Big data can save the little pollinators
It’s time to apply the big data approach of molecular medicine to the problem.
Wednesday 20 May 2020
Bio
Yannick Wurm is Senior Lecturer in Bioinformatics at Queen Mary University of London, a fellow of The Alan Turing Institute and the Software Sustainability Institute.
His lab takes advantage of the 50,000-fold drop in DNA sequencing cost over the past 10 years to study the evolution of social behaviour in ants and the effects of environmental challenges on pollinators. Working on such species, for which modern molecular and genomic resources are scarce, requires careful balancing of analytical efforts for robustness and productivity.
Yannick's background is highly computational. His first degree was as an engineer in bioinformatics and modelling from the French National Institute of Applied Sciences (INSA de Lyon). He subsequently obtained PhD in sociogenetics of ants at University of Lausanne in collaboration with the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics.
Research interests
Yannick aims to combine his lab's expertise with that of the Turing by developing methodologies to:
- Optimise search space exploration for bioinformatics algorithms.
- Translate novel AI/machine learning approaches for genomic data.
- Improve agile visualisation of large genomic datasets.