Plenary Lecture

Exploring chemical, genetic and disease space with AI technologies Dr. Sun Kim Seoul National University

Sun Kim is Professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Adjunct Professor of Biological Sciences, and Director of Bioinformatics Institute (2011-2021) at Seoul National University. He is also currently President of Mogam Institute of Biomedical Research and a member of National Academy of Engineering, Korea. Before joining SNU, he was Chair of Faculty Division C; Director of Center for Bioinformatics Research, an Associate Professor in School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University (IU) Bloomington. Prior to joining IU in 2001, he worked at DuPont Central Research from 1998 to 2001, and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1997 to 1998. Sun Kim received B.S and M.S and Ph.D in Computer Science from Seoul National University, KAIST and the University of Iowa, respectively. Sun Kim is a recipient of Outstanding Junior Faculty Award at Indiana University 2004, US NSF CAREER Award in 2003, and Outstanding Faculty Award in research 2021 in the College of Engineering at Seoul National University. He is actively contributing to the bioinformatics community, having serving on the editorial board for journals including editors for the METHODS journal (2013-present) and, associate editor-in-chief for ACM/IEEE Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (2019-2021), and also on the board of directors for ACM SIG Bioinformatics and for education for the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Bioinformatics. Among many service activates in Korea, he served on Samsung Future Technology Committee for 2016-2018, a member of The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) of the Korean Government for 2019-2020, President of Korea Artificial Intelligence Society (2016-2018) and Vice President of Korea Society of Bioinformatics and Systems Biology (2011-present).

Microbiome analysis for human and planetary health Dr. Peer Bork EMBL Heidelberg

Peer directs the Heidelberg site of EMBL (European Molecular Biology laboratory) and is senior group leader in the areas of computational biology and microbiomics. In addition, he is honorary professor at the universities of Heidelberg and Würzburg as well as the Fudan university of Shanghai. Peer received his PhD in Biochemistry (1990) and his Habilitation in Theoretical Biophysics (1995). His research group works in various areas of computational and systems biology, currently with a focus on microbiomes. He has published more than 650 research articles, among them more than 80 in Nature, Science or Cell, and is among the most cited researchers in the world (>340.000 citations, H-factor of 236 in 2023). He is or has been on the editorial board of various journals, including Science and Cell, and functions as founding editor of the journal Molecular Systems Biology. Peer co-founded five successful biotech companies, two of which went public. More than 60 of his former associates now hold professorships or other group leader positions in prominent institutions all over the world. He received a number of awards, among them the "Nature award for creative mentoring" for his achievements in nurturing and stimulating young scientists, the prestigious "Royal Society and Académie des Sciences Microsoft award" for the advancement of science using computational methods and the Novo Nordisk Foundation Novozymes prize for outstanding contributions to Biotechnology. He further obtained two competitive ERC advanced investigator grants and is elected member of the German national academy of sciences (Leopoldina), the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and the Academia Europaea.