Bio-IT World Conference & Expo Pre-Conference Workshops*

Bio-IT World is pleased to offer morning and afternoon pre-conference workshops on Tuesday, May 16. They are designed to be instructional, interactive and provide in-depth information on a specific topic. They allow for one-on-one interaction and provide a great way to explain more technical aspects that would otherwise not be covered during the main conference tracks that take place Wednesday - Thursday.

*Separate registration required.

Tuesday, May 16, 2023  8:00 - 10:00 am

W1: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Detailed Agenda
In this workshop, we will address various aspects of an organization – the people, processes, and platforms – that can be assessed and structured for ML/AI success. In ML: Ready, Set, Go, we will explore the various stages of launching ML technology within your organization and their impact on the following areas: Infrastructure & Platforms, Data Hygiene, Data Management & Data Governance, Strategy Alignment, Tools, & Analytics.
8:00 am

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Fernanda S. Foertter, MSc, Director of Developer Relations, Voltron Data

Jordan Ramsell, Scientific Consultant, BioTeam, Inc.

Anna Sowa, PhD, Senior Scientific Consultant, BioTeam, Inc.

INSTRUCTOR BIOGRAPHIES:

Fernanda S. Foertter, MSc, Director of Developer Relations, Voltron Data

Fernanda Foertter is currently the Director of Developer Relations at Voltron Data. She previously held roles as the Senior Scientific Consultant for BioTeam and GPU Developer Advocate for Bioinformatics at NVIDIA in the Healthcare group where she fostered an emerging community in AI and GPU computing. Before NVIDIA, Foertter held roles as an HPC Data Scientist in the Biomedical Sciences and Engineering group and was an HPC Programmer and Training Coordinator at the Oak Ridge National Lab's Leadership Computing Facility. She participated in the CORAL project that selected Summit as the next supercomputer to replace Titan, was co-PI of Kokkos Exascale Computing Project, served in OpenACC and OpenMP language standards, and is the “inventor” of the GPU Hackathon training series. Other interests include the intersection of HPC and AI, facilitating data integration workflows, and productivity in scientific application development.

Jordan Ramsell, Scientific Consultant, BioTeam, Inc.

Having joined BioTeam in 2021, Jordan uses his previous experience as a bioinformatician in the Hubbard Center for Genome Studies to enable scientific research through providing IT and computing assistance. He also pursues practical applications of machine learning and data visualization for use in the biological sciences.

Anna Sowa, PhD, Senior Scientific Consultant, BioTeam, Inc.

Anna is on a mission to help the scientific community make the most out of their data. Trained in human genetics and rare neurodegenerative disease, she transitioned to working on machine learning for agricultural data challenges and subsequently joined BioTeam in 2021. Since joining, she is focused on advancing the mission of BioTeam to empower science, scientists, and accelerate their ability to innovate.

 

W2: Data Science in Practice

Detailed Agenda
This workshop will cover descriptive, exploratory, and predictive data analysis, all essential to work in the computer-aided drug design environment. No longer are the old-fashioned readymade software tools and knowing pull-down menus sufficient to work in the new era of pharma research. We will introduce basic data science processes, python programming ecosystem, and drug discovery databases. Also, we highlight the deep generative AI models for de novo molecular design.
Lynn Miller, ARCH Science & Technology Lead, Research & Development, Information Research, Abbvie
Parthiban Srinivasan, PhD, Professor, Data Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research
8:00 am

Data Science in Practice

Lynn Miller, ARCH Science & Technology Lead, Research & Development, Information Research, Abbvie

Parthiban Srinivasan, PhD, Professor, Data Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research

Key themes covered:

  • ​Data Science Process
  • Descriptive and Exploratory Data Analysis
  • Predictive Data Analysis
  • Python Programming Ecosystem
  • Drug Discovery Databases
  • Deep Generative AI Models

INSTRUCTOR BIOGRAPHIES:

Lynn Miller, ARCH Science & Technology Lead, Research & Development, Information Research, Abbvie

Lynn started her career in bioinformatics and scientific computing at the onset of the genome-sequencing era and the human genome project. She spent 25 years at BIOVIA in many roles including assisting life sciences customers in pharma, biotech, and academia with commercial tools for scientific data analysis and creation of custom software solutions. Lynn joined AbbVie in July 2021 as the AbbVie R&D Convergence Hub (ARCH) Science and Technology Lead, to assist scientists and SMEs in defining data convergence use cases and integrating their data into AbbVie’s cutting edge knowledge platform, the ARCH.

