BioSB Young Investigator Award 2023

And the winner is!

BioSB yearly presents an award at the BioSB conference for a young researcher who has significantly contributed to the bioinformatics or the systems biology research community in the Netherlands. 

The selection committee of the BioSB Young Investigator Award 2023 unanimously chose Soufiane Mourragui as the winner of the BioSB Young Investigator Award 2023.

Soufiane, who is working as a post-doctoral researcher/computational biologist in the group of Alexander van Oudenaarden at the Hubrecht Institute (Utrecht), will receive the award on May 9 at 16:30, after which he will give an honorary lecture.

Biography

Soufiane Mourragui is a computational biologist with a special interest in application of machine learning and single cell technologies to cancer research. After a BSc in physics and mathematics, and a MSc in statistics and computer science at Mines Paris, Paris Sciences et Lettres University, he moved to the Netherlands in 2017 to start his doctoral research. Embedded at the Netherlands Cancer Institute and the TU Delft, under the joint supervision of Lodewyk Wessels, Marcel Reinders and Marco Loog, his research focused on the development of transfer learning algorithms to help translate findings from pre-clinical models to tumors.

In 2022, he joined the Hubrecht Institute (Utrecht) where he now works as a post-doctoral researcher in the group of Alexander van Oudenaarden.

Computational models for clinical drug response prediction

The great progress in sequencing technologies and basic biology from the last decade have moved the field of cancer research towards a new paradigm, termed “precision medicine”, which consists of designing bespoke lines of treatment for each patient. Fueled by international consortia, efforts towards this new paradigm have followed two main strategies: sequencing of tumor biopsies directly extracted from patients, or studying pre-clinical models, i.e., tumor cells cultured in artificial environments. While the first strategy generates clinically faithful data, the second strategy is flexible and cost-effective.

During this talk, I will present some attempts to computationally bridge the gap between these two approaches. Specifically, I will present machine learning algorithms designed to integrate and align genomic data from pre-clinical models and tumors, and show how to exploit the vast amount of pre-clinical data for drug response prediction in patients.

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~ ​​We thank all group leaders and nominees for their efforts. ~

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Call for nominations - closed

During the BioSB 2023, we will present the 14th edition of the BioSB Young Investigator Award 2023. The winner will receive a voucher of 500 Euros sponsored by the BioSB research school (to be spent on conference or course participation of their choice) and will be invited to present an honorary lecture in the plenary programme.

The submission deadline is set to 24 March 2023. --> CLOSED

All nominees will of course be contacted by the conference organizers. Notification of the winner of call for nominations is set to 7 April 2023.

Criteria

The candidate must have conducted his/her bioinformatics or systems biology research primarily in a Dutch institute. The primary result on which the award will be based will be the PhD thesis written by the candidate. Therefore, the final version of the thesis of the candidate should have been submitted to the PhD reading committee at the candidate's university on March 21, 2023 at the latest.

Other criteria that might be considered by the award committee are:

• The candidate significantly contributed to the idea of the research;
• The research of the candidate resulted in novel or improved bioinformatics or systems biology methodologies;
• The research of the candidate advanced life sciences research;
• The candidate independently conducted the research;
• The research resulted in a scientific publication, software application or database;
• The work of the candidate has given broad visibility of bioinformatics or systems biology in the life sciences field;
• The candidate has otherwise significantly contributed to bioinformatics/systems biology or the bioinformatics/systems biology community in the Netherlands.

Procedure

Each nomination must be accompanied with:

• Name and affiliation of candidate
• Motivation for nomination by group leader of candidate
• Curriculum Vitae of the candidate
• A URL to the final version of the PhD thesis (preferably to the PDF of the printed version)

--> Apply here!

Award committee

The 2023 members of the award committee are:

• Marten Postma, Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences (SILS), University of Amsterdam (ORCID)
• Halima Mouhib, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (LinkedIn)(ORCID)
• Aalt-Jan van Dijk, Wageningen University & Research (ORCID)
• Marnix Medema, Wageningen University & Research (ORCID)

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Last year's award winner: Janani Durairaj  

The selection committee of the BioSB Young Investigator Award 2022 unanimously chose for
Janani Durairaj as the winner of the BioSB Young Investigator Award 2022.

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