This week, we brought our 2025 Statistical Bioinformatics Seminar Series to a close, marking the end of an engaging program that showcased cutting-edge research and fostered collaboration across the data science community
The Statistical Bioinformatics Seminars are delivered each Monday during the semester and includes presentations from distinguished researchers as Judith and David Coffey invited speakers.
This year, our Statistical Bioinformatics Seminar Series hosted 27 invited speakers from eight countries, including Australia, the United States, Canada, China, Singapore, Italy, Germany, and Austria. The speaker cohort was well-balanced across career stages, including 3 NHMRC Fellows, 4 Assistant Professors, 2 Associate Professors, and 3 Professors, as well as 10 postdoctoral researchers and 5 PhD students.
Each week, 30 to 40 attendees join the seminars, and our Zoom-based strategy of having a more casual conversation with the speakers following the formal presentations remains a welcome feature of our seminar series.
Over the year we hosted a rich mix of international speakers whose work spanned polygenic risk modelling across populations, microbiome-therapeutics, spatial and single-cell omics integration, and AI/machine-learning applications in biotechnology and pathology. Dr Guillaume Jaume (Harvard Medical School) delivered the most popular talk of the year, showing how adding molecular data can greatly improve generalist AI models in pathology and make their predictions more reliable and biologically meaningful. We also invited Dr Haotian Cui (University of Toronto), the author of the first Single-Cell GPT model, who presented his latest work on large models for single-cell data. Another interesting topic came from PhD student Liyang Song (Westlake University), who presented “Spatially resolved mapping of cells associated with human complex traits”, demonstrating how spatial transcriptomics and genetic association data can be combined to pinpoint where trait-related cell types are located within tissues.
Our Judith and David Coffey Invited Speaker, Prof Christine Wells (University of Melbourne), showcased generative-AI tools developed by her team for automated stem-cell metadata curation and introduced new community-driven platforms from the Human Cell Atlas project that aim to improve data quality and support the creation of new cell atlases.
As the seminar series continued throughout the year, we saw growing interest and participation from audiences not only within our centre but also from institutions across Australia. We are pleased to see the community expanding and welcome anyone who is interested in statistical bioinformatics to join us online. Thank you to all speakers and attendees for your support, see you again next year.