Prof. Shoba Ranganathan holds a Chair in Bioinformatics at Macquarie University since 2004. She has held research and academic positions in India, USA, Singapore and Australia as well as a consultancy in industry. She hosted the Macquarie Node of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Bioinformatics (2008-2013). She was elected the first Australian Board Director of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB; 2003-5); President, Asia-Pacific Bioinformatics Network (2005-2016) and Steering Committee Member (2007-12) of Bioinformatics Australia. She currently serves as Co-Chair of the Computational Mass Spectrometry (CompMS) initiative of the Human Proteome Organization (HuPO), ISCB and Metabolomics Society and as Board Director, APBioNet Ltd. Shoba’s research addresses several key areas of bioinformatics to understand biological systems using computational approaches. Her group has achieved both experience and expertise in different aspects of computational biology, ranging from metabolites and small molecules to biochemical networks, pathway analysis and computational systems biology. She has authored as well as edited several books in Immunoinformatics as well as contributed several articles to the Encyclopedia of Systems Biology, published by Springer in 2013. She is currently Editor of Elsevier's Reference Module in Life Sciences and Editor-in-Chief of Elsevier's Encyclopedia of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology.

Prof. N. Srinivasan completed his PhD in 1991 from Indian Institute of Science (IISc) on three-dimensional structures of proteins. After his PhD, he worked as a research scientist at Department of Crystallography, Birkbeck College, London, UK, at Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, London, UK, and at University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK. He is currently working as Professor at the Molecular Biophysics Unit, IISc, Bangalore. He is leading a research group in the area of computational biology and bioinformatics. He has published over 280 scientific articles in leading international journals. He is recipient of several national level awards including National Bioscience Award, Shanti Swaroop Bhatnagar Award, Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, J C Bose National Fellow. At the international level, he has been International Senior Fellow of the Wellcome Trust, London, Senior Fellow of the University of Manchester, UK, visiting Professor of bioinformatics, Reunion University, France, visiting Professor of bioinformatics, Nantes University, France, Faculty member of Faculty of 1000, London. He has served in editorial board of many international journals including Bioinformatics, Biology Direct, PLoS ONE, Scientific Reports etc..

Dr. Asta Försti completed her PhD in Biochemistry and Biotechnology from University of Kuopio in Finland. From 2002 to present she is working as Senior Research Scientist at Molecular Genetic Epidemiology group at German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and University of Heidelberg, Germany. She has published over 200 research articles and conference proceedings. Her areas of interest in research include Breast Cancer, Colorectal Cancer, Genome-Wide Association Studies, SNP array and DNA sequencing.

Dr. Raghava is a Professor & Head at Department of Computational Biology, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT)-Delhi, India. Before joining IIIT-Delhi, he was working as Chief Scientist at Bioinformatics Centre, CSIR-Institute of Microbial Technology (IMTECH), Chandigarh, India. He received his M.Tech degree from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi and PhD from IMTECH. He worked as Postdoctoral fellow at Oxford University in UK (1996-98), Bioinformatics specialist at UAMS, USA (2002-3 & 2006) and visiting professor at POSTECH, South Korea (2004). He worked as scientist for 30 years (1986-2016) in IMTECH. His group developed more than 250 web servers, 200 research papers, 80 Copyrights/patents, 35 databases and mirror sites. He has received following major awards/recognition: i) Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award in Biological Science, ii) “National Bioscience Award for Carrier Development” for year 2005-2006 (by Department of Biotechnology, Govt. India), iii) J. C. Bose national fellowship 2010 by DST, iv) fellow of National Academy of Sciences (F.N.A.Sc), and v) fellow of Indian Academy of Science (F.A.Sc.), Bangalore.

Dr. Andrew Michael Lynn is currently working as a Dean and Professor at the School of Computational and Integrative Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, India. He gained his masters in Biotechnology from Goa University (1991) and Ph.D. in Life Sciences from JNU (1998). He was ranked 5 on list of best Bioinformaticians in India. He has been appointed as a member of the Board of Studies, Computational Biology at Pondicherry University (2011 – 2015), and currently works as a member of the Board of Studies at Bansthali Vidyapeeth (since 2007), PSRG National Resource Center for Free and Open Source Software Ministry of Communication and Information Technology (since 2009), and the Central University of Bihar (since 2013).

His research is mainly focused on finding computational methods for the biological sequence, structure and systems analysis. He has developed useful bioinformatics software such as HMM-Mode. Currently, his research group is involved in data mining in Chemoinformatics, NGS data analysis, Biocomputing, CyberInfrastructure and Cloud Computing, and Molecular Dynamic Simulations and Free Energy Calculations using Gromacs.

