Alessia David | Imperial College London

Dr Alessia David is an Associate Professor In Bioinformatics and Data Intensive Biology in the Centre for Bioinformatics at Imperial College London and a Consultant Physician for Imperial College NHS Trust, London. She holds a PhD in Molecular Endocrinology from Queen Mary University London and an MSc in Bioinformatics and System Biology from Imperial College London. She joined Imperial College in 2013 on a prestigious MRC fellowship in Biomedical Informatics. Over the last few years, she has been engaged in identifying the genetic and molecular mechanisms contributing to human diseases by using a range of mathematical and bioinformatics approaches. She is one of the main developers of Missense3D Portal, a suite of algorithms for variant prediction, and the Missense3D-DB the database of pre-calculated structural predictions for 4 million human missense variants.

ORCID: 0000-0001-8687-024X

Alexandre Bonvin | University of Utrecht

Alexandre Bonvin (1964) studied Chemistry at Lausanne University, Switzerland and obtained his PhD at Utrecht University in the Netherlands (1993). After two post-doc periods at Yale University (USA) and the ETHZ (CH) he joined Utrecht University in 1998 where he was appointed full professor of computational structural biology in 2009. In 2006, he received a prestigious VICI grant from the Dutch Research Council. He was director of chemical education (2009-2012), vice head of the Chemistry Department (2010-2012) and Scientific Director of the Bijvoet Centre for Biomolecular Research (2019-2023). He has and is participating to several EU projects including the BioExcel Center of Excellence in Biomolecular Simulations. His work has resulted in over 275 peer-reviewed publications.

ORCID: 0000-0001-7369-1322

Antonina Andreeva | EMBL-EBI

Antonina is a database biocurator for InterPro and Pfam databases at the EMBL-EBI since January 2023. Previously, she worked on the development of the Structural Classification of Proteins (SCOP) at the MRC Centre of Protein Engineering (CPE) and Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge. She has strong expertise in protein sequence and structure analysis and protein classification.

ORCID: 0000-0002-0450-0091

Bálint Mészáros | St. Judes Research Hospital

Bálint Mészáros is a Principal Bioinformatics Research Scientist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital at the Department of Structural Biology. Bálint obtained his Ph.D. in Biophysics at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. He later worked as a staff scientist at the Institute of Enzymology and the Research Centre for Natural Sciences in Budapest and at EMBL Heidelberg with an EMBO and a Marie Skłodowska–Curie postdoctoral fellowships before joining St. Jude. Bálint’s main interest is understanding how protein flexibility contributes to cellular functions. He studied intrinsically disordered proteins, developing physics-based methods to predict their presence and functionality based on their sequences. He also focused on how disordered proteins mediate interactions between cells, enable pathogenic interactions, and how are rewired by mutations associated with diseases. His current focus is on understanding the role of biological condensation in tumorigenesis and the identification of various protein-protein interactions mediated by the disordered C-terminal tails of human GPCRs, tying GPCR signaling into various cellular processes and pathways.

ORCID: 0000-0003-0919-4449

Emma Manners | EMBL-EBI

Emma is a Senior Biological Curator in the ChEMBL team and is involved in data depositions, curation of biological entities and database enhancements, she also provides support to ChEMBL users. She has a PhD in Bioorganic Chemistry and a background in molecular biology along with experience in both academic and industry research.

ORCID: 0000-0001-7875-1259

Fabio Madeira | EMBL-EBI

Fabio Madeira is Technical Project Lead Software Engineer at the EMBL-EBI and his work focus on providing core Bioinformatics Sequence Analysis Applications available through the EMBL-EBI website, as well as through reliable Web Services. Fabio is also involved in bioinformatics training and external user support. Before joining EMBL-EBI, Fabio worked under the supervision of Professor Geoff Barton at the University of Dundee, where he obtained a PhD in Computational Biology and worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher. His work focused on the development of new methods to predict 14-3-3-binding proteins, on the characterisation of genetic variants in protein families and interaction interfaces, and later on Bioinformatics Web Services.

ORCID: 0000-0001-8728-9449

Genevieve Evans | EMBL-EBI

Genevieve has worked in protein science at 4 different research labs in 3 different countries, New Zealand, Australia and Belgium. She received her PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Canterbury with supervisor Professor Juliet Gerrard. Genevieve’s focus in most of these labs was generating new experimental data for structural biology, as well as using a wide variety of techniques to characterize protein:protein or protein:ligand interactions. X-ray crystallography was the primary technique she utilized when trying to determine new protein structures. Genevieve currently works as biocurator at Protein Data Bank in Europe (PDBe), one of the members of worldwide Protein Data Bank (wwPDB). When new structural data is deposited in the database, Genevieve is part of team of biocurators who processes this data and correspond with the scientists about their data. The wwPDB is an open-source database that predates the internet.

ORCID: 0000-0002-8612-9539

Harry Powell | Imperial College London

PhD in Inorganic Chemistry (synthesis and structure determination) followed by postdocs in synthetic Chemistry and small molecule Crystallography. Then moved to structure solution by X-ray diffraction in protein and DNA crystallography. From 1998 to 2016 developed and maintained software for single crystal diffraction image processing (Mosflm) at MRC-LMB in Cambridge, followed by three years running a crystallographic consultancy. Worked at PDBe for a short while (2019 – 2020) before starting at Imperial College London at the start of 2020 working on Phyre2 (homology modelling of proteins).