Parthiban Srinivasan, PhD, Professor, Data Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research

Parthiban Srinivasan, an experienced data scientist, earned his PhD from Indian Institute of Science, specializing in Computational Chemistry. After his PhD, he continued the research at NASA Ames Research Center (USA) and Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel). Then he worked at AstraZeneca in the area of Computer Aided Drug Design for Tuberculosis. Later, he headed informatics business units in Jubilant Biosys and then in GvkBio before he floated the company, Parthys Reverse Informatics and later an AI consultancy, Vingyani. Currently, he is a Professor at Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Bhopal, teaching Data Science.

 

W3: Digitizing Human Biology-Centric Advanced in vitro Models for Drug Development

Detailed Agenda
Do you want to learn how we digitize human biology-centric in vitro models such as Organoids and Lab-on-a-Chip devices at Roche? How do we assemble an end-to-end process to interconnect complex biological data that support our drug development process with translational power at heart? How do we connect these complex puzzle pieces together to make an E2E solution that is FAIR and scalable? Come and join us!
Moritz Gilsdorf, Solution Architect & Principal Scientist, Roche
Daniela Ortiz Franyuti, Dr.sc.ETHZ, Senior Scientist, Roche
8:00 am

Digitizing Human Biology-Centric Advanced in vitro Models for Drug Development

Moritz Gilsdorf, Solution Architect & Principal Scientist, Roche

Daniela Ortiz Franyuti, Dr.sc.ETHZ, Senior Scientist, Roche

INSTRUCTOR BIOGRAPHIES:

Moritz Gilsdorf, Solution Architect & Principal Scientist, Roche

Moritz has a degree in Bioinformatics and 15+ years of experience in scientific software engineering and solution architecture. His main focus areas are in building and operating solutions for big data management, data engineering and data integration. Moritz joined Roche Pharma Research and Early Development in 2012 and is part of the Data & Analytics Department.

Daniela Ortiz Franyuti, Dr.sc.ETHZ, Senior Scientist, Roche

Daniela joined Roche in 2018 and is part of the Investigative and Immunosafety Chapter in Pharmaceutical Sciences at Roche’s Early Research & Development. She works on the development and application of advanced cellular in-vitro models, including microphysiological systems and organoids for preclinical safety evaluation of drug candidates. She is in charge of developing and implementing a FAIR Data strategy for advanced in-vitro models to support robust data management, processing, and advanced integrative analyses to enable the interpretation of complex data to support decision making today, and fuel the translational capabilities of the future.

Tuesday, May 16, 2023  10:30 - 12:30 pm

W4: People, Process, Technology: A Proven Framework for Scalable Translational Insights

Detailed Agenda
Challenges abound when preparing translational (preclinical and clinical) data for analytics approaches. There is often little alignment on nomenclature and standards across a multitude of data vendors. Technology can only work with the data it has but must also adapt to new data and how it relates to existing data. Come explore Takeda's approach to connecting people, processes, and technologies for scalable search and extraction to enable downstream translational analytics.
Julia Fox, Director, Takeda Data Sciences Institute
Julie Gorenstein, Director, Takeda Data Sciences Institute
Samantha Lipsky, Associate Director, Systems & Architecture, Takeda
Mingxi Song, Associate Manager, Takeda Data Sciences Institute
10:30 am

People, Process, Technology: A Proven Framework for Scalable Translational Insights

Julia Fox, Director, Takeda Data Sciences Institute

Julie Gorenstein, Director, Takeda Data Sciences Institute

Samantha Lipsky, Associate Director, Systems & Architecture, Takeda

Mingxi Song, Associate Manager, Takeda Data Sciences Institute

Challenges abound when preparing translational (preclinical and clinical) data for analytics approaches. There is often little alignment on nomenclature and standards across a multitude of data vendors. Technology can only work with the data it has but must also adapt to new data and how it relates to existing data. Come explore Takeda's approach to connecting people, processes, and technologies for scalable search and extraction to enable downstream translational analytics.

INSTRUCTOR BIOGRAPHIES:

Julia Fox, Director, Takeda Data Sciences Institute

Julia Fox is part of the Clinical Data Flow Transformation team in Takeda’s Data Science Institute, where she leads multiple efforts to broadly define and support a metadata-driven approaches in Clinical Data management, in close collaboration with Clinical Sciences, Therapeutic Areas, IT and across the Institute. Julia has a background in developmental genetics, genomics and drug discovery informatics with a focus on scientific semantics and data curation and annotation. She will share approaches to developing aligned common data models for institutionally shared metadata object definitions supported by scientific and clinical ontologies. Harmonized metadata and richly annotated data sets accelerate analysis and innovation.

