Keynote speakers
Joana Pereira
VIB Group leader and KU Leuven assistant professor
Joana Pereira is an expert in computational structural biology and protein evolution, with a focus on structural bioinformatics. She is a biochemist with a doctorate in Chemistry from the University of Hamburg and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. She has over 7 years of postdoctoral experience in protein evolution and structural bioinformatics, having worked at both the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen (Germany) and the Biozentrum of the University of Basel (Switzerland).
Her research interests are focused on applying computer science, complex network analysis, and deep learning to investigate the structure, diversity, and evolution of the 'protein universe'. She led the Protein Universe Atlas project, funded by the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. Her research is fundamentally computational, but she also collaborates closely with experimentalists in interdisciplinary projects focused primarily on prokaryotic interactions with the environment, as well as their unknown defense and resistance mechanisms.
