DDLS Annual Conference 2026

Title: Three impactful problems in drug discovery that might be solvable with machine learning (and what we are doing about them at Relation).

Bio: Lindsay is an internationally recognised leader at the interface of AI, machine learning, computational biology, and drug discovery. Across both academia and industry, he has consistently advanced the translation of science into medicine using computational sciences. In his academic career in Australia and at King’s College London, he developed innovative computational approaches to human metabolism, hypoxia, and respiratory physiology. His teams pioneered methods for modelling metabolic and transcriptomic data, applying these to diverse clinical contexts including respiratory disease, diabetes, hypertension, Parkinson’s disease, and critical illness. In industry, Lindsay founded one of the first pharmaceutical data science divisions at GSK, embedding machine learning and data science into every stage of the discovery pipeline. As CTO of Relation Therapeutics, he has raised over $200M, creating one of the most significant TechBio companies rooted in scientific translation (including forging a landmark platform multi billion dollar collaboration with GSK). His role on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Schmidt Centre at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT further reflects his international collaborative reach, engaging with leading global scientists at the intersection of AI and life sciences. His publication record—over 40 papers in top biomedical journals (NEJM, JAMA, PNAS) and premier AI/ML venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR)—is exceptionally rare, demonstrating dual impact across medicine and computational science. He was recently elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences.

Title: Top-down and bottom-up exploration of alternative community types in the human gut microbiome.

Bio: Karoline Faust is an Associate Professor at KU Leuven who heads the Lab of Microbial Systems Biology, which focuses on investigating microbial community dynamics in silico and in vitro. In particular, her team is studying interactions between human gut bacteria and the resulting dynamics with synthetic communities in controlled conditions. In addition, the team develops new tools for the analysis of microbiome data, specifically the analysis of microbial networks. The group’s work is thus situated at the intersection of bioinformatics, systems biology, and microbial ecology.

Affiliation: Molecular Bacteriology Unit (Rega Institute), Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Transplantation, KU Leuven