Julie Gorenstein, Director, Takeda Data Sciences Institute

Julie Gorenstein is part of the Clinical Data Systems & Architecture team in the Data Science Institute at Takeda, where she co-leads efforts to streamline data processes and technological pipeline for sample-based, imaging and device clinical data. After building her analytical toolkit while obtaining degrees in Biomedical Engineering and Bioinformatics, Julie focused on target evaluation and molecule identification within oncology R&D, followed by a tenure in scientific software development & consulting. She hopes to share her learnings regarding development and coordination of clinical data processes and their impact on increased efficiency and acceleration of clinical trials.

Samantha Lipsky, Associate Director, Systems & Architecture, Takeda

Mingxi Song, Associate Manager, Takeda Data Sciences Institute

Max Song is an associate manager in the Data and Analytics Team in the Data Science Institute at Takeda. He manages projects involving generating insights as well as projects involving understanding new technologies and platforms in the context of insight generation. A recent graduate from Brandeis University with a computer science degree, Max hopes to use his background in computer science and fullstack development to teach and enable scientists.

 

W5: Biomedical Digital Twins

Detailed Agenda
With the successful and growing use of digital twin approaches in established industries such as power, propulsion, and aerospace combined with a rapidly developing biomedical ecosystem of computing, modeling, and expanding data has opened the door to develop the role of digital twins in biomedical applications. The workshop will bring together leaders in the use of digital twins and biomedical applications to provide key insights into launching digital twin efforts, factors influencing the present environment, challenges and opportunities expected along the way, and broader questions shaping the future for digital twins in biomedical applications.
Richard Arthur, Senior Principal Engineer/Senior Director - Computational Methods Research & Digital Engineer, GE Research
Leili Shahriyari, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics & Statistics, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Ilya Shmulevich, PhD, Professor, Institute for Systems Biology
Anil Srivastava, President, Open Health Systems Laboratory (OHSL)
Eric Stahlberg, PhD, Director, Cancer Data Science Initiatives, Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research
Andrea Townsend-Nicholson, PhD, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Division of Biosciences, University College London
Thomas Yankeelov, PhD, Professor, Director of Center for Computational Oncology, The University of Texas at Austin
10:30 am

Biomedical Digital Twins

Richard Arthur, Senior Principal Engineer/Senior Director - Computational Methods Research & Digital Engineer, GE Research

Leili Shahriyari, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics & Statistics, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Ilya Shmulevich, PhD, Professor, Institute for Systems Biology

Anil Srivastava, President, Open Health Systems Laboratory (OHSL)

Eric Stahlberg, PhD, Director, Cancer Data Science Initiatives, Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research

Andrea Townsend-Nicholson, PhD, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Division of Biosciences, University College London

Thomas Yankeelov, PhD, Professor, Director of Center for Computational Oncology, The University of Texas at Austin

Learning from the industrial world, biomedical digital twins have great potential, but also great challenges in implementation.

INSTRUCTOR BIOGRAPHIES:

Richard Arthur, Senior Principal Engineer/Senior Director - Computational Methods Research & Digital Engineer, GE Research

Rick Arthur is Senior Principal Engineer for GE Research Digital Technologies, focusing on Advanced Computational Methods Research and its application to Digital Engineering. This involves pathfinding of novel computing hardware and software architectures and connecting these with industrial application opportunities. Rick represents GE on several government and professional community advisory councils. Rick has over 30 years' experience with GE, supporting products and services that spanned diverse industrial sectors such as healthcare, air and rail transportation, media, finance, defense and energy. Rick established the Advanced Computing Laboratory to build expertise and facilitate adoption of emerging hardware and software capabilities critical to GE competitive advantage in materials, manufacturing, eCommerce, controls and automation, security, information services, turbomachinery, medical diagnostics, and life sciences. Beyond GE, he has worked with DARPA, NBC-Universal, Lockheed-Martin and the Department of Energy’s National Labs. Rick received a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Clarkson University, an M. Eng. in Computer Systems Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and an M.B.A. at the University at Albany. He is a co-chair of the U.S. Council on Competitiveness Advanced Computing Roundtable, technical member of the Exascale Computing Project Industry Council, and has advised on working groups for the National Science Foundation, Office of Science & Technology Policy, universities creating programs in computational methods and companies leading the state of the art in software and computing hardware. He previously served on the Science & Engineering Technical Advisory Council for the Blue Waters supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Rick co-chairs the AIAA Digital Engineering Integration Committee’s Digital Systems Model working group. He is a Senior Member of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Leili Shahriyari, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics & Statistics, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Ilya Shmulevich, PhD, Professor, Institute for Systems Biology