Prof. Debnath Pal obtained his Ph.D. in Structural Bioinformatics from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. He is currently working at the Department of Computational and Data Sciences, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, India. His areas of interest in research are spanning Genomics, Proteomics, Metabolomics, Structural Biology, Drug Discovery, Algorithms & Methods with a focus to address biological problems through Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. His methods include the use of data from NGS, Mass Spectrometry, X-ray Crystallography, NMR and other biophysical techniques. His lab works on biological problems that attempt to understand the biological function at various scales through the development and integration of new methods and techniques. His recent projects include "Inference of Protein Function from Molecular Dynamics", "Genome Secondary Analysis", "Hemoglobin Structure & Function" and so on.

Dr. Jens Allmer is Professor of Medical Informatics and Bioinformatics at the Ruhr West University of Applied Sciences (HRW), Mülheim, Germany. He previously held positions as Cluster Leader (Wageningen University and Research, Wageningen, Netherlands, 2017-2018), Assistant and Associate Professor (Izmir Institute of Technology, Izmir, Turkey, 2008-2016). Prof. Allmer received his doctorate (2006) in biology with distinction from the University of Münster, Germany, where he also received his diploma. In year 2010, he was named an outstanding young scientist in the field of bioinformatics by the Turkish Academy of Sciences. Prof. Allmer's research interests include most of the omics areas. At the moment his main focus is on microRNA regulation and pathogen-host interaction. He uses machine learning to research these topics.

Dr. Lasky-Su is an Associate Professor in Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA. She earned her doctoral degree in Genetic Epidemiology from Harvard School of Public Health and has spent the last 19 years focusing on the identification of genetic, genomic, and metabolomic determinants for complex diseases. The accumulation of these efforts has resulted in over 100 peer-reviewed original research manuscripts. Dr. Lasky-Su’s more recent work has focused on analytic and network approaches to integrate metabolomics and other omics data types with the end goal of making strides towards precision medicine. She is currently the principal investigator and co-investigator on many grants focused on the integration of metabolomics and other omics data types for several diseases including asthma, allergies, preeclampsia, macular degeneration, cancer, and several other complex diseases. Dr. Lasky-Su currently serves in leadership capacities in a variety of consortiums, including acting as the chairman of the Consortium of METabolomic Studies (COMETS).

Prof. Malik Yousef is a data scientist, with focus on bioinformatics applications to various biomedical/biological problems. He has experience in both research environments as well as teaching responsibilities. He was a postdoc for 3 years at The Wistar Institute, Cancer Center, USA (Prof Louise Showe Cancer Biology lab) and 1 year at the University of Pennsylvania (UPENN-Bioinformatics Center), where he contributed to development machine-learning algorithms for microRNA gene and target prediction, gene expression classification and gene selection. He has significant expertise in machine learning and its applications ranging from gene expression studies to developing algorithms to predict miRNAs and their targets and more recently, to text mining applied to microRNA PubMed articles. His efforts in these areas are supported by his publication record.

Dr. Mohammad Asif Khan is currently appointed as a Consultant Researcher to Bezmialem Vakif University, Istanbul, Turkey. He is an Associate Professor in the School of Data Sciences at the Perdana University, Malaysia. He has been adjunct Assistant Professor (2011-2014) at the Department of Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, USA. He was the founding dean of the Perdana University School of Data Sciences and is appointed as Chief Data Officer. Since 2018, he has been president of Asia-Pacific Bioinformatics Network (APBioNet). He obtained his PhD in Bioinformatics from the National University of Singapore (NUS), and did his postdoctoral fellowships at both NUS and Johns Hopkins University. He also held a visiting scientist position at the Immunology Frontier Research Center (iFReC), Osaka University, Japan, under their Young Researchers Program.

Dr. Khan’s research interests are in the area of biological data warehousing and applications of informatics to the study of immune responses, vaccines, viruses, venom toxins, drug design, and disease biomarkers. He has authored/co-authored more than 50 international, peer-reviewed research and review articles, published in various international journals, books and conferences, and presented his work at numerous international conferences. He has been involved in the development of several novel bioinformatics methodologies, tools, and specialized databases, and currently has three patents granted. Most recently, he was the Section Editor of the Applications Volume of a three volume Encyclopedia on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (The A to Z of Bioinformatics), published by Elsevier.