ICBRA 2025

Keynote Speaker

Prof. Ming Chen

Zhejiang University, China

Biography: Prof. Ming Chen received his PhD in Bioinformatics from Bielefeld University, Germany. He is a professor and PhD supervisor at the college of Life Sciences in Zhejiang University, and is the leading figure in the field of Bioinformatics at Zhejiang University. He has a long career in scientific research and education of bioinformatics and systems biology. He has published over 200 SCI academic papers in journals such as Cell, Nature, Nucleic Acids Research, and Bioinformatics, and his google scholar H-index is over 51. Prof. Ming Chen is the President of the Bioinformatics Society of Zhejiang Province, China; Committee Director of Chinese Society for "Multi-Omics and Integrative Biology", Committee Deputy Director of Chinese Society for "Modeling and Simulation of Biological Systems"; Committee executive member of Chinese Societies for "Computational Systems Biology" and "Functional Genomics & Systems Biology"; and Committee member of Chinese Societies for "Biomedical Information Technology" and "Biophysics (Bioinformatics) ".

Prof. Qihua Tan

University of Southern Denmark, Denmark

Biography: Dr. Qihua Tan is a professor of genetic epidemiology at Institute of Public Health and Institute of Clinical Research, University of Southern Denmark. Professor Tan’s research area involves twin modelling, bioinformatics, genetics, epigenetics, biodemography as well as their applications in public health with a focus on human aging and development and in clinical medicine such as cancer, diabetes, asthma etc. He has also established a strong network of international collaboration on twin analysis, genetic and epigenetic studies on aging and metabolic health. Professor Tan has published over 250 articles in internationally peer reviewed journals among which about half as first author or last (corresponding) authors.

Prof. Dr. G.V. Shivashankar

ETH Zurich and Paul Scherrer Institute, Switzerland

Shivashankar is currently a Full Professor of Mechano-Genomics at the Department of Health Science and Technology, ETH Zurich jointly with the Paul Scherrer Institute, Switzerland. He carried out his PhD at the Rockefeller University (1994-1999) and Postdoctoral research at NEC Research Institute, Princeton USA (1999-2000). He was a tenured faculty at the National Center for Biological Sciences, NCBS-TIFR- Bangalore, India (2000-2009) before relocating to the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2010. He was the Deputy Director of the Mechanobiology Institute at NUS (2011-2019) and was the IFOM-NUS Chair Professor (2014-2019) before joining ETH. His scientific awards include the Birla Science Prize in 2006, the Swarnajayanthi Fellowship in 2007. He was elected to the Indian Academy of Sciences in 2010 and to the EMBO membership in 2019.

Prof. Jan Komorowski

Uppsala University, Sweden

Dr. Jan Komorowski is Senior Professor of Bioinformatics at the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology at Uppsala University, Sweden, Visiting Professor at the Institute of Computer Science, PAS, Warszawa, Poland, and Affiliate Faculty at Washington National Primate Research Center, Seattle, WA, USA. He came to Bioinformatics after a successful career in Computer Science. His PhD work on partial evaluation of logic programs is cited to the day, 40 years after the publication. Since mid-90’s Dr. Komorowski’s main research interest is interpretable machine learning for Life Sciences. At the center of his work are models of complex regulatory mechanisms as they change in response to genetic and environmental factors developed from transcriptome data, mutation and DNA modification data, metabolomics, screening and clinical data in the context of cancer, diabetes and viral diseases. Dr. Komorowski has published in Nature, Nature Genetics, Nature Communications, Genome Research, Nucleic Acid Research, Bioinformatics and several other international journals. https://scholar.google.se/citations?user=P6CBNTMAAAAJ&hl=en.
Dr. Komorowski obtained an MSc in Computer Science at University of Warsaw in 1976 and in 1981 he earned a PhD in Computer Science at Linköping University with Professor Erik Sandewall. He was appointed Assistant Professor at Harvard University and Adjunct Professor at the AI Laboratory at MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1982-1987. In 2002 he was appointed Professor and Chair of Bioinformatics and Director of the Linnaeus Centre for Bioinformatics at Uppsala University. Dr. Komorowski is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences and of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters. In 2020 he was nominated Fellow of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study.

Invited Speakers

Dr. Roberto Sotero

Diaz-University of Calgary

Biography: Roberto C. Sotero earned his BSc in Nuclear Physics in 2003 and his PhD in Physics in 2009, both from Havana, Cuba. He then pursued a postdoctoral fellowship at the Montreal Neurological Institute from 2010 to 2014. In 2014, he joined the Department of Radiology at the University of Calgary, where he currently holds the position of Associate Professor. Roberto's expertise lies in developing computational models of brain activity, bridging gaps in imaging across various scales and between brain structure and function. His work focuses on the essential biophysical properties that influence empirical dynamics. Recently, he began integrating machine learning techniques with biophysical modelling. Through these hybrid models, he aims to address critical health challenges, particularly the early detection of autism spectrum disorder.

Dr. Kevin Lin

University of Virginia