Abstract

Abstract: Omics approaches, in particular those with spatial resolution, provide unique opportunities to study the deregulation of intra- and inter-cellular processes in disease using computational approaches. The use of prior biological knowledge allows us to reduce the dimensionality and increase the interpretability of the data, in particular by extracting from the data features describing the activity of molecular processes such as signaling pathways, gene regulatory networks, and cell-cell communication events. In this talk, I will present resources and methods from our group to effectively capture and deploy prior knowledge from the public domain to extract mechanistic information from omics data using computational methods, and illustrate them in several disease applications.

Bio: Julio Saez-Rodríguez was appointed as EMBL -EBI’s Head of Research in 2024. He leads on the development of the institute’s research mission and vision. His research group explores how large biological datasets can be interrogated with mathematical and AI models, to unveil the molecular basis of disease as a means to develop novel therapies. While the research is driven by applications, the group develops free open-source computational tools, and benchmarks existing methods, both within the group and with the community as part of the DREAM challenges . The current emphasis of Julio’s group is on single-cell and spatial data, multi-omics integration, and understanding multi-cellular communication. The methods they develop are broadly applicable, and the group’s focus is on cancer, autoimmune diseases, and conditions of the kidney and heart. Between 2018 and 2024, Julio was a Professor of Medical Bioinformatics and Data Analysis and Director of the Institute for Computational Biomedicine at Heidelberg University’s Faculty of Medicine, as well as a Group Leader at the EMBL -Heidelberg University Molecular Medicine Partnership Unit. Previously, he was a Professor and Institute Director at RWTH -Aachen University (2015-2018), and a Group Leader at EMBL -EBI (2010-2015).

Julio did his postdoctoral studies at Harvard Medical School and MIT , after earning a PhD in Process Engineering from the Max-Planck Institute and University of Magdeburg in Germany. He has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Oviedo in Spain.