BOSC 2025 Keynotes

Chris Mungall (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)

Open Knowledge Bases in the Age of Generative AI

(Keynote talk for joint BOSC/BOKR session)

Dr. Chris Mungall is a Senior Scientist at Berkeley Lab, where he heads the Biosystems Data Science department in the Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology Division. Chris’s research interests center around the capture, computational integration, and dissemination of biological research data, and the development of methods for using this data to elucidate biological mechanisms underpinning the health of humans and of the planet. He and his team have led the creation of key biological ontologies for the integration of resources covering gene function, anatomy, phenotypes and the environment, including the the Uberon anatomy ontology, the Cell Ontology (CL), and the Mondo disease ontology. He is also one of the cofounders of the OBO Foundry.

Chris and his collaborators develop systems that translate data and knowledge into a computable form and apply it to answer complex biological and biomedical questions. His areas of focus include ontologies, systems biology, data science, biocuration, knowledge representation, data harmonization, reusable and interoperable software, knowledge graphs, machine learning and reasoning. For decades, he has been a strong advocate for open-source bioinformatics software, open standards, and open science.

Chris, who has a PhD in bioinformatics from the University of Edinburgh, is a PI on the Gene Ontology (GO), the Monarch Initiative, the Alliance of Genome Resources, Phenomics First, and the NCATS Biomedical Data Translator, as well as metadata lead for the National Microbiome Data Collaborative (NMDC). In 2017, Chris was the first person to be awarded the Exceptional Contributions to Biocuration Award by the International Society for Biocuration. In 2020, he received a Berkeley Lab Early Scientific Career Director’s Award.

Christine Orengo (University College London)

Working together to develop, promote and protect our data resources: Lessons learnt developing CATH and TED

Dr. Christine Orengo is a Professor of Bioinformatics at University College London (UCL). Her research focuses on the development of algorithms to capture relationships between protein structures, sequences and functions. She has built one of the most comprehensive protein classifications, CATH. CATH structural and functional data for hundreds of millions of proteins has enabled studies that revealed essential universal proteins and their biological roles, and extended characterisation of biological systems implicated in disease e.g. in cell division, cancer and aging. Dr. Orengo is known for her support of FAIR and open data and data sharing practices.

Dr. Orengo received her PhD from University College London. She is currently a Vice President of the International Society of Computational Biology (ISCB) and was previously the ISCB’s first female President. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), an Elected Member of EMBO since 2014, and a Fellow of ISCB since 2016.