NorthernBUG 15
- Date: 23 January 2026
- Location: University of York
- Hosts: Andrew Mason
General
The organising committee for NorthernBUG15 is: Andrew Mason, Marcello Beltrami, Sally James and Alastair Droop. Emails should be directed to Andrew at andrew.mason@york.ac.uk
The meeting will take place on 23rd January 2026 in The Department of Biology at The University of York. Weather depending, it’s a nice ~40 minute walk from the station to the university, or you can catch the U1 or U2 buses to Wentworth Way bus stop in ~25 minutes. There is some limited car parking on campus or you can use the Park & Ride at Grimston Bar.
What to expect
NorthernBUG meetings are open to anyone interested in bioinformatics or its application in life science research. Meetings are free, and lunch is provided!
These meetings focus on being a user group for the benefit of all. Talks and posters do not have to be a polished and complete body of work, but can be an opportunity to discuss your research with others experienced in the area. All speakers have been encouraged to leave 20% of their time for questions and discussion. There is always a friendly atmosphere, with discussions around techniques, training and education, as well as broader applied research areas.
Registration
Registration has now closed.
Travel scholarships
Thank you for the support of the UKRI Digital Research Skills Catalyst in providing travel scholarships for this meeting. These have now closed and we will announce the winners shortly.
Agenda
Posters and talks will be judged by all attendees using Google Forms, with prizes awarded for the top scoring.
If you have a suggestion you’d like us (or organisers of the next meeting) to take on board, let us know!
We will award Best and Runner Up prizes for talks and posters based on your votes! Please use the Google Form rating systems below.
Rate the oral presentations here.
| Time | Speaker | Presentation | Information |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10:00-10:30 | Registration opens and Tea/coffee | Registration available all day | |
| 10:30-10:35 | Andrew Mason | Formal welcome to NorthernBUG15! | |
| Training and Professionalisation | |||
| 10:35 | Tony Burdett | BioFAIR: Building a National FAIR Data Ecosystem for UK Life Sciences | Director of BioFAIR |
| 10:50 | Allyson Lister | Recent advances in FAIR evaluation of digital research objects | FAIRsharing coordinator |
| 11:05 | Krzysztof Poterlowicz | The ELIXIR-UK Training Ecosystem and Communities | ELIXIR-UK Training Coordinator |
| 11:20 | Emma Rand | UKRI Digital Research Skills Catalyst: A national hub for researcher and innovator development | UKRI Digital Research Skills Catalyst Lead |
| 11:35 | Open forum discussion | What role for northern universities in training and data skills professionalisation? | |
| 12:00-12:55 | Lunch break with posters | ||
| Session 1 Talks | |||
| 13:00 | Alun Jones | Reduced regulatory complexity associated with the evolutionary transition to sociality from cockroaches to termites despite evolutionary parallels with Hymenoptera | Postdoc |
| 13:15 | Harry Taylor | Functional Annotation of the Hyalomma anatolicum Cell Line HAE/CTVM9 Through Integrated Transcriptomic and Proteomic Analysis. | PhD student |
| 13:25 | Ana Valdes | Learning What to Label: Active Learning for Efficient Biological Text Mining | PhD student |
| 13:40 | Jordan Tzvetkov | Can LLMs Help Solve the Curation Bottleneck? | Bioinformatician |
| 13:55 | Mingkai Wang | DDGWizard: Integration of feature calculation resources for analysis and prediction of changes in protein thermostability upon point mutations | PhD student |
| 14:10 | Mohamed El-Nemr | Beyond Binary Detection: A Multicentre Protocol for Automated AO Classification of Hand Fractures | MD student |
| 14:20 | Industry sponsor flash talks | Azenta/Genewiz, Twist Bioscience | |
| 14:30-15:20 | Poster session break | Coffee, posters, industry, networking | |
| Session 2 Talks | |||
| 15:20 | Ronak Naeemaee | Unlocking Precision Medicine: Advanced Survival Analysis Tools for Cancer Biomarker Validation | PhD student |
| 15:35 | Marisa Loach | Developing Single Cell Training to Increase Reuse of FAIR Workflows | PhD student |
| 15:50 | Amelia Fisher | Single cell sequencing of normal B cells in CLL patients: multiomic analysis of low-count cell populations | PhD student |
| 16:05 | Muhammad Ahtazaz Ahsan | DeepPathway: Predicting Pathway Expression from Histopathology Images | PhD student |
| 16:20 | Joshua Winter-Luke | Ensemble Computational Framework for Robust Cell-Type Classification in Spatial Transcriptomics | PhD student |
| 16:35 | Mohammad Faiz Iqbal Faiz | Spartan: A Multiplex Graph Framework for High-Resolution Spatial Domain and Spatially Variable Gene Discovery | PhD student |
| 16:50-17:00 | Prizes and closing remarks | ||
| 17:00- | Pub | Rose & Crown, Lawrence Street, YO10 3BP |
After the meeting we will gather at the Rose & Crown. This is a 15 minute walk from the university (walking route here). This is on the way back to the station and on the U1 or 10 bus routes which will take you back to the station.
Our funders
We continue to be core supported by The Genetics Society, but thanks also to our amazing sponsors past and present. For NorthernBUG15 we are supported by Twist Bioscience and Genewiz by Azenta Life Sciences. Event sponsors will have stalls on the day, so there is an opportunity to hear about new technologies, promotional sequencing offers, and the potential for jobs in industry. Thank you to all our sponsors!
Feedback
Please complete this feedback Google Form at the end of the meeting - this will remain open for 7 days. All feedback is incredibly valuable for determining the direction of NorthernBUG, improving and keeping meetings relevant to members, and for sourcing future funding.
Location:
The Department of Biology, Wentworth Way, York