Speakers
Ronny Bartsch
Ronny Bartsch studied physics in Konstanz, Germany, and at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, where he received his Ph.D. in June 2009. Ronny was a post-doctoral fellow at the Division of Sleep Medicine, Harvard Medical School, from 2008 to 2013, after which he joined the faculty at the same division as an Instructor in Medicine. In April 2014, Ronny joined the Physics Department at Boston University as a Research Assistant Professor. Since October 2020, he has been an Associate Professor at the Department of Physics at Bar-Ilan University. Ronny applies statistical physics and nonlinear dynamics methods to study physiologic dynamics, sleep regulation, and circadian rhythms, and he investigates how physiologic transitions affect the coupling between organ systems.
Christopher R. Stephens
Chris Stephens is Full Professor and Director of Data Science at the C3 –Center for Complexity Science at the National University of Mexico (UNAM), the oldest university in the Americas. He possesses a B.A. and an M.A. from The Queen's College, Oxford and an M.S. and Ph.D in theoretical physics from the University of Maryland. After his doctoral work and postdoctoral positions in the University of Glasgow, Imperial College and the University of Utrecht, where he worked with Nobel Laureate Gerard ‘t Hooft, he was awarded a prestigious Marie Curie Fellowship by the European Union at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. He has been invited to Visiting Professor positions at many universities, including the Universities of Birmingham, Essex, Limerick and Northumbria as well as being a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Among his honors are a Leverhulme Professorship from the Leverhulme Trust U.K. and the Jorge Lomnitz Prize of the Mexican Academy of Sciences. He has over 170 publications in international journals. He is a member of the editorial boards of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Hardware, Theory of Biosciences and Frontiers in Physiology. He was a founding partner of Adaptive Technologies Inc. and is currently Founder and Director of Presage Research, both companies dedicated to the application of artificial intelligence research to business and industry, with a special emphasis on healthcare.
Valeria D'Andrea
Valeria d’Andrea received her Master Degree in Physics in 2010 and her Ph.D. in Neurophysiology in 2013, from Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. During her Ph.D., in 2012 and 2013, she was a visiting student at Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany. From 2014 to 2018, she had a post-doctoral position at the Neural Computation group of the Italian Institute of Technology and from 2018 to 2021 at the Complex Multilayer Network lab at Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), in Trento, Italy. She is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Health Emergencies Center in FBK, where she is working on statistical and mathematical modelling of infectious disease transmission, with particular emphasis on the role of human mobility in epidemic propagation. d’Andrea’s research focuses on the study of the dynamics of complex systems and she uses network theory, statistical physics and data analysis tools to work on both theory and applications. Her studies deal with the modeling of brain dynamics, epidemic spreading processes and human behavior.
Michele Giugliano
Michele GIUGLIANO is Principal Investigator and Associate Professor at the International School of Advanced Studies (SISSA) of Trieste, Italy.
He graduated summa cum laude in Electronic Engineering in 1997 at the University of Genova (Italy), specializing in Biomedical Engineering, and in 2001 he completed a PhD in Bioengineering with a thesis in Computational Neuroscience at the Polytechnic of Milan (Italy). He then received an award from the Human Frontiers Science Program Organization to pursue postdoctoral training in experimental Electrophysiology and Neurobiology at the Inst. of Physiology of the Medical School of the Univ. of Bern (Switzerland). In 2005, he moved to the Brain Mind Institute of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne, joining as junior group leader the experimental lab of Prof. Henry Markram.
Three years later, in 2008, he was appointed Assistant Professor at the University of Antwerp (Belgium). During the period 2013-2015, he was also visiting scientist at the Neuroelectronics Flanders Institute at IMEC, Leuven (Belgium) and over the years he had also a visiting scientist appointment at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Sheffield (UK).
In 2012, he received his tenure and later, in 2016, he was promoted to full professor.
From 2008 until 2019, he directed the Laboratory for Theoretical Neurobiology and Neuroengineering, founding in 2017 a new research unit on Molecular,
Cellular, and Network Excitability research.
In 2019, he moved his research group and lab to the International School of Advanced Studies (SISSA) of Trieste, where he became faculty in the Neuroscience Area and started the Neuronal Dynamics Laboratory.
Olga Krali
Olga Krali studied Biology at the University of Patras (Greece) during 2010-2014. She holds an MSc degree in Ecology and Biodiversity from Stockholm University (2014-2016, Sweden). During her master thesis, Olga decided to switch her career path, as she became particularly interested in data analysis. She studied the master's programme Molecular Techniques in Life Science, a unique collaboration between KTH Royal Institute, Karolinska Institute and Stockholm University at the Science for Life Laboratory in Stockholm (SciLifeLab, Sweden) and received her MSc degree in 2019. In parallel with her master's studies, Olga worked as an intern at SciLifeLab and continued her work as a summer fellow where she focused on machine learning and neural networks for building predictive models using –omics data. She also did her master thesis at SciLifeLab, where she implemented deep neural networks for data augmentation of breast cancer images. During 2017-2019, she also worked part-time as a science guide at Vetenskapens Hus in Stockholm, an educational center with main goal to inspire and teach children about science in a multidisciplinary way. After graduating, Olga worked as a summer intern at Ericsson, focusing on machine learning to solve problems that arose in the telecommunications field. Then she was employed by Capgemini in Stockholm, as part of the IgnITe Graduate Programme team and worked there as a data scientist consultant (2019-2020). As she decided to follow an academic career, she joined as a Ph.D. student the Molecular Precision Medicine (MPM) group at Uppsala University (Sweden) in 2021. Olga is currently in her third year and her research focuses in multimodal data integration for predicting patient subtype and outcome in pediatric acute leukemia using machine learning models.
Ani Kaplanian
Ani Kaplanian is holding a Research Fellow position in the Department of Neuroscience and Rare Diseases in Hofmann-La Roche since August 2022. After obtaining her Bachelors in Biology from the University of Patras in Greece (2010-2014), she started her Masters in Molecular Medicine in Athens in 2014, with a direction in Neurosciences and got fascinated by the field of Neurophysiology. During her master's thesis, she focused on ex vivo brain electrophysiology and neural networks. In 2016, she entered the Medical University of Athens as an MD student, wanting to obtain the clinical background in brain physiology and pathophysiology as well. In 2017, Ani started her PhD in Neurophysiology at the Biomedical Research Foundation of Academy of Athens where she studied the development of neural networks, focusing on mechanisms that regulate Slow Waves, a particular brain rhythm. During the years of her PhD, she withheld several positions in education as a professor (Metropolitan College of Athens) and teaching assistant (University of Patras and Athens at the BSc and MSc level). After obtaining her PhD in 2022, she joined Roche in her current position, in Basel, Switzerland. Her research is focused on models of genetic epilepsies and finding new potential therapeutic targets using electrophysiological tools. Ani is obtaining her medical degree by the end of 2023 and planning to continue as a Post Doctoral Fellow in Roche in Neuroscience and Rare Diseases, deepening her knowledge in the pathophysiology of neural networks during epileptic seizures.