Programme

All talk slots include time for discussion.

• Standard talks: 25 min presentation + 5 min Q&A
  
• Short talks: 15 min presentation + 5 min Q&A
  
• Shared talks: 20 min combined presentation + 10 min Q&A

29 September 2026

Time	Session
09:30–10:00	Registration
10:00–10:10	Opening remarks
10:10–10:40	Dr. Alessandro Bonetti Turning Junk into Gems: Long Non-Coding RNAs Unlock New Therapeutic Horizons
10:40–11:10	Dr. Mikhail Kabeshov Therapeutic discovery and industry perspectives
11:10–11:40	Coffee break
11:40–12:10	Fabio Bove + Marco Ferrarini Thoughts on AI in Therapeutic Discovery
12:10–12:40	Dr. Gabriele Corso Generative models and biological design
12:40–13:10	Dr. Esther Wershof PRiMeFlow: Winning the ARC Virtual Cell Challenge with Generative Modeling
13:10–14:10	Lunch
14:10–14:40	Dr. Fabian Frohlich Deep Mechanistic Models Reveal Pathway-Extrinsic Drivers of Mammary MAPK Signalling Heterogeneity
14:40–15:10	Dr. Michail Mamalakis From Genes to Brain Imaging: Interpretable and Adaptable AI for Understanding Brain Disease
15:10–15:40	Dr. Tiansi Dong Logic Classifier and its Applications in Molecular Discovery
15:40–16:10	Coffee break
16:10–16:40	Dr. Larry Melidis Predicting Nucleic Acid Structural Diversity Across the Tree of Life
16:40–17:10	Dr. Anurag Limdi Uncertainty Quantification in Multi-Omic Generative Models Identifies Context-Dependent Biology and Technical Noise
17:10–17:40	Tom McClelland The Problem of Artificial Consciousness · Slides
17:40–18:00	General discussion / wrap-up

30 September 2026

Time	Session
09:30–09:50	Dr. Johann Hawe AI-Powered Interpretation of Human Genetic Variation
09:50–10:10	Dr. Ilaria Billato Beyond the Slide: Integrating Histopathological Image Features with Multi-Omics Data in R/Bioconductor
10:10–10:30	Dr. Bianca Pierattini Structure at Scale: Turning RNA into Training Data for Predictive Models
10:30–11:00	Coffee break
11:00–11:20	Dr. Tania Bobbo Machine Learning for Probiotics Discovery: The PROB-AI Project
11:20–11:40	Dr. Davide Rigoni Constrained Generation of Molecular Structures
11:40–12:00	Flavio Sartori Scoring Tissue Health from Microscopy to Enable Causal Analysis in Dry AMD · Slides
12:00–13:00	Lunch
13:00–13:20	Matteo Baldan Learning to Simulate: Neural Operators and the Generation of Physical Dynamics with Applications in Cardiac Electrophysiology
13:20–13:40	Weigao Pu Serp-2 in Liver Transplant Ischemia–Reperfusion Injury: TNFAIP3 and AI-Guided Target Discovery
13:40–14:00	Andrea G. Di Francesco RAG Beyond NLP: Learning Relevant Context for Cellular Prediction
14:00–14:20	Valerio Reffo What are we feeding foundation models?
14:20–14:40	David Miller Emerging research talk
14:40–15:00	Salvatore Romano Geometric Deep Learning Application in Biology: Two Case Studies
15:00–15:30	Coffee break
15:30–15:50	Andrea Rubbi Lab in the loop with generative models
15:50–16:10	Wageesha Widuranga LLMsFold: Integrating Large Language Models and Biophysical Simulations for De Novo Drug Design
16:10–16:30	Akihiro Mori Bridging mechanistic modelling and experimental perturbation to understand biological state transitions
16:30–17:00	Discussion: future directions in generative models for therapeutic discovery
17:00–17:15	Closing remarks