Visualizing Biological Data (VIZBI 2017)

Prof. Dr. Daniel A. Keim conducts research in the analysis, exploration, and visualization of mass data. He and his team develop novel techniques for visual analysis of business, customer, finance, demoscopic, and network data motivated by applications in customer relationship management (CRM), telecommunications, the financial market and network security. He focuses on techniques for interactive mass data analysis applied on very large multidimensional and geographic data sets.

Tamara Munzner is a professor at the University of British Columbia Department of Computer Science, and holds a PhD from Stanford. She has worked on visualization projects in a broad range of application domains, including genomics, evolutionary biology, geometric topology, computational linguistics, large-scale system administration, web log analysis, and journalism. Her technique-driven interests include graph drawing and dimensionality reduction. Her evaluation interests include both controlled experiments in a laboratory setting and qualitative studies in the field.

She co-chaired EuroVis in 2010 and 2009, and InfoVis in 2004 and 2003. She currently serves as chair of the VisWeek Executive Committee and a member of the InfoVis Steering Committee. She was a founding member of the BioVis Steering Committee, and a Member At Large of the Executive Committee of the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee (VGTC) from 2004 to 2009. She has consulted for or collaborated with many companies including Agilent, AT&T Labs, Google, Microsoft, Silicon Graphics, and several startups.

Dr. Drew Berry is a biomedical animator who combines cinema and science to reveal the microscopic worlds inside our bodies. His scientifically accurate and aesthetically rich visualizations are elucidating cellular and molecular processes for a wide range of audiences. His animations have been shown in exhibitions, multimedia programs, and television shows, and have received many awards and commendations. 

Jane Richardson is a Professor of Biochemistry at the Duke University, USA. She developed the Richardson diagram, ribbon diagram, method of representing the 3D structure of proteins. Together with Prof. David Richardson, they established the Richardson Labs and their goal is to contribute to a deeper understanding of the 3D structures of proteins, including their description, determinants, folding, evolution, and control. This has now been broadened to include RNA structures. Their approaches include structural bioinformatics, macromolecular crystallography, molecular graphics, analysis of structures, and methods development, currently focussed on the improvement of structural accuracy.

Seán O’Donoghue is an Office of the Chief Executive Science Leader in Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Sydney.

He is also Group Leader and Senior Faculty Member at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney. He received his B.Sc. (Hons) and PhD in biophysics from the University of Sydney, Australia. Much of his career was spent in Heidelberg, Germany, where he worked in the Structural and Computational Biology programme at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), and also at Lion Bioscience AG - then the world's largest bioinformatics company - where he was Director of Scientific Visualization.

His work has received many awards, including the Elsevier Grand Challenge (first prize), the Eureka Prize for Excellence in Interdisciplinary Scientific Research (finalist, 2015), the NSW Emerging Creative Talent Award (finalist, 2015), and the NSW iAward for Research and Development (first prize, 2015). His contributions have been recognised with a C. J. Martin Fellowship from the National Health & Medical Research Council of Australia, an Achievement Award from Lion Bioscience AG, and by being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Dr John McGhee is a practicing 3D CGI artist, researcher and senior lecturer based at UNSW Art & Design. He has a background in design and 3D computer arts research.  His visual practice explores arts-led modes of visualising complex scientific and biomedical data, using the 3D CGI techniques used in the visual effects and animation industries. 

John's academic research builds on this theme, was the basis for his doctoral thesis and has since resulted in a variety of collaborative projects across the visual arts and sciences. His research investigates new modes of visualising complex data - such as MRI, CT and microscopy data - using 3D computer animation techniques.

The work investigates through practice, the emergent ways of working across art & science. This research provides methods of engaging the public with complex scientific data such as MRI during their interactions with healthcare professionals.  This research has resulted in the creation of 3D computer visualisation strategies that facilitate visual dialogue between patients and healthcare professionals. 

Davis McCarthy is a National Health and Medical Research Council Early Career Fellow, currently a visitor in the Stegle Research Group at EMBL-EBI. He works on transcriptional regulation of human induced pluripotent stem cells using bulk and single-cell data, as well as developing methods and software for single-cell RNA-seq analysis.

Davis is an author of widely used software packages, including the scater package for pre-processing and visualisation of single-cell gene expression data and the edgeR package for differential expression analysis of RNA sequencing data.

