Abstract

Friday 30 January, 13:00 – 14:00

Speaker: Dr Evangelia Petsalaki, EMBL -EBI

Talk Title: From data towards Digital Twins of biological systems: Network-based approaches to study context-specific cell signalling.

Biography: Evangelia Petsalaki is a computational biologist with over 20 years of experience in systems biology, network biology, and modelling of cell signalling. Her research focuses on how dynamic, context-specific signalling processes determine cellular phenotypes, with direct relevance to disease mechanisms and therapeutic response.

Evangelia completed her PhD at EMBL Heidelberg in structural bioinformatics (Russell group; summa cum laude, Wilma Moser Prize), followed by postdoctoral work in Toronto integrating systems and experimental biology to study signalling rewiring (Pawson and Roth groups). Since 2017, she has led the Whole Cell Signalling group at EMBL -EBI, developing data-driven frameworks that combine machine learning, network biology, and perturbation data to build predictive models of cellular behaviour. Her work spans cancer drug resistance, immune signalling, metabolic liver disease, and organoid-based digital twins.

Overall, her work aims to bridge data-driven and mechanistic approaches to generate interpretable, predictive models that inform experimental design and translational decision-making.