Category Archives: Conferences

Dispatches from Lisbon

Tiles, tiles, as far as the eye can see. Conquerors on horseback storming into the breach; proud merchant ships cresting ocean waves; pious monks and shepherds tending to their flocks; Christ bearing the cross to Calvary—in intricate tones of blue and white on tin-glazed ceramic tilework. Vedi Napoli e poi muori the Sage of Weimar once wrote—to see Naples and die. But had he been to Lisbon?

The azulejos of the city’s numerous magnificent monasteries are far from the only thing for the weary PhD student to admire. Lisbon has no shortage of imposing bridges and striking towers, historically fraught monuments and charming art galleries. Crumbling old castles and revitalised industrial quarters butt up against the Airbnbs-and-expats district, somewhere between property speculation and the sea. An endearing flock of magellanic penguins paddles away an afternoon in their enclosure at the local aquarium (which is excellent), and an alarming proliferation of custard-based pastries invites one to indulge.

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Nanobodies® galore in Utrecht

At the end of September, I had the opportunity to present at the 4th Single-Domain Antibody (sdAb/VHH) Conference hosted in the city of Utrecht. The sdAb conference is a biennial event, and was held for the first time in Bonn (2019), then in Brussels (2021) and Paris (2023), before coming to the Netherlands this year.

This was the first time I’d attended a VHH-focused conference, and I was taken aback at just how large the community is; the Jaarbeurs ‘Supernova’ event hall was completely sold out, with over 400 researchers in attendance (pictures below courtesy of the organisers). The buzz reflects the ever growing interest in sdAbs as tools to discover new fundamental biology, vectors for diagnosing disease, and as prophylactic or curative therapeutics. Most every disease indication was represented at the conference, from anticancer and antiviral sdAbs to antivenom sdAbs (both for use in lateral flow tests to diagnose the snake that bit you, and as quick ‘epipen’-like therapeutics accessible even in the most remote parts of the world).

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Reflections on GRC CADD 2025: A Week of Insight, Innovation, and Baseball

Henry

Back in July, some very lucky OPIGlets ventured across the pond to discover life in Southern Maine (and Boston!). For someone visiting Boston for the first time, no trip would be complete without a Red Sox game—a thoroughly enjoyable highlight (see Figure 1). While we were there, we also went to Gordon Research Conference (GRC) on Computer Aided Drug Design (CADD).

A flock of OPIGlets taking in the Fenway Park experience at a Red Sox game.
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ISMB/ECCB conference feedback 

The ISMB/ECCB conference took place in Liverpool this year. So, a couple of OPIGlets took the train up north to attend this biyearly joint conference. Here we will give some general feedback on the conference and highlight some interesting talks/posters. 

General feedback 

ISMB/ECCB is a 4.5 day conference starting on the Sunday evening and running until Thursday evening. The conference is attended by around 2500 people, mostly from academic groups around the world. With more than 20 different tracks, it is a broad conference with lots of tracks happening at the same time. As always, it is thus recommended to have a look at the schedule beforehand to not get too overwhelmed. Each day there is one keynote, two poster sessions, and three blocks of talks. These talks are often given by PIs, but also PostDocs and PhD students get the opportunity to present. There are also some smaller slots for highlighting posters which are presented that day. 

This year there was a very interesting line-up of Distinguished Keynote speakers. The conference was kicked off by John Jumper talking about AlphaFold2, with a focus on how the team went about the various problems during the process of going from the initial AlphaFold model to AlphaFold2. On Monday Prof. Amos Bairoch talked about biocuration and importance and challenges of public databases. He discussed the FAIR principles for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable for data management [1]. The next Keynote was by Prof. James Zou about computational biology in the age of AI agents (later more). On Wednesday we had our own Prof. Charlotte Deane (woo!) talking about structure-based drug discovery with a focus on the importance of baselines and benchmarking. The conference was ended by a short interview with Prof. David Baker, followed by a talk from Prof. Fabian Theis on decoding cellular systems. He discussed Cellflow [2], an AI tool that predicts how perturbations like drugs effect the cellular phenotype. 

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Conference feedback: Protein Society Annual Symposium

Recently, a couple of OPIG members had the opportunity to attend and present at the 39th Annual Symposium of the Protein Society—a not-for-profit scholarly society founded in 1985 that focuses on protein structure, function, and design—held in San Francisco.

The PS39 schedule was well designed, offering a balance between plenary talks, themed parallel sessions, and networking opportunities. A wide range of topics was covered, including transient protein states, supramolecular assemblies, proteostasis, and circadian clocks. This allowed us to follow areas of personal interest, both related and unrelated to our research, while exploring unfamiliar fields. Although many talks were biology-heavy, they were generally pitched at an accessible level for those from other disciplines (ie. the small molecules side of OPIG). Presentations almost always included results from both in silico and experimental approaches, with relatively few focusing exclusively on one or the other; a very nifty thing to see as people who mostly just dream of experimental validation! In contrast to our generalisable-model-focus, many of the researchers presenting had dedicated years to studying a single protein or system, uncovering its nuances in a way that made for some neat storytelling.

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An insight into mega-conferences – attending ESCMID Global 2025

I suppose it really hit me when the Viennese border control officer asked, “Ah, you must be here for the conference?” That’s when I realised: this wasn’t just any event. ESCMID Global isn’t your average gathering of lab coat enthusiasts, but rather one of the largest clinical infectious disease conferences in the world. Over 16,000 attendees packed into Vienna for their 35th annual congress.

So, was flying across Europe to attend the Glastonbury of conferences, minus the mud, plus the microbes, worth it?

Well… it depends on what you’re hoping to get out of it. If you’re an academic, you might find that a lot of the sessions lean heavily towards the clinical side of things. On the plus side, it made it easier to narrow down my schedule – with over a dozen sessions happening at any one time, a bit of decisiveness goes a long way. Personally, I found the big-name, high-level keynotes and annual updates from organisations like EUCAST the most accessible and informative.

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Attending LMRL @ ICLR 2025

I recently attended the Learning Meaningful Representations of Life (LMRL) workshop at ICLR 2025. The goal of LMRL is to highlight machine learning methods which extract meaningful or useful properties from unstructured biological data, with an eye towards building a virtual cell. I presented my paper which demonstrates how standard Transformers can learn to meaningfully represent 3D coordinates when trained on protein structures. Each paper submitted to LMRL had to include a “meaningfulness statement” – a short description of how the work presents a meaningful representation.

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Baby’s First NeurIPS: A Survival Guide for Conference Newbies

There’s something very surreal about stepping into your first major machine learning conference: suddenly, all those GitHub usernames, paper authors, and protagonists of heated twitter spats become real people, the hallways are buzzing with discussions of papers you’ve been meaning to read, and somehow there are 17,000 other people trying to navigate it all alongside you. That was my experience at NeurIPS this year, and despite feeling like a microplankton in an ocean of ML research, I had a grand time. While some of this success was pure luck, much of it came down to excellent advice from the group’s ML conference veterans and lessons learned through trial and error. So, before the details fade into a blur of posters and coffee breaks, here’s my guide to making the most of your first major ML conference.

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Roche Continents 2024

This July I had the opportunity to be part of the Roche Continents programme [1]. The programme was organised by Roche and LUMA Arles and took place in the beautiful city of Arles in the south of France. Together with 40 students from various disciplines and European universities we discussed and explored the connection between arts, science, and sustainability. The theme of the week was resourcefulness.  

For students considering applying to Roche Continents next year, I’d like to offer some insights on what to expect, as well as share a few of my personal highlights from the experience. 

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