Keynote speakers

Biography
Jeremy Farrar is the Assistant Director-General for Health Promotion, Disease Prevention and Care at the World Health Organization (WHO). He previously served as WHO Chief Scientist (2023–2025) and was Director of the Wellcome Trust (2013–2023). Before that, he led the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Ho Chi Minh City (1996–2013). Trained in neurology and infectious diseases, he holds a PhD in immunology from the University of Oxford and is a Fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences, the US National Academies, and the European Molecular Biology Organization. He has received major international honours, including the Queen’s 2018 New Year knighthood and the Japanese Order of the Rising Sun (2020).

Biography
Stephen Quake is the Lee Otterson Professor of Bioengineering and Applied Physics at Stanford University. He has received numerous awards for his contributions to science and is one of only two dozen scientists elected to all three National Academies. Previously he was the Head of Science at Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (2022-2025), founding co-president of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub (2016-2022), investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (2006-2016), and Professor at the California Institute of Technology (1996-2005).

Biography
Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas is an associate professor in the Department of Computational Biology at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. She studied biology and physics at the University of Geneva and obtained her PhD in population genetics and computational biology from UC Berkeley under Montgomery Slatkin. After a postdoc with Eske Willerslev in Copenhagen, she returned to Switzerland as an Assistant Professor at the University of Bern. Her research focuses on theoretical population genetics and the analysis of ancient DNA. Her lab develops computational tools and applies large-scale genomic analyses to understand how humans colonized the world and adapted to new environments.

Biography
Aleksandra Walczak received her PhD in physics at the University of California, San Diego, working on models of stochastic gene expression. After a graduate fellowship at Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP), she was a Princeton Center for Theoretical Science Fellow, focusing on applying information theory to signal processing. Currently she is a Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) research director at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, interested in collective behavior, fly development and statistical descriptions of the immune system. She was awarded the “Grand Prix Jacques Herbrand de l’Académie des sciences" in 2014, the bronze medal of CNRS in 2015, the American Physical Society Fellowship, the Prix Jean Ricard of the French Physics Society in 2021 and the silver medal of CNRS in 2024. She was elected to the French National Academy of Sciences in 2024.