Ilya Shmulevich received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, in 1997. His graduate research was in the area of nonlinear signal processing, with a focus on the theory and design of nonlinear digital filters, Boolean algebra, lattice theory, and applications to music pattern recognition. From 1997-1998, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Nijmegen Institute for Cognition and Information at the University of Nijmegen (now Radboud University) and National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Amsterdam in The Netherlands, where he studied computational models of music perception and recognition, focusing on tonality induction and rhythm complexity. In 1998-2000, he worked as a senior researcher at the Tampere International Center for Signal Processing at the Signal Processing Laboratory in Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland. While in Tampere, he did research in nonlinear systems, image recognition and classification, image correspondence, computational learning theory, multiscale and spectral methods, and statistical signal processing. This background proved to be fruitful for undertaking problems in computational biology at a time when genomic technologies were beginning to produce large amounts of data. In 2001, he joined the Department of Pathology at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center as an Assistant Professor and held an adjunct faculty appointment in the Department of Statistics in Rice University. He and his colleagues developed statistical approaches for cancer classification, diagnosis, and prognosis, and applied them to the study of metastasis, cancer progression, and tumor heterogeneity for multiple different cancer types. He co-developed the model class of probabilistic Boolean networks (PBNs), which has been applied to the study of gene regulatory networks in cancer. Dr. Shmulevich joined the ISB faculty in 2005 where he is currently a Professor. Dr. Shmulevich directed a Genome Data Analysis Center within The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) consortium. He also directed one of three NCI Cancer Genomics Cloud Pilots, which is now operating as an NCI Cancer Genomics Cloud Resource (isb-cgc.org). Dr. Shmulevich’s research interests include theoretical studies of complex systems, including information theoretic approaches, as well as the application of image processing and analysis to high-throughput cellular imaging. His main research interest is multiscale modeling for cancer therapy. Dr. Shmulevich is a co-author or co-editor of six books in the areas of computational biology. He holds Affiliate Professor appointments in the Departments of Bioengineering and Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington and has held affiliate appointments in the Department of Signal Processing in Tampere University of Technology, Finland and in the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering in Strathclyde University, Glasgow, UK.

Anil Srivastava, President, Open Health Systems Laboratory (OHSL)

Anil Srivastava as head of Open Health Systems Laboratory (OHSL) located on the JHU Montgomery County Campus as US National Cancer Institute (NCI) in Rockville, MD, leads the ICKA: International Cancer Knowledge Alliance and ICTBioMed: International Consortium for Technology in Biomedicine beside serving as Special Volunteer, Radiation Research Program (RRP) and Member, Quantitive Imaging Network (QIN) International Liaison Committee at NCI. In the past he has worked as international program coordinator with NCI’s Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (NCI CBIIT) where he led the IUCRG: Indo-US Cancer Research Grid initiative which led to the creation of the National Cancer Grid in India. Later he served as senior advisor for life sciences with Internet2 (University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development) and Advisor to India’s National Knowledge Commission which established the direct fiber connection between the research and education network of India (National Knowledge Network) and United States (Internet2).. He currently serves as Advisor, Biomedical Informatics for the Indian National Cancer Institute of the All India Institute for Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi, and Visiting Faculty and Consultant on Information Technology for Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumbai, India. As part of the collaboration between OHSL and Tata Memorial Hospital he advised on international procurement of the proton therapy facility and planning for the center of excellence and research for carbon ion therapy. He has been associated with the conception and planning of the Indian National Cancer Institute of AIIMS from the beginning. Previously, he was a member of Apple’s Advanced Technology Group. He continues his work as Advisor to the World Bank Group increasingly focusing on health systems and planning for non-communicable diseases treatment and research in LMICs (Lower and Middle Income Countries). In the past he worked as senior professional advisor with Booz-Allen & Hamilton in the Asia-Pacific region. He has several publications and research papers to his credit and has been speaker at professional conferences (AACR, Accelerating Biology Symposium, BioIT, Indian Cancer Congress, Internet2, etc). Biomedical informatics and establishing international collaboration in cancer research and treatment are his special field of interest and expertise. Prior to moving to the United States, he was the founding chief executive (1989-91) of NASSCOM: National Association of Software and Service Companies and founding director (1972-86) and head off Knowledge Engineering with Centre for Development of Instructional Technology.

Eric Stahlberg, PhD, Director, Cancer Data Science Initiatives, Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research

