The next BIST seminar Big Data in Biology: What the pandemic has taught us by Dr. Ewan Birney (Deputy Director General of EMBL and Director of EMBL-EBI) will take place on 5th April at 15.30 pm at Sala Josep Marull at Campus Universitari Mar and via streaming on youtube. 

The seminar is part of the BIST Colloquium Series Spring, periodic lectures and discussion sessions with internationally recognized researchers, providing a broad exposure to multidisciplinary research in experimental sciences. The BIST Colloquium Series forms part of the curriculum of the BIST Master of Research in Experimental Sciences and is open to anyone interested in attending.

Take into account that places will be available until the Sala Josep Marull's capacity is complete.  

Talk abstract:  

Molecular biology is now a leading example of a data intensive science, with both pragmatic and theoretical challenges being raised by data volumes and dimensionality of the data. These changes are present in both “large scale” consortia science and small scale science, and across now a broad range of applications – from human health, through to agriculture and ecosystems. All of molecular life science is feeling this effect.

This shift in modality is creating a wealth of new opportunities and has some accompanying challenges. In particular there is a continued need for a robust information infrastructure for molecular biology. This ranges from the physical aspects of dealing with data volume through to the more statistically challenging aspects of interpreting it. A particular problem is finding causal relationships in the high level of correlative data. Genetic data are particular useful in resolving these issues. 

The pandemic has brought together operational public health delivery (eg, testing and DNA sequencing of the infectious agent) alongside research and models. The rate of learning has increased between these two domains and delivered better and better products for both policy makers and research. I will illustrate this with examples including the expansion of the Alpha and Delta SARS-CoV-2 genomes and integrating genomic and contact tracing work.

Biography

Ewan Birney is Deputy Director General of EMBL and Director of EMBL-EBI.

Ewan completed his PhD at the Wellcome Sanger Institute with Richard Durbin. In 2000, he became Head of Nucleotide data at EMBL-EBI and in 2012 he took on the role of Associate Director at the institute. He became Director of EMBL-EBI in 2015. Ewan led the analysis of the Human Genome gene set, mouse and chicken genomes and the ENCODE project, focusing on non-coding elements of the human genome. Ewan’s main areas of research include functional genomics, DNA algorithms, statistical methods to analyse genomic information (in particular information associated with individual differences in humans and Medaka fish) and use of images for chromatin structure.

Ewan is a non-executive Director of Genomics England, and a consultant and advisor to a number of companies, including Oxford Nanopore Technologies and Dovetail Genomics. Ewan was elected an EMBO member in 2012, a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2014 and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2015.

He has received a number of awards including the 2003 Francis Crick Award from the Royal Society, the 2005 Overton Prize from the International Society for Computational Biology and the 2005 Benjamin Franklin Award for contributions in Open Source Bioinformatics. On December 29, Ewan Birney was made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) as part of the Queen’s New Year’s Honours List for 2019.  Ewan received the honour in recognition of his services to computational genomics and leadership across the life sciences.