Precision genomics requires a diverse reference | LC 25

Biography

Prasad Sarashetti is currently Senior Research Officer at the Genome Institute of Singapore, where he spearheads efforts in telomere-to-telomere genome assembly and pangenome construction for the Asian Reference Genome project.

Francisco De La Vega DSc is the Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Platform R&D at Galatea Bio. He is a distinguished human geneticist and computational biologist, recognized for his expertise in clinical and population genomics and bioinformatics.

Yu Kang is a Professor at the Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Her research centres on sequencing technologies, genome assembly, and genomic analysis. She led the successful assembly of the high-quality diploid genome of a Han Chinese individual (T2T-YAO), achieving a quality on par with the T2T-CHM13 reference.

Yaw Bediako is a Ghanaian immunologist and entrepreneur with a PhD from Northwestern University in the United States and post-doctoral fellowships in Kenya and London. In 2020, Yaw founded Yemaachi Biotech to increase the representation of African data in oncology drug discovery. In 2022, Yaw was recognized as one of the top 40 under 40 businesspeople in Ghana, and in January of 2023 he was selected as one of the 100 most influential Africans by the New African magazine.