolfgang Huber at EMBL Heidelberg and Peter Bühlmann at ETH Zurich before joining DKFZ in 2019. As a visiting scientist she conducted some of her research at Stanford University, D-BSSE in Basel, EMBL-EBI in Cambridge and is currently co-affiliated to the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge.

In her research, Britta aims to apply statistical reasoning in combination with modern machine learning to gain insights into fundamental processes that underlie complex biological systems. For this, she has pioneered statistical methods and computational tools to analyze and integrate high-throughput molecular omics data sets across different molecular layers, time and space, and applied them in a variety of fields including personalized medicine, cancer biology, single cell biology and developmental biology.

She has authored multiple Bioconductor and PyPI packages including MOFA2, mofapy2 and graper. More information on her research can be found at https://bv2.github.io.