Dr. Eric Stahlberg now directs cancer data science initiatives at the Frederick National Laboratory, having led and launched several initiatives at the lab. He has been instrumental in establishing the Frederick National Laboratory’s high-performance computing initiative and in assembling scientific teams across multiple, complex organizations to advance predictive oncology. Stahlberg first joined the Frederick National Laboratory in 2011 to form and direct the National Cancer Institute’s Center for Cancer Research Bioinformatics Core, which helped build intramural research collaborations between the national laboratory and the National Cancer Institute. Since then, Stahlberg has played a leadership role in many key partnerships, including a major collaboration between the National Cancer Institute and the Department of Energy. Under the Joint Design of Advanced Computing Solutions for Cancer (JDACS4C), the National Cancer Institute and Department of Energy are accelerating progress in precision oncology and computing. The collaboration is rooted in three major national initiatives; the Precision Medicine Initiative, the National Strategic Computing Initiative, and the Cancer Moonshot. He has helped lead initiatives to transform data management approaches at the lab as well as more recently leading program efforts exploring the application biomedical digital twins for cancer applications. Stahlberg has spearheaded the Frederick National Laboratory’s contributions to a number of JDACS4C projects, including ATOM and CANDLE. He helped launch the annual meeting series, Frontiers in Predictive Oncology and Computing, and co-organizes the annual Computational Approaches for Cancer and HPC Applications of Precision Medicine workshops. In 2017, he was recognized as one of FCW‘s Federal 100. Stahlberg holds a Ph.D. in computational chemistry from The Ohio State University.

Andrea Townsend-Nicholson, PhD, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Division of Biosciences, University College London

Andrea Townsend-Nicholson holds a chair in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology at University College London (UCL). She obtained a BSc degree in Molecular Genetics & Molecular Biology (University of Toronto, Canada; 1986) and a DSc degree in Cellular & Molecular Biology (Université Louis Pasteur, France; 1990), completed postdoctoral training at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research (Sydney Australia;1991-1995) and UCL (1995-1999), and held a British Heart Foundation Fellowship at UCL from 1999-2001. Her research focuses on understanding the molecular basis of cell surface receptor function in health and disease using a combination of experimental and computational methodologies. Andrea is particularly interested in facilitating the introduction of personalised medicine into clinical practice and in the development of computational methodologies that converge with experimental findings. She teaches medical and undergraduate bioscience students to use supercomputers as part of their taught university curriculum.

Thomas Yankeelov, PhD, Professor, Director of Center for Computational Oncology, The University of Texas at Austin

Tom Yankeelov received an MA in Applied Mathematics and an MS in Physics from Indiana University, before completing the PhD in Biomedical Engineering at SUNY @ Stony Brook. He completed his post-doc under Dr. John Gore at the Vanderbilt University Institute of Imaging Science and climbed the ranks to Full Professor in 2010. He then joined the faculty at The University of Texas at Austin in 2016 where he is now the W.A. "Tex" Moncrief Chair of Computational Oncology and Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Diagnostic Medicine, and Oncology. Dr. Yankeelov is the founding Director of the Center for Computational Oncology, and also serves as co-Director for the Quantitative Oncology Research Program and Director of Cancer Imaging Research within the Livestrong Cancer Institutes at UT Austin. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Imaging Physics at MD Anderson Cancer Center. The overall goal of Dr. Yankeelov's research is to develop tumor forecasting methods by integrating advanced imaging technologies with predictive, multi-scale models of tumor growth to optimize therapy. This is accomplished by dividing his efforts into approximately equal parts mathematical modeling, pre-clinical development, and implementation in clinical trials.

 

W6: Using Amazon Omics for Genomics End-to-End: From Raw Sequence to Querying Variants

Detailed Agenda
Take a hands-on tour of Amazon Omics and how to use it to build a complete end-to-end genomics data journey. Here you will learn how to store petabytes of raw genomics data at low cost, process data efficiently and at scale with secondary analysis workflows, and query population scale variant datasets. Only a laptop and a connection to the internet are required to participate.
Karl Gutwin, PhD, Director, Software Engineering Services, BioTeam, Inc.
Domen Jemec, Senior Product Manager, Amazon Omics, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Lee Pang, PhD, Principal Bioinformatics Architect, Health AI, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
William Van Etten, PhD, Senior Scientific Consultant, Consulting, BioTeam, Inc.
10:30 am

Using Amazon Omics for Genomics End-to-End: From Raw Sequence to Querying Variants

Karl Gutwin, PhD, Director, Software Engineering Services, BioTeam, Inc.

Domen Jemec, Senior Product Manager, Amazon Omics, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Lee Pang, PhD, Principal Bioinformatics Architect, Health AI, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

William Van Etten, PhD, Senior Scientific Consultant, Consulting, BioTeam, Inc.

Using AWS, healthcare and life science organizations can store, query, analyze, and generate insights from genomics and other biological data to improve human health. In this session you will learn how you can use Amazon Omics to support large scale genomic analysis with scalable workflows, purpose-built data stores, and multi-modal analytics.

INSTRUCTOR BIOGRAPHIES:

Karl Gutwin, PhD, Director, Software Engineering Services, BioTeam, Inc.

Karl is the Director of Software Engineering at BioTeam and has been contributing to life sciences technology solutions for fifteen years. Karl's focus is on building custom software, cloud, and high-performance computing systems for scientific data and applications.

