If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. (African Proverb)
Leadership
Ruben Dries, PhD combines computational data analysis with novel experimental approaches and technologies to understand basic biological concepts in health and disease. These insights could then be leveraged to target tumor specific processes or inhibit the development of treatment resistance. These interests grew dynamically throughout his research career. In his early studies Dr. Dries developed a systems biology approach to dissect the regulatory network of neural differentiating embryonic stem cells and used this knowledge at a later stage to understand how cancer cells transcriptionally respond to targeted therapies and other stress factors. More recently, he expanded this area by focusing on how cells can spatially communicate within their microenvironment and build tools to facilitate these type of analyses.
Dr. Dries Website: https://www.drieslab.com/
Artür Manukyan is a trained statistician, computational scientist and bioinformatician living in Berlin. He currently helps developing graph-based learning algorithms and software platforms for spatial transcriptomics technologies, and he aims to combine these tools with foundation models capable of learning patterns from multiple omic and imaging modalities simultaneously. He is also interested in biological knowledge graphs as well as other machine learning approaches to analysing omics datasets in general.
Building Opportunities & Community
Community
- Encourage participation
- Value contribution
- Promote diversity (background & skills)
- Clear governance
Opportunities
- Writing scientific publications
- Seek funding
- Internships & Hackathons
- Training & Workshops
Next Steps
- Volunteers
- Develop communication channels
- Share ideas & provide feedback
- Seek funding
- Workshops
- Hackathons
First Projects
- Short-term
- Interoperability across omics and imaging Platforms
- Aggregating existing spatial data analysis resources
- Long-term
- Help and collaborate on building FAIR metadata standards for spatial omics
- A joint primer/review on spatial data analysis
- Projects pitched by the Community!