Dr. Erik Bongcam-Rudloff

Dr Erik Bongcam-Rudloff is Professor in Bioinformatics at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), Uppsala, Sweden. He is also the Head of the ”SLU-Global Bioinformatics Centre” (http://sgbc.slu.se ). Dr Bongcam-Rudloff got his doctors degree in Medical Sciences at Uppsala University, Faculty of Medicine in 1995 and his Docentur at SLU in 2004.

His main research deals with development of bioinformatics solutions for the Life Sciences community. Members of his group are involved or leading several research projects that covers many areas of Life Sciences research: Dog Genomics as model to understand human diseases, Metagenomics of Coral Reef in Kenya and Mauritius coasts, Metagenomics of spongies and sea urchins in the Antarctic, genomic sequencing and annotation of a nematode from Srilanka, metagenomics of Rumanian bats, metagenomics of penguin poo, genome sequencing of bacteria involved in biogas production, building of educational systems for bioinformatics, building of LIMS and Biobank systems based on Open Source elements.

From 2002 to 2010 and again this year Prof. Bongcam-Rudloff is the chair of EMBnet (www.embnet.org), founded in 1988. He is is also founder member of GOBLET, Global Organisation for Bioinformatics Learning, Education & Training (www.mygoblet.org).

Prof. Bongcam-Rudloff is the coordinator of an EU Horizon2020 project called B3Africa (www.b3africa.org) and vice-chair of a second; CHARME (www.cost-charme.eu ). In the past he has coordinated two EU projects (ALLBIO (www.allbioinformatics.eu) and SeqAhead (www.eurokup.org)) and coordinated the activities of Work Packages in five others (Affinomics (www.affinomics.org), EMBRACE, BBMRI-LPC (www., EuroKup (www.eurokup.org) and BBMRI-EU). He has also served as member of Advisory Boards and review for scientific journals and research councils.

In 2006, together with Dr. Etienne deVilliers he started the series of courses in Bioinformatics at ILR/ BECA that this year celebrates it´s ten years anniversary thanks to the work of staff at BECA and excellent teachers.

www.rudloff.se, Erik.Bongcam@slu.se

Walter Verweij

Biography I’ve received my PhD degree from the Free University in Amsterdam, the Netherlands in

where I worked on Petunia hybrida and the pH regulation of the vacuoles - the anthocyanin containing compartments - in flowers. After that, I joined The Sainsbury Laboratory (TSL),

Norwich in the lab of Prof. Dr. Jonathan Jones where I was involved in the development of the Ren-Seq technology with the aim to clone resistant genes in wild potato varieties. The last 4 years I’m working as a Senior Research Scientist at TGAC, Norwich where I am

involved in various projects related to plant and microbial interaction.

Current research interest

My research is focused on the analysis of the expression levels of defense related genes in

very small leaf sections by keeping the tissue’s spatial information. With this method, we have studied Arabidopsis leaves that are locally challenged with various plant immune

triggering agents. This approach is unique approach to detect signals that travel from the infected site towards neighboring cells, possibly to warn cells for upcoming threats, which helps to understand the constant counter play of host and pathogens.

BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY Stephen O. Opiyo, PhD

Dr. Stephen Obol Opiyo is a Research Scientist at The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio,USA; and a Data Scientist/Consultant at Patira Data Science, Kampala, Uganda. He obtained his PhD in Bioinformatics, and MSC in Plant Breeding and Genetics from The University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA, and a Post-Doctoral training in Molecular Evolution at the same University.

His research is focused on pathogen effector bioinformatics (Effectoromics). Pathogen effector bioinformatics include identification of pathogen effector proteins from pathogen genomes (bacteria, fungi, oomycetes, and nematodes), and their effector targets from host genomes (Arabidopsis, soybean, rice, maize, etc.) using alignment-free multivariate statistics, alignment-based methods, and machine learning approaches (https://u.osu.edu/mcicsouth/). He lectures and gives workshops in statistics, bioinformatics, metabolomics, proteomics, genomics, metagenomics, and data science to students, post-docs, staff, and scientists from universities, private industries, and non-governmental organizations. In addition, he does collaborative research in genomics, metagenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics using multivariate statistics and machine learning to Identify molecular markers. He is also involved in Big Data Crowdsourcing analysis (Proteomics, genomics, and toxicology, medical and health data, text analytics, etc.); Predictive Analytics: extracting knowledge from various sources of data (structured and unstructured data). He is a co-founder of Patira Data Science (http://patiradatascience.com) based in Kampala, Uganda. At Patira Data Science he uses robust statistical, mathematical, and machine learning methods to assess, understand, and nalyze data to discover Knowledge from structured and unstructed data (text, geospatial, pictures, time series, big data, etc).

NewYorkUniversityAprivateuniversityinthepublicservice

DepartmentofBiology100WashingtonSquareEastNewYork,NY10003-6688Telephone:(212)998-8249Email:mkatari@nyu.edu

Dr.ManpreetS.KatariPhDClinicalAssociateProfessorofBioinformatics

Dr.ManpreetS.KatariisaClinicalAssociateProfessorintheDepartment of Biology atNew YorkUniversity,who leadsbioinformaticsresearchprojectsattheCenterforGenomicsand Systems Biology. He is also the Coordinator ofComputational Studies and the Advisor for MS Biology -BioinformaticsandSystemsBiologyTrack.Manpreet received his PhD in Genetics from Stony BrookUniversity in New York under the supervision of Dr.W.R.McCombieatColdSpringHarborGenomeCenter.Histhesis

research involved comparing Brassica oleracea shotgun sequence to the newlysequencedArabidopsisthalianatoimprovegenomeannotation.Dr.KatarilaterjoinedDr.GloriaCoruzzi’sPlantSystemsBiologygroupatNYU’sCenterforGenomics and SystemsBiology to study themolecular response to different formsofnitrogen in Arabidopsis thaliana. Dr. Katari was the lead developer for VirtualPlant(www.virtualplant.org),asoftwarethatenablesbiologiststoanalyzetheir–omicdatainaSystemsBiologycontext.Currently Dr. Katari’s research interests lie in the areas of data integration andtranslationalsystemsbiologyresearch.HeiscurrentlydevelopingtoolsforVirtualPlantwhichwillenablecropbiologiststotakeadvantageofthevastexperimentaldataavailableforArabidopsis.Asaneducator,Dr.Katarihasdevelopedcoursesandworkshopstotrainstudentsandresearchersindevelopingbioinformaticsskillsinanalysisofgenomicdata.Coursesinclude:“BioinformaticsinMedicineandBiology”and“BiologicalDatabasesandDataMining”, “Programming for Biologists”, and “Applied Genomics”. In addition totheseformalcoursestaughtatNYU,Dr.Katarileads“Next-genSequenceAnalysis”and“R-boot Camp” workshops at NYU and internationally. His courses are attended bystudents,scientistsandPIs.