AI Frontiers in Life Sciences: From Models to Meaning

PI Computational Health Center

Sebastian Lobentanzer is a PI at the Computational Health Center at Helmholtz Center Munich since 2025, and in affiliation with the Open Targets group at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) since 2024. Sebastian serves as the head of computational biology at the German Center for Diabetes Research. He is the author of BioCypher – https://biocypher.org/ , BioChatter – https://biochatter.org/ projects.

Lab Web: https://www.helmholtz-munich.de/en/research-group-lab-9

Interim Head of Unit for CBB

Anna Kreshuk is a group leader and a Senior Scientist in the Cell Biology and Biophysics Unit at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany. She received a PhD in Computer Science from Heidelberg University in 2012. Following this, she worked as a PostDoc in the Heidelberg Collaboratory for Image Processing (HCI). She joined EMBL in July 2018, where her research group develops novel computer vision methods for the analysis of microscopy images. Beyond method development, she is also committed to the democratisation of machine learning for the life science community, contributing open source tools such as ilastik and PlantSeg. She is an ELLIS scholar and a scientific co-coordinator of the Horizon Europe project AI4Life. She is Interim Head of Cell Biology and Biophysics Unit since 2024.

Web: https://www.embl.org/groups/kreshuk/

Director, SciLifeLab, 

Director for SciLifeLab & Wallenberg National Program for Data-Driven Life Science

Jan Ellenberg is the director of SciLifeLab, the national research center for molecular biosciences, since 2024. He also holds a position as professor of cell biology and biophysics at Karolinska Institutet and as affiliated professor at Stockholm University and KTH. His research focuses on cell division and organization of the cell nucleus. He has recently received support from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation to launch a new strategic research program at SciLifeLab to create a virtual human cell, Alpha Cell, using imaging-based molecular mapping and AI. Web: https://www.scilifelab.se/management/management-group/jan-ellenberg/

Head of Computational Biology Research Centre – Multimodal AI Across Scales, Computational biology, Research Group Leader, 

Dr. Florian Jug holds a PhD in Computational Neuroscience from the Institute of Theoretical Computer Science at ETH Zurich. His research aims at pushing the boundary of what AI and machine learning can do to better analyze and quantify biological data. At HT, Dr. Jug covers the full breadth of bio-image computing, from research on novel methods for computer vision and machine learning, all the way to offering bio-image analysis as a service. Web https://humantechnopole.it/en/research-groups/jug-group/

Scientific Leader and Associate Principal Scientist, Recursion, a company focused on AI-driven solutions in drug discovery.

Dr. Kadi Liis Saar is the Scientific Leader and Associate Principal Scientist, Computational Biology & Data Science at Recursion, and elected member of Estonian Young Academy of Science. Dr. Saar is an interdisciplinary scientist and inventor with a background in chemical engineering and biotechnology (BA & MEng) and biophysical chemistry (PhD University of Cambridge 2018). Previously at Transition Bio, she was a Junior Research Fellow at St. John’s College, University of Cambridge and a Schmidt Science Fellow working between the Centre for Misfolding Diseases and the Maxwell Centre 2018-2022. Web: https://www.recursion.com/