Trainer biographies

Anna Vathrakokoili Pournara | EMBL-EBI

I am a Predoctoral fellow at Papatheodorou Group at EBI and during my PhD I have been working on cell-type deconvolution of bulk expression data, exploring the contribution of cell composition in various phenotypes. I am focusing on investigating the contribution of immune cells in cancer outcomes and my goal is to apply machine learning models utilising omics data to predict patient outcomes. I am passionate about making bioinformatic analyses and tools more accessible to the community and reproducible. Beyond bioinformatics I enjoy going for long walks with friends and exploring new cafés in town.

ORCID: 0000-0002-2701-1987

Andrian Yang | EMBL-EBI

Dr Andrian Yang is a Senior Computational Scientist in the Discovery Research Platform for Tissue Scale Biology, part of the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute. Prior to his current position, he did his postdoctoral research in EMBL-EBI and IMS Metabolic Research Laboratories with John Marioni and Florian Merkle on single-cell characterisation of human induced pluripotent cells (hiPSC)-derived POMC neurons. His research interest includes single cell and bulk omics analysis, computational method development and biological data visualisation.

Iris Diana Yu | EMBL-EBI

Iris is a bioinformatician in the data production team of the Expression Atlas group in EMBL-EBI. She helps build, maintain, and improve the pipelines that produce the datasets made available via the Expression Atlas and Single-Cell Expression Atlas resources. Prior to this role, she was a research bioinformatician at the Marine Science Institute of the University of the Philippines, and a service bioinformatician at the Core Facility for Bioinformatics of the Philippine Genome Center. In those roles, she had the opportunity to handle omics projects that ranged across the health, agriculture, and biodiversity fields. Iris, currently a Cambridge resident, was born and raised in the islands of the Philippines.

ORCID: 0000-0003-3627-2393

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

Jinzheng Ren | Australian National University

With a background in computer science, Jinzheng has interdisciplinary research experience, specializing in applying deep learning to solve biological problems. He began his research journey as an intern at Monash University in 2019 and furthered his work as a visiting intern at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in 2022.

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

Nadav Yayon | EMBL-EBI

Postdoctoral fellow at the labs of Sarah Teichmann (Sanger), John Marioni and Virginie Uhlmann (EMBL-EBI). PhD in molecular and computational neuroscience.

ORCID: 0000-0002-7034-0524

Silvie Fexova | EMBL-EBI

Silvie has a molecular biology training. After finishing her PhD at Dr. Sarah Bray’s lab in Cambridge, UK, focusing on the role of Notch signalling in cell apoptosis and survival in Drosophila melanogaster, she joined FlyBase as a curator and then moved to EMBL-EBI. She currently works as a senior scientific curator in the Gene Expression Team, where she looks after the content of the three resources the team maintains – the ArrayExpress archive, the Expression Atlas and the Single Cell Expression Atlas knowledgebases. She leads the ArrayExpress functional genomics submission project and the maintenance and further development of its submission tool, Annotare.

Tallulah Andrews | University of Western Ontario

Dr. Tallulah Andrews has a DPhil from the University of Oxford, where she used systems biology techniques to identify biological pathways linking orphan diseases. She entered the single-cell field in her postdoc at the Wellcome Sanger Institue where she developed and benchmarked single-cell tools including M3Drop, CycleMix and EllipsePseudotime. She returned to Canada to join the Liver Seed Network of the Human Cell Atlas at UHN in Toronto, and has recently been appointed an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Western Ontario, where she continues to develop tools for single-cell and spatial transcriptomics.

ORCID: 0000-0003-1120-2196

Wendi Bacon | The Open University

Wendi completed her PhD in developmental haematopoiesis at the University of Cambridge, before transitioning partially to dry lab as a postdoctoral research associate in Obstetrics & Gynaecology. She then began training scientists in single-cell RNA-seq analysis at EMBL-EBI, building their first single cell courses and becoming a single cell lead within the Galaxy Project.

Wendi is a Senior Lecturer in Health Sciences at the Open University, where she is championing interdisciplinary big biology data analysis. Her group is interested in how bench biologists and clinicians want to use and analyse data; what pitfalls prevent them from such analysis; and how to ensure informed decision-making in analysis.

ORCID: 0000-0002-8170-8806

Yuyao Song | EMBL-EBI

Yuyao is a PhD candidate from the Papatheodorou group at EMBL-EBI. Her primary research lies in cross-species comparison of cell types using scRNA-seq data. She has been developing packages and workflows to tackle the conservation and divergence of cell type expression profiles across species, from the perspective of evolution and functional genomics. She is enthusiastic about exploring nature and culture across the globe and theatre.

ORCID: 0000-0001-9738-9726