1st 2018 Cambridge UK Computational Biology and Bioinformatics meetup March 9th

Dear Member,
Firstly, the organisers wish everyone a belated Happy New Year 2018. Our first 2018 meetup is scheduled for March 9th at the usual venue of The Red Bull in Newnham (corner of A603 and Hardwick St). The focus of our first meetup of the year shall be on human genetics and we are announcing two presenters today.

Our first speaker will be Slavé Petrovski, VP & Head of Genome Analytics at AstraZeneca. Slavé heads AstraZeneca’s 2 million genomes initiative, the largest genome initiative announced thus far. In his talk Slavé will discuss recently published population genetics work that leverages human standing variation data to identify critical regions within genes agnostic of known functional boundaries. To get a sneak-peek of the work, please visit http://mtr-viewer.mdhs.unimelb.edu.au/ To give an academic perspective, our second speaker will be Sudhakaran Prabakaran, who is a group leader at the Department of Genetics, University of Cambridge. Sudhakaran did his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge and worked on systems neuroscience. He then moved to Harvard Medical School, where he did a 12 year postdoctoral research in mathematical modelling and systems biology. He returned back to University of Cambridge to start his own group in the Department of Genetics as a Lecturer. He also has an academic lab at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER-Pune), India. His group uses Big Data and Machine Learning approaches to functionally interpret disease associated variants in the noncoding regions of the human genome. In this talk, he will cover aspects of his group’s work on prioritization of variants in small open reading frames (sORFs) of the human genome. DNAnexus EMEA is sponsoring the event and pizza will be served from 7:30pm, with the first talk starting at 8pm sharp.

We look forward to seeing you all again,
On behalf of the organisers,
Miika Ahdesmaki