Speaker Program

In addition to talks given by invited speakers, the SBHD program includes contributed short talks selected from submitted abstracts and poster sessions. The Anne Heidenthal Prize for Fluorescence Research lecture is presented on June 9.

Monday, June 8, 2026

Time	Speaker	Title / Topic
08:30 AM	Registration, Check-In, and Welcome Coffee
09:15 AM	Conference Opening
09:30 AM	Welcome Remarks (Beth A. Winkelstein, Provost, Northeastern University)
Session: Rare Diseases / Hearing and Vision
09:45 AM	Anne O’Donnell-Luria Broad / MIT & Harvard	Rare Disease: Improving Variant Classification for Genomic Medicine Through Evidence Calibration
10:15 AM	Heidi Rehm Broad / MIT & Harvard	Tackling the VUS Problem
10:45 AM	Anne Calof UC Irvine	Developmental Disorders: Understanding the Common Causes of Birth Defect Syndromes: Therapeutic Opportunities for Rare Diseases?
11:15 AM	David P. Corey Harvard Medical School	Cell-Specific Gene Therapy Rescues Hearing in Mouse Models of a Common Hereditary Deafness
11:45 AM	Christian Meyer Duet Biosystems	TBD
12:15 PM	LUNCH
Session: Multiomics Integration and AI
01:30 PM	Peter Sorger Special Speaker Harvard University	AI: Machine Learning and Spatial Profiling to Study the Tissue-Resident Immune System
02:00 PM	Samuel V. Scarpino Special Speaker Northeastern University	TBD
02:30 PM	John Platig Univ. of Virginia	Learning a Splicing Regulatory Logic of RBP Binding
03:00 PM	Guantong Qi Baylor College of Medicine	RareCollab: An LLM-Guided Framework for Structured Multimodal Reasoning in Mendelian Disease Diagnosis
03:15 PM	Hratch Baghdassarian MIT	scLEMBAS: Context-Aware Signaling Pathway Modeling at Single-Cell Resolution
03:30 PM	Coffee Break
Session: Developmental Disorders / Computational Biology
04:00 PM	Katy Börner Indiana University	Computational Biology: Endothelial Cell Environments Across Organs in Spatially Resolved Omics Data
04:30 PM	Arthur D. Lander UC Irvine	TBD
05:00 PM	Welcome Cocktail Hour and Poster Session
06:00 PM	Conference Dinner

Tuesday, June 9, 2026

Time	Speaker	Title / Topic
09:00 AM	Welcome Coffee
09:20 AM	Opening Remarks
Session: Neurodegeneration
09:30 AM	Leroy Hood Special Speaker Institute for Systems Biology	TBD
10:00 AM	Christian Meisel BIH at Charité	Sensors, Wearables, AI: Opportunities and Challenges for a New Era of Neurology
10:30 AM	Bin Zhang Mount Sinai, New York	Multiomic Network Models Reveal Convergent Pathways and Therapeutic Targets in Alzheimer’s Disease
Session: Multiomics Integration and AI
10:45 AM	Yoseph Barash Univ. of Pennsylvania	Deep Generative Models for RNA Processing Prediction and Design
11:15 AM	Peter Castaldi Harvard Medical School	Computational Biology: Long Read Sequencing and Interpretable AI Models Reveal Principles of Nonsense-Mediated RNA Decay
11:45 AM	Adrian Attard Trevisan RCSCI / Asomi College, Malta	Voice as a Digital Biomarker: Device-Free Respiratory Monitoring through AI-Driven Omics Integration
12:00 PM	Itai Danielli Haifa University, Israel	Computational Framework for Unveiling Clones Repertoire Informative Motifs Within and Across Human Subjects
12:15 PM	LUNCH
Session: Cancer
01:30 PM	Galit Lahav Harvard University	Cancer: Therapy Guided by Protein Dynamics in Single Cells
02:00 PM	Herbert Levine Northeastern University	The Role of Epigenetics in Cancer Progression
02:30 PM	Anne Heidenthal Prize Sponsored by Chroma	Anne Heidenthal Prize for Fluorescence Research: Award Lecture (Presented by Georg Draude, Chroma Technology)
03:00 PM	Poster Session and Coffee
Session: Cancer (continued)
04:00 PM	Melissa Bondy Stanford University	A Systems Biology Approach to Brain Tumors: Multi-Omics, Histopathology, and Patient Outcomes
04:30 PM	Gennaro Gambardella TIGEM	ESMRank: Learning-to-Rank Prediction of Protein Variant Effects from Integrated Mutational Landscapes
04:45 PM	Ali R. Zomorrodi MGH / Harvard Medical School	BiomeGPT: A Foundation Model For The Human Gut Microbiome
05:00 PM	Poster Session (5:00 – 6:00 PM)

Wednesday, June 10, 2026

Time	Speaker	Title / Topic
09:00 AM	Welcome Coffee
09:20 AM	Opening Remarks
Session: Cancer / Epidemiology
09:30 AM	Daniel Gallahan Special Speaker NCI	TBD
10:00 AM	Tania Konry Northeastern University	From Immune Function to Predictive AI: A Biotech-AI Platform for Immunotherapy Response
10:30 AM	Saskia Trump BIH at Charité	Epidemiology: Epigenetic Alterations Acquired During Acute COVID-19 Persist as Long-Term Transcriptional Dysregulation in Airway Epithelium
Session: Industry / R&D in Biotech and Pharma
11:00 AM	Tamar Thompson Alexion Pharmaceuticals	Industry: How AI Shapes the Patient, Advocacy Group, and Access Environment in Rare Disease
11:30 AM	Molly Gibbons Flagship Pioneering	TBD
12:00 PM	Ajay Yekkirala Superluminal Medicines	TBD
12:30 PM	Closing Remarks and End of Conference

This year’s highlights

On Monday evening, we warmly welcome our participants to our traditional conference dinner at the Atrium of ISEC, Northeastern University. You can expect a three-course meal, complimentary drinks, and music — a perfect opening for networking.