Domen Jemec, Senior Product Manager, Amazon Omics, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Domen Jemec is a senior product manager at AWS focused on Amazon Omics. In this role, he is responsible for listening to customers, defining requirements, and ensuring that Amazon Web Services (AWS) helps customers advance scientific discovery and precision medicine. Domen has over 9 years of experience delivering technical and machine learning solutions for builders across various industries including Biotech, Life Science, Healthcare, Pharmaceutical and Medical Device. In addition, he continues to pursue various research projects at the junction of bioinformatics and ML, a passion started while studying Genetics at Clemson University.

Lee Pang, PhD, Principal Bioinformatics Architect, Health AI, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Lee is a Principal Bioinformatics Architect with the Health AI services team at AWS. He has a PhD in Bioengineering and over a decade of hands-on experience as a practicing research scientist and software engineer in bioinformatics, computational systems biology, and data science developing tools ranging from high throughput pipelines for *omics data processing to compliant software for clinical data capture and analysis.

William Van Etten, PhD, Senior Scientific Consultant, Consulting, BioTeam, Inc.

As a PhD geneticist, Van Etten contributes the perspective of a scientist in helping clients solve their computer-aided research problems. Van Etten honed his informatics skills at the Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research at MIT before co-founding BioTeam in 2002. Since then he has specialized in the development of informatics software with a keen eye toward ease of use. Van Etten received his Doctorate of Philosophy in Genetics at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. Following his graduate research Bill was Senior Software Engineer at the Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research where he contributed to the genetic mapping of the rat, and was the Head of Informatics for the Mouse Radiation Hybrid Mapping Project as well as Whitehead’s contribution to the SNP Consortium. Bill was involved with the generation of 2 million DNA sequences, and the discovery of 1.4 million Human SNPs; having developed and optimized novel algorithms for SNP discovery. He took these high-throughput computing research skills to Blackstone Computing as Principal Bioinformaticist where he designed, built and configured environments to support computer-aided research for life sciences.

Tuesday, May 16, 2023  1:45 - 3:45 pm

W7: Digitalization of Pharma R&D – Master the Marathon

Detailed Agenda
The digitalization of pharma R&D is not a sprint but a marathon with unique challenges, many pitfalls, and unforeseen side effects. The conversion of healthcare and technology promises game-changing breakthroughs and high rewards and makes the successful digitalization an absolute necessity for tomorrow's R&D organizations. This workshop will showcase the digitalization journey of a pharma R&D organization and critically discuss its setup and impact to increase R&D productivity.
Angelika Fuchs, Chapter Lead Data Products and Platforms, pRED Data & Analytics, Roche Diagnostics GmbH
David Herzig, Principal Scientist, Roche Pharma
Holmfridur Thorsteindottir, PhD, Head, Clinical & Biomarker Informatics, Roche Pharma
1:45 pm

Digitalization of Pharma R&D – Master the Marathon

Angelika Fuchs, Chapter Lead Data Products and Platforms, pRED Data & Analytics, Roche Diagnostics GmbH

David Herzig, Principal Scientist, Roche Pharma

Holmfridur Thorsteindottir, PhD, Head, Clinical & Biomarker Informatics, Roche Pharma

Workshop Agenda

​1:45 pm A Summary of the Case for Change and the Resulting Opportunities for a Digitalized Science

Angelika Fuchs, Chapter Lead Data Products and Platforms, pRED Data & Analytics, Roche Diagnostics GmbH

1:55 pm INTERACTIVE DISCUSSION: Key Opportunities and Challenges in Today’s Pharma R&D

Holmfridur Thorsteinsdottir, Angelika Fuchs, David Herzig

2:05 pm Building Blocks: Key Success Factors to Implement a Successful Digitalization Journey

  • ​Implementation Approach – Angelika Fuchs
  • Architecture – David Herzig
  • Change Management and Value Assessment – Holmfridur Thorsteinsdottir

2:35 pm Coffee Break  

2:45 pm Use Cases Digital Therapeutics

David Herzig, Senior Scientist, Roche Pharma

Lab Automation and Preclinical Data FAIRification  

Angelika Fuchs, Chapter Lead Data Products and Platforms, pRED Data & Analytics, Roche Diagnostics GmbH

Prospective FAIRification of Ophthalmology Image Analysis Pipeline

Holmfridur Thorsteindottir, PhD, Head, Clinical & Biomarker Informatics, Roche Pharma

3:15 pm Value Realization, Learnings, and Challenges 

Angelika Fuchs, Chapter Lead Data Products and Platforms, pRED Data & Analytics, Roche Diagnostics GmbH

3:25 pm INTERACTIVE DISCUSSION: Common Challenges and Learnings across the Industryall participants

