Speaker biographies

Paul Digard is a molecular virologist specialising segmented RNA viruses, in particular, influenza A virus. His laboratory is interested in the molecular, cellular and evolutionary biology of how these viruses replicate, using this information to understand the basis of virus pathogenesis and host range, as well as for translational studies on virus control measures. In recent years, the group has focused on three main areas: the cell biology of virus replication, viral and cellular elements that define host range, and in identifying novel virus gene products which affect virus pathogenicity. He is currently a member of the Defra Scientific Advisory Council’s Exotic and Emergent Diseases Committee (SAC-ED) and co-wrote an independent report on highly pathogenic avian influenza for the UK government. He is also a member of the Hong Kong InnoHK Scientific Committee and the interim Chair of the Edinburgh Scientific Academic Track programme for CMVM.

Chris is the Chair of Medical Bioinformatics at the University of Edinburgh. He is the Chief Investigator of the DecodeME project, and leads the UK PRIME network, both of which focus on myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME; also known as chronic fatigue syndrome). His ME work is done in co-production with people with lived experience. ME is commonly a post-infection chronic condition that affects 400,000 people in the UK whose distinguishing symptom is post-exertional malaise.

Jenny's postdoctoral research focussed on hormone regulation of innate phagocytes over developmental transitions, and ageing pathology of immune tissues and the impact of anti-ageing drugs, using the genetic model, Drosophila. Her lab's research combines these interests, to ask how bacterial and viral infections and the ageing immune system impact life history traits including organismal ageing, how the sexes differ, and how innate immune tissues respond to interventions targeting nutrient-sensing pathways. 

Dr Ting Shi is a Senior Lecturer from Usher Institute, School of Population Health Sciences. She is an Infectious Disease Epidemiologist using national linked data analysis, statistical modelling, and systematic approaches to generate epidemiological evidence to inform public health response. 

Ian Simpson is a leading figure in biomedical and healthcare informatics and AI at the University of Edinburgh, where he serves as a professor of biomedical informatics. He is Director of the UKRI AI Centre for Doctoral Training in Biomedical Innovation and former Director of the UKRI CDT in Biomedical AI.

With a rich academic background, including a D.Phil. in Genetics and B.A. & M.A. in Biochemistry from Oxford, his work bridges the realms of computational science and medicine. His research focuses on developing innovative computational, statistical, and machine learning methodologies to understand human disease, particularly neurodevelopment and neurodegenerative disorders and rare genetic diseases. 

Much of the ongoing methodological research in the Biomedical Informatics Group that he leads is focussed on multimodal data integration methods especially using patient and molecular networks learning jointly from heterogeneous data types. This includes the combination of clinical notes and healthcare meta-data with genomics and other high throughput bimolecular data. The research group work extensively with graph neural networks and biomedical natural language processing techniques.