Together with spring this year, a new guest, hosted by the ELBE Visiting Faculty Program has arrived. Paul Villoutreix will be visiting the Center for Systems Biology Dresden (CSBD) until the end of September. Paul is a research group leader at The Turing Centre for Living Systems (CENTURI) in Marseille and holds a junior professor chair at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM). His group focusses on developing Machine Learning and inference methods for answering biological questions, specifically involving large and heterogenious experimental datasets.
Before his successful application to the program, Paul had already visited Dresden four years ago, attending the “Image-based Modeling and Simulation of Morphogenesis” workshop organized by the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems (MPI-PKS) and coordinated by Ivo Sbalzarini, Professor of Scientific Computing for Systems Biology at the TU Dresden, Research Group Leader at the MPI-CBG, and Dean of the Faculty of Computer Science at the TU Dresden. “Back then, I spent a week here, and I really enjoyed the premises and the scientific community.” About his current stay, Paul says, “I am very grateful for this program,” to which he adds that it enables him to focus on research, writing, and developing new collaborations with fewer administrative constraints.”
The vast increase in experimental data in recent years, especially from acquisition techniques such as imaging and omics, calls for new and inventive ways of data analysis. Paul and his lab work on extracting useful information from such datasets and also on crossing the information from these two types of techniques. He elaborates: “One of the main focuses is the question of data integration – how to connect information from very heterogeneous data acquisition techniques and extract something meaningful out of this. The second question is how to do good data exploration out of it, so how to find patterns, how to identify specific behavior in multi-model data.” He concludes: “Finally, we are also trying to develop predictive, data-driven models, that enable us to numerically predict how the system is going to behave.”
During his stay, Paul is looking forward to new collaborations, new ideas, and new projects. He says: “People should reach out to me if they are interested in machine learning and quantitative approaches in biology.” On the question of what a successful stay would look like, he concludes: “I think there is no quantitative way of evaluating it, but just to be here is already very motivating.”
The ELBE Visiting Faculty Program provides funded opportunities for researchers at different career stages. Visiting scientists closely interact with the CSBD and both Max Planck Institutes (MPI-CBG and MPI-PKS). Through this program, the CSBD promotes networking between scientists and thereby fosters the community’s sharing of its research mission.