3:35 pm Future Outlookall participants

INSTRUCTOR BIOGRAPHIES:

Angelika Fuchs, Chapter Lead Data Products and Platforms, pRED Data & Analytics, Roche Diagnostics GmbH

With >10 years experience in Research Informatics, a passion for science and human-centric digitalization in drug discovery, Angelika Fuchs is currently leading the Data Products & Platforms chapter in Data & Analytics of Pharma Research and Early Development.The chapter brings together all competencies required to design, build, operate and evolve pRED's digital landscape and aims to enhance the full scientific data pipeline from structured data capture to powerful data integration and efficient data interrogation in order to create and develop successful drug molecules as efficiently as possible. Before the current role, Angelika led the Discovery Informatics organization in Roche pRED as well as several global research informatics projects in the space of Digital Pathology and Lab Automation.

David Herzig, Principal Scientist, Roche Pharma

Result-driven scientific software engineer with 15+ years of experience including 13 years in the pharmaceutical research environment. Demonstrated skills in designing, architecting, implementing and supporting enterprise-level applications hosted on Cloud and On-premises technologies. Collaborating closely with software engineering teams as well as with project stakeholders, end-users and vendors. Actively working on 20+ large IT projects across the research value chain to achieve major improvements including digitalisation projects.

Holmfridur Thorsteindottir, PhD, Head, Clinical & Biomarker Informatics, Roche Pharma

Holmfridur Thorsteinsdottir is heading the Clinical & Biomarker informatics team in pRED Data & Analytics. The team is responsible for driving the delivery of innovative healthcare solutions that address large-scale digitalization challenges. Together we analyze complex business environments, identifying strategic business opportunities and efficiently turning them into reality with innovative and transformative industry-leading solutions. Establishing global strategies in alignment with business vision and goals and working across international boundaries and cultures.

 

W8: Automating Instrument Data

Detailed Agenda
Instruments including cryo-EM systems, light sheet microscopes, gene sequencers, and X-ray beam lines play a critical role in biomedical research, where discovery is driven by analysis of increasingly large datasets. Managing the data generated by these instruments is complicated and time-consuming, presenting challenges for the facilities that operate the instruments and researchers who use them. The common need is end-to-end solutions that streamline data management throughout the research data lifecycle.
Rachana Ananthakrishnan, Executive Director, Globus, University of Chicago
Vas Vasiliadis, Chief Customer Officer, Globus, University of Chicago
1:45 pm

Automating Instrument Data

Rachana Ananthakrishnan, Executive Director, Globus, University of Chicago

Vas Vasiliadis, Chief Customer Officer, Globus, University of Chicago

Instruments including cryo-EM systems, light sheet microscopes, gene sequencers, and X-ray beam lines play a critical role in biomedical research, where discovery is driven by analysis of increasingly large datasets. Managing the data generated by these instruments is complicated and time-consuming, presenting challenges for both the facilities who operate the instruments and the researchers who use them. Instrument facilities want data off their machines as quickly as possible, and require management tools that can scale to many users with very large datasets; they also need automation capabilities to offload routine data management tasks, saving time and money. And researchers just want their data as quickly as possible, so they can get to the job of analyzing the data, sharing it with collaborators, and publishing it to communities and data repositories. The common need is end-to-end solutions that streamline data management throughout the research data lifecycle. In this workshop, we will demonstrate a fast and reliable way to address these challenges via Globus.

INSTRUCTOR BIOGRAPHIES:

Rachana Ananthakrishnan, Executive Director, Globus, University of Chicago

Rachana Ananthakrishnan is Executive Director & Head of Products at the University of Chicago, and has a joint staff appointment at Argonne National Laboratory. In her role at the university, she leads Globus (www.globus.org) department, which delivers research data management services and platform to national and international research institutions. She also serves on the WestGrid Board of Directors, and is a member of the Internet2 InCommon Steering Committee. Her work is focused on research and education field, and she has worked on security and data management solutions on various projects including Earth System Grid (ESG), Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN), and Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE). Prior to that she worked on the Globus Toolkit engineering team and customer engagement teams, leading the efforts in web services and security technologies. Rachana received her MS in Computer Science at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Vas Vasiliadis, Chief Customer Officer, Globus, University of Chicago

Vas leads the customer team for Globus, an innovative software-as-a-service for research data management, developed and operated by the University of Chicago. He works with current and prospective users to grow adoption of the service and make it self-sustaining. Vas is also a lecturer in the Master's Program in Computer Science, where he teaches courses on Cloud Computing and Product Management. Vas has 30 years of experience in operational and consulting roles, spanning strategy, marketing and technology. He has nurtured early stage companies into successful businesses, and consulted to companies on a wide range of strategic issues. Vas holds an MBA from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa.

