Revolutionizing Biology with AI

Sarah did her PhD at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK and was a Beit Memorial Fellow at University College London. She started her group at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in 2001, where they described conserved pathways of protein complex assembly, and a “periodic table of protein complexes”, using biophysics and data science. After starting work on single cell genomics of T cells, in 2013, she moved to the Wellcome Genome Campus where she was the first and to date only faculty member appointed across both the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute and the Wellcome Sanger Institute. There, she was a founding member of the Sanger-EBI Single Cell Genomics Centre.  In 2016, Sarah was appointed as Head of the Cellular Genetics programme at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and co-founded the international Human Cell Atlas consortium. This initiative creates reference maps for cells across all human tissues, and has grown to include over three thousand members across the world. She also co-directs the CIFAR MacMillan Multiscale Human research programme.

From April 2024, Sarah has taken up the chair in Stem Cell Medicine at the University of Cambridge, Department of Medicine/Cambridge Stem Cell Institute. She now also spends part of her time at GlaxoSmithKline, and the startup company she co-founded, EnsoCell Therapeutics.

While maintaining a molecular and biophysics perspective, Sarah’s laboratory has developed and applied experimental and computational approaches for cell atlas technologies to decipher human cells, tissues and organs. A particular focus of hers is how cellular diversity is generated in the immune system and through development. Notable achievements include the first comprehensive reconstruction of the cell interactions in the human placenta in early pregnancy, and the first 3D map of the developing and mature thymus at cellular resolution and full molecular depth. Her work has been recognised by numerous awards, including the EMBO Gold Medal, Genetics Society Mary Lyons Award, Biochemical Society GlaxoSmithKline Award, the FEBS|EMBO Women in Science Award, Raman Chair of the Indian Academy of Sciences among others. She is an EMBO Member, ISCB Fellow, International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and Royal Society.

Caroline Uhler is a core institute member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she directs the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center and is a member of the Scientific Leadership Team. She is also the Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society at MIT.

Caroline’s research lies at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and genomics, with a particular focus on causal inference, representation learning, and gene regulation. Caroline is recognized as a creative and innovative researcher and teacher at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and biology. She is a SIAM Fellow, a Fellow of the IMS, a Sloan Research Fellow, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. In addition, she has received multiple awards including an NIH New Innovator Award, a Simons Investigator Award, and an NSF Career Award. Caroline holds an M.Sc. in mathematics, a B.Sc. in biology, and an M.Ed., all from the University of Zurich. She obtained her Ph.D. in statistics from UC Berkeley and then spent three years as an assistant professor at IST Austria before joining the faculty at MIT in 2015.

Fabrice André, MD, PhD, received his MD in Paris in 2002, and a PhD in Biotechnology from Paris University in 2005. He is a medical oncologist working at Gustave Roussy and taking care of patients presenting a breast cancer.
He is a past recipient of Career Development Awards from the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and Outstanding Investigator in Breast Cancer Award from the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). He is currently Head of Research Division, and Professor in the Department of Medical Oncology.

His research work in the field of biomarkers and personalised therapies focuses on biomarker discovery, development of targeted agents and implementation of personalised medicine. His team includes 80 people working on basic sciences, bioinformatics, biotechnologies and clinical research. He is also leading phase I-III trials testing targeted agents in the field of breast cancer and large national trials testing implementation of high throughput technologies in the health care system.

Professor André has published more than 300 peer reviewed papers, including papers in Nature, the New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, Nature Medicine, as main author.
Professor André is the Chair of the National Cancer Precision Medicine Center PRISM and was a member of several scientific committees for international meetings, including SABCS, AACR, ECCO, ESMO, and IMPAKT.

Professor André is currently President of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO). He has been a member of the Annals of Oncology Editorial Board (2010-2013), Associate Editor since 2014 and Editor-in-Chief 2017-2023.

He was the first Chair of the ESMO Young Oncologist Committee, served as Coordinator (2012-2014) and member (since 2015) of the ESMO Breast Cancer Faculty. Professor André was also a member of the ESMO Cancer Research Faculty, 2012- 2014; Chair of the ESMO Translational Research and Precision Medicine Working Group (end 2019), and member since 2020. He is also a member of the ESMO Council. He was the Scientific Co-Chair of the ESMO 2022 Congress and the MAP Congress.

Professor Jakob Kather holds dual appointments in medicine and computer science at the Technical University (TU) Dresden, Germany, serves as a senior physician in medical oncology at the University Hospital Dresden and holds an additional affiliation with the National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT) in Heidelberg. His research is focused on applying artificial intelligence in precision oncology. Prof. Kather’s research team at TU Dresden is using deep learning techniques to analyze a spectrum of clinical data, including histopathology, radiology images, textual records, and multimodal datasets. Guided by the belief that medical and tech expertise needs to be combined, medical researchers in his team learn computer programming and data analysis, while  computer scientists are immersed in cancer biology and oncology. Prof. Kather chairs the “Working group on Artificial Intelligence” at the German Society of Hematology and Oncology (DGHO) and is a member of the pathology task force of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). His work is supported by numerous European and national grants, which enable the team to develop new deep learning methods for medical data analysis techniques and to apply them in precision oncology.

John Connolly, PhD, is the Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) at the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (PICI), where he designs and executes PICI’s overall research strategy in close collaboration with the institute’s leadership team, center directors and scientific steering committee.

As a human immunologist, his research interests focus on immune monitoring and immunometabolism. Dr. Connolly previously served as CSO of Tessa Therapeutics, a clinical stage cell therapy company focused on solid tumor immunotherapy, and one of PICI’s strategic partners. He is an associate professor at National University of Singapore and an adjunct associate professor of Immunology at Baylor University, where he served on the Board of Governors for the Institute of Biomedical Sciences.

He is also a senior principal investigator and director for translational immunology at the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology (IMCB) A*Star. Additionally, Dr. Connolly serves as director for the IMPACT Program, a multi-disciplinary national initiative focused building cell therapy manufacturing, clinical and regulatory capability for Singapore.

Dr. Connolly received his PhD in Immunology from Dartmouth Medical School and studied human dendritic cell biology under Dr. Michael Fanger. During this time he was involved in the development of immunotherapeutic preclinical models and clinical trials for glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). He moved to the Baylor Institute for Immunology Research, a fully translational research institute dedicated to rationally designed vaccines against cancer and infectious disease. Dr. Connolly served as the director of Research Initiatives for the Baylor Research Institute, leading a large integrated translational research resource and multi-institutional programs that involved a number of international sites. During his tenure at Baylor, he was the central core facility director of the NIAID Centers for Translational Research on Human Immunology and Biodefense, an NIH-funded consortium of basic, translational research and clinical trials focused on vaccine design. Dr. Connolly is the past president of the Board of Directors of The American Cancer Society in N. Texas and founding director of the Singapore Immunology Network’s Immunomonitoring Platform.

Regina Barzilay is a School of Engineering Distinguished Professor of AI & Health in the Department of Computer Science and the AI Faculty Lead at MIT Jameel Clinic. She develops machine learning methods for drug discovery and clinical AI. In the past, she worked on natural language processing. Her research has been recognized with the MacArthur Fellowship, an NSF Career Award, and the AAAI Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity. Regina is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Medicine.