Workplace: Biozentrum, University of Basel

Link(s): About the Research Group

Contact: NeherLab; Twitter

Biography: Richard Neher received his PhD in Physics from the University of Munich (Germany) in 2007. He continued as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics ate University of California (Sanata Barbara, USA). From 2010-2017, Richard Neher was an independent Max Planck Research Group Leader before becoming an Associate Professor at the University of Basel, Switzerland. In 2016 he received the Open Science Prize (Phase I, with Trevor Bedford).

Current activities/ scientific goals: Richard Neher and his group are studying how bacteria and viruses adapt to changing environments – such as our immune system or new drug treatments – with the aim of better understanding how evolution works on a molecular level. The group combines methods from bioinformatics, population genetics and statistical physics with sequencing data from different pathogens, such as the influenza virus, HIV or COVID-19, to elucidate the evolutionary dynamics behind the spread of infectious diseases.

Workplace: Biozentrum, University of Basel

Link(s): About the Research Group

Contact: Twitter

Biography: Mihaela Zavolan graduated as a medical doctor at the University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Timisoara, Romania, in 1992. Her training then continued in Computer Science and Computational Biology, at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, leading to her PhD in 1999. In 2000 she moved the Rockefeller University as a postdoc in computational biology, and in 2003 she was appointed as a tenure-track assistant professor at the Biozentrum, University of Basel. Since 2014 she is professor in Computational and Systems Biology at the Biozentrum. She is a member of the EMBO and Academia Europaea.

Current activities/ scientific goals: The identity and function of cells in a multi-cellular organism is determined by the complement of genes that they express under the control of epigenetic, transcriptional, as post-transcriptional mechanisms. The Zavolan group combines experimental work with data analysis, mathematical modeling and simulations to characterize post-transcriptional layers of gene regulation. Current projects in the group study how the synthesis of proteins by ribosomes is rewired in response to various stresses, in the context of aging, infections and cancers.

Workplace: Roche pRED, pRED Operations - Data Science

Contact: Linkedin

Biography: Luise Wolf works as Principal Data Scientist in pRED Informatics at Roche Innovation Center Basel and has a background in molecular and computational biology. She studied Biology at the University of Freiburg/Breisgau and did her PhD in Computational Biology at the Biozentrum/University of Basel with a focus on the evolution of bacterial transcriptional regulation in Erik van Nimwegen's lab.

Current activities/ scientific goals: Luise Wolf joined Roche in 2015 and supports all disease areas with a focus on the integration and advanced analysis of different modalities (images, genomics, proteomics, CRISPRomics, clinical data, real-world data, clinicogenomics) to enable decision making at all stages of early drug development in the area of Personalized Healthcare. Recently, she has been supporting the cultural transformation on Gender Diversity & Inclusion at pRED.

Workplace: Roche pRED, Pharmaceutical Sciences (PS) - Predictive Modelling & Data Analytics

Contact: LinkedIn

Biography: Fabian studied bioinformatics in Munich and finished with his PhD in 2009. He joined Boehringer Ingelheim as a PostDoc working on NGS sequencing and then joined Roche in 2010. In the first 7 years of his career he worked as an Oncology Bioinformatician supporting projects move along the value chain. Since 2017 he had the honor to lead a team of Bioinformaticians and Biostatisticians.

Current activities/ scientific goals: Ever since becoming the head of the Bioinformatics & Exploratory Data Analysis (BEDA) team his work is mostly focusing on developing his team and the people in the team as well as to help Roche define the digital and data analytics strategies.