 

W9: AI-Driven Protein Analysis on AWS

Detailed Agenda
Proteins are the molecular machines of the body and make up an increasingly important class of bio-therapeutics. The functions of many proteins depend on their three-dimensional structures. Digital tools to predict and understand protein structures can dramatically increase the speed of biopharma innovation. In this workshop, you will use AWS cloud services to predict protein structure and function. First, you will use Amazon SageMaker Studio to explore protein data. Next, you will experiment with machine learning algorithms to predict molecular properties. Finally, you will build high-throughput pipelines for protein analysis. Participants will leave this workshop with hands-on knowledge of the most advanced protein analysis workflows available today.
Joshua Broyde, Senior AI/ML Solutions Architect, Global Life Sciences, Amazon Web Services
Brian Loyal, Senior AI/ML Solutions Architect, Global Life Sciences, Amazon Web Services
Angel Pizarro, Principal Developer Advocate, Amazon Web Services
Ujjwal Ratan, Leader, ML and Data Science, Healthcare and Life Sciences, Amazon Web Services

Location: Room 202

1:45 pm AI-Driven Protein Analysis on AWS

Joshua Broyde, Senior AI/ML Solutions Architect, Global Life Sciences, Amazon Web Services

Brian Loyal, Senior AI/ML Solutions Architect, Global Life Sciences, Amazon Web Services

Angel Pizarro, Principal Developer Advocate, Amazon Web Services

Ujjwal Ratan, Leader, ML and Data Science, Healthcare and Life Sciences, Amazon Web Services

In this workshop, you will use AWS cloud services to predict protein structure and function. First, you will use Amazon SageMaker Studio to explore protein data. Next, you will experiment with machine learning algorithms to predict molecular properties. Finally, you will build high-throughput pipelines for protein analysis. Participants will leave this workshop with hands-on knowledge of the most advanced protein analysis workflows available today.

 

INSTRUCTOR BIOGRAPHIES:

Joshua Broyde, Senior AI/ML Solutions Architect, Global Life Sciences, Amazon Web Services

Brian Loyal, Senior AI/ML Solutions Architect, Global Life Sciences, Amazon Web Services

Angel Pizarro, Principal Developer Advocate, Amazon Web Services

Ujjwal Ratan, Leader, ML and Data Science, Healthcare and Life Sciences, Amazon Web Services

 

W10: Empowering Biomedical Research Collaboration with Terra on Azure

Detailed Agenda
In this workshop, you will learn why researchers are excited about Terra’s growth onto Microsoft Azure, a secure biomedical research platform co-developed by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Microsoft, and Verily. Terra’s cloud-based platform offers a centralized location for biomedical research, connecting researchers to each other and to the datasets and tools they need to collaborate effectively and achieve scientific breakthroughs. Terra on Azure provides valuable support for enterprise organizations across industries natively supporting single sign-on (SSO) with Azure Active Directory and the ability to spin up resources into an end-user’s Microsoft Azure Tenant. During this workshop, you will get a hands-on-tour of Terra and a chance to work within the platform through a guided data analysis exercise. You will be using your own laptops for this exercise.
Sara Bonner, Software Product Manager, Data Sciences Platform, Broad Institute
Allie Cliffe, Lead Science Writer, Data Sciences Platform, Broad Institute

Location: Room 209

1:45 pm

Empowering Biomedical Research Collaboration with Terra on Azure

Sara Bonner, Software Product Manager, Data Sciences Platform, Broad Institute

Allie Cliffe, Lead Science Writer, Data Sciences Platform, Broad Institute

Learn why researchers are excited about Terra on Microsoft Azure: a secure biomedical research platform co-developed by Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Microsoft, and Verily, built on Azure cloud. Access the datasets and tools you need to collaborate effectively, and achieve scientific breakthroughs in a single, cloud-native platform. Terra on Azure provides valuable support for enterprise organizations across industries. Terra natively supports single sign-on (SSO) with Azure Active Directory and the ability to spin up resources into an end-user’s Azure tenant.

INSTRUCTOR BIOGRAPHIES:

Sara Bonner, Software Product Manager, Data Sciences Platform, Broad Institute

Sara Bonner is a Product Manager for Terra at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. She has a background in computer engineering and a passion for bridging the communication gap between users and engineers to develop innovative solutions to meet user needs.

Allie Cliffe, Lead Science Writer, Data Sciences Platform, Broad Institute

Allie Cliffe is a rocket scientist turned science writer with a passion for making big biomedical data in the cloud easier to understand, access, and analyze. She currently works at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard as a lead science writer for Terra, a biomedical research platform co-developed by the Broad Institute, Microsoft, and Verily.





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