A dozen experts on subjects, ranging from computational biology to bioengineering to AI, have been confirmed for the Eighth Annual Mutational Scanning Symposium, May 21st through 23rd in Barcelona, Spain.
The speakers represent leading academic institutions and biotech firms, including Stanford University, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Harvard University, and the University of California, Berkeley. The three-day meeting is hosted by the Institute of Bioengineering of Catalonia, the Centre for Genomic Regulation, and the Atlas of Variant Effects Alliance.
“Our discussions will center on a variety of exciting topics, including variant effect prediction, saturation mutagenesis, sequence-structure-function relationships and protein engineering, as well as conversations on emerging technologies for functional assays and biophysical modelling,” said Benedetta Bolognesi one of the lead conference organizers and a group leader at the of Institute of Bioengineering of Catalonia. "I am confident this meeting will advance the key role it has played in bridging the community of scientists and clinicians seeking to use deep mutational scanning for clinical variant interpretation as well as for model generation and protein design.”
Confirmed speakers include:
-
David Adams, Ph.D., is the senior group leader in the Cancer Ageing and Somatic Mutation programme at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and leads the Experimental Cancer Genetics Laboratory. His expertise is in high-throughput functional genetic screens in human cells and mice, cancer genetics and computational biology. Adams also is co-head of the Sanger Excellence Programme for Black British scientist and is an advocate for cancer genetic studies in LMICs, particularly with Latin American countries.
-
Polly Fordyce. Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Genetics and Bioengineering and fellow of the ChEM-H Institute at Stanford. Her laboratory focuses on developing and applying new microfluidic platforms for quantitative, high-throughput biophysics and biochemistry and single-cell genomics. She is also a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator.
-
Patrick Hsu, Ph.D., is Co-Founder of the Arc Institute and Assistant Professor of Bioengineering and Deb Faculty Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. He and his lab work at the intersection of biology, engineering, and AI to develop technologies for biological programming and design. He was an early pioneer of CRISPR-Cas9 technologies for genome editing and his research has been recognized by MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35.
-
Kresten Lindorff-Larsen, Ph.D., is a Professor at the Linderstrøm-Lang Centre for Protein Science in the De¬partment of Biology, University of Copenhagen. His research focuses on protein dynamics and their relationship to protein structure and function. He and his colleagues study these by integrating computational methods with experimental studies, to understand how proteins change their shapes help modulate, or determine, their function.
-
Pascal Notin, Ph.D., is a Scientific Lead in the Marks lab at Harvard Medical school, where he focuses on protein engineering. His research incorporates Generative AI, Computational Biology, and Chemistry. With colleagues from the Marks lab, he also leads the development of the ProteinGym benchmarks, a useful resource to analyze protein models.
-
Nicky Whiffin, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor and Group Leader at the Big Data Institute and the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics funded by a Sir Henry Dale Fellowship from the Wellcome Trust and Royal Society. She is also a visiting scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and a Research Fellow at St Anne's College and the Centre for Personalised Medicine. In addition, Whiffin leads the Computational Rare Disease Genomics group, which uses computational approaches to interpret the role of genetic variants in rare diseases.
Learn more about the MSS 2025 here.