Brenda Andrews is a Professor and Director of the Donnelly Centre which is located at the University of Toronto. The Andrews lab uses synthetic generic array technology to explore genetic networks in budding yeast.

Prof. Caroline Rae is a Conjoint Senior Principal Scientist at NeuRA and a Professor of Brain Sciences at University of New South Wales. She is a biochemist with a background in magnetic resonance and interdisciplinary brain research.  

Prof. Rae is currently involved with various projects, some of these are 'Brain network discovery in medical research' and 'New methods for analysis and visualisation of metabolic data'. 

Aaron Darling is an Associate Professor in Computational Genomics and Bioinformatics at the University of Technology Sydney. He has over ten years of experience developing computational methods for comparative genomics and evolutionary modeling.

He started his career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and he then led the development of some widely used computational methods for analyzing genomic data.

Elena N. Naumova is the Academic Dean for Faculty and a Professor of Mathematics at the Friedman School on Nutrition Science and Policy, Turf University. Her research activities span a broad range of research programs in emerging infections, environmental epidemiology, immunology, and nutrition.

Her primary expertise is in the development of analytical tools for georeferenced and longitudinal data analysis applied to the effects of extreme weather on spatial and temporal patterns of infectious diseases. 

David Raubenheimer is Professor in nutritional ecology at the University of Sydney. His research applies theory from ecology and evolution to understand how animals adapt to the foods and diets available to them. The many species that he has studied, both in the laboratory and the wild, have shown one thing in common: an ability to choose foods that provide nutritionally balanced diets. 

David Powell is an Associate Professor and Scientific Director of the Monash Bioinformatics Platform at Monash University. He is most interested in topics involving bioinformatics, in particular, interactive visualization of biological data. 

One of his most recent work is Degust, a freely available, web-based tool for analysis of differential gene expression data. It was primarily designed for RNA-Seq data, but it can also be used in microarray and proteomics data. Degust focuses on being fast and interactive, while still using sound analysis techniques.

Christian Stolte is currently an UI & Visualization Designer at the New York Genome Center. He is also the art director and designer for VizbiPlus, an initiative aimed at educating and inspiring the general public about cutting edge biomedical research.

He designs and programs user interfaces for data exploration and analysis in the life sciences. Christian has more than twenty years of experience as an art director and designer for the web, interactive media, and print, working for design firms, medical advertising, software, and publishing companies, as well as in his own business. He began his career in Germany, then moved to the USA, where he first became involved in science at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, building data analysis and visualization tools.

Dr. Siobhan Braybrook is a Career Development Fellow at The Sainsbury Laboratory, University of Cambridge. Her research group studies pattern formation and shape generation in biological systems. Projects within the group include mechanical characterization of biological materials, geometric analysis of shape formation, and dissecting the molecular mechanisms underlying patterns. The group works on many different organisms including seaweeds and sunflowers.

Yue Wan is a senior research scientist at A*Star Genome Institute of Singapore. Her research aims to identify functional RNA elements in transcriptomes through genome-wide detection of RNA structures. RNA play an important role in regulating cellular gene expression. Its ability to fold into complex secondary and tertiary structures is fundamental to its function in the cell.

In almost every step of its life cycle, RNA structure has been found to influence diverse processes including transcription, translation mRNA transcript, and decay. Alterations in RNA structure have been implicated in several diseases. Despite the importance of RNA structure, structural information for most cellular RNAs, such as mRNAs, is lacking due to the low throughput nature of RNA structure probing and difficulties in probing long RNAs.

To fully assess the impact of RNA structure in biology, she aims to utilise and extend high throughput ways to probe RNA structures in solution by coupling structure probing to high throughput sequencing. This enables them to probe RNA structures for thousands of RNAs simultaneously. This expansion of RNA structural data will likely enhance their understanding of how RNA function in different cellular systems, as well as open doors to potentially target these structural elements in diseases.

Dr. Michael Landsberg is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences, University of Queensland. His group is interested in understanding the structure and function of biological assemblies and has provided unprecedented insights into our understanding of the ways in which proteins and other molecules come together and function as large, macromolecular machines. In particular, his group was the first to discover how a new family of bacterial protein toxins is assembled into a multi-functional protein machinery that combines maturation, folding, transportation, targeting and injection of a potent cytotoxin into susceptible cells. These toxins were originally discovered in bacteria that are naturally occurring pathogens of insects and our discoveries have helped to guide strategies which might prove useful in the development of next generation biopesticides.