ORCID: 0000-0003-1510-5115

Ian Sillitoe | UCL

I completed a Chemistry Masters degree from Sheffield University before coming to UCL for a PhD in Bioinformatics (using inter-residue protein contacts for protein structure comparison and fold recognition). During my PhD and first Post-doc, I helped recode the CATH classification web site and set up automated workflows. I took a few years away from academia to work in commercial web design and software development before coming back to UCL, first as a senior postdoc, now as a Principal Research Associate.

ORCID: 0000-0003-1091-9144

Melissa Adasme | EMBL-EBI

Dr. Melissa F. Adasme is a Data Mining Scientist at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), where she applies her multidisciplinary expertise in computer science, chemistry, and biology to accelerate drug discovery. Her journey into the heart of structural bioinformatics began during her PhD in Germany, where she focused on pioneering structure-based methods for drug repositioning. This research led her to become a core developer of the Protein-Ligand Interaction Profiler (PLIP), a powerful tool used globally to automatically characterise the binding modes of drugs. Her first-hand experience in building such a fundamental tool provides her with an unparalleled understanding of protein-ligand interactions. Today, at EMBL-EBI, she continues to push the boundaries of computational chemistry. Her work involves weaving together vast datasets from ChEMBL (bioactivity data), PDBe and CCDC (3D structures), and using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning to uncover evidence linking protein targets to specific diseases for the Open Targets platform. Holding a PhD in Computer Science and a degree in Bioinformatics Engineering, Melissa combines rigorous technical skill with deep biological insight. As your trainer, I’m excited to share my real-world experience in 3D structural analysis and demonstrate how these computational techniques are vital in the modern hit-to-lead pipeline.

ORCID: 0000-0003-2217-4629

Miao Ma | EMBL-EBI

Structural biologist expertised in cryo-EM and X-ray crystallography, experienced in gene-to-structural pipeline in both academic research and industry drug discovery.

ORCID: 0000-0002-5294-5562

Michael Sternberg | Imperial College London

Professor Michael Sternberg holds the Chair of Structural Bioinformatics in the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College and is the Director for the Centre for Integrative Systems Biology and Bioinformatics. His research interest is the development of novel approaches for modelling biomolecular structure, function and interactions. MS’s group has an extensive track record in developing and disseminating protein modelling tools. Most notable is the 3D-PSSM/ Phyre/ Phyre2 web servers for protein structure prediction which have received over 5 million submissions over 21 years. Recently MS’s group has resources to map and interpret missense variants onto experimental and predicted protein structures. The Missense-3D portal models the stereochemical impact of a user-supplied missense variant onto a protein structure. Allied to this is Missense3D-DB that is a database of precomputed structural predictions for ~4M human missense variants on experimental and Phyre-predicted structures. A related resource is the PhyreRisk database. In addition, there are two predictors of allosteric binding sites in proteins- AlloPred and ExPRoSE. The group has also developed a graphics program EzMol to meet requests from several of our Phyre users for a web-based easy-to-use program to display structure and produce publication-quality images.

ORCID: 0000-0002-1884-5445

Nandana Madhusoodanan | EMBL-EBI

Hi, I’m Nandana Madhusoodanan, working as Documentation & Bioinformatics Support Officer for the Job Dispatcher team at the EBI. My main focus is supporting various bioinformatics sequence analysis applications and maintaining documentation related to these services. I’m interested in learning biocuration and its tools and techniques. This course is helpful for a beginner like me in this field, and I consider this as an opportunity to get hands-on experience. I hope this is an excellent opportunity to interact with biocurators and their resources.

ORCID: 0000-0001-5004-152X

Pedro Raposo | EMBL-EBI

Pedro Raposo is a Senior Bioinformatician in the Protein Function Content team of UniProt at EMBL-EBI working on automatic annotation of protein function, and maintaining the Proteomes resource. After obtaining his MSc in Bioinformatics, he worked at the UK Stem Cell Bank on genomic data, before joining EMBL-EBI.

ORCID: 0000-0001-6149-9456

Raphaelle Versini | University of Utrecht

My name is Raphaelle Versini. I am currently a post-doc in the NMR Spectroscopy Reasearch Group in Utrecht University, under the supervision of Alexandre Bonvin. I have recently defended my Ph.D. in Paris, France, which focused on the protein mitofusins and their structure predictions using either AI based methods such as AlphaFold or physics-based methods such as molecular dynanmics. I currently work on the development of the docking software HADDOCK.

Robbie Joosten | Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI)

My research focusses on developing new computational methods to validate and improve the quality and value of macromolecular structure models. Within the PDB-REDO project (pdb-redo.eu) we take experimental data and initial models from crystal diffraction experiments, and improve the fit with the data and remove model errors. This approach delivers high-quality structure model for downstream studies such as drug (lead) discovery and structure-function analyses of proteins. Our AlphaFill project (alphafill.eu) focusses on adding value to structure models by fitting ligands, ions and cofactors on the bases of homology or by AI-based predictions.

ORCID: 0000-0002-2323-2686

Zhe Wang | EMBL-EBI

He is a software developer and specialist at the Electron Microscopy Data Bank (EMDB), with a focus on validating electron microscopy (EM) density maps and their corresponding atomic models. His work involves ensuring the accuracy and consistency of structural data deposited in the EMDB, contributing to the development of tools for model validation and data integrity.