Speaker Profile
Ph.D., Assistant Professor, UC Berkeley/UCSC
Biography
Prof. Nilah Ioannidis has a joint appointment in EECS and the Center for Computational Biology (CCB). Her group works on computational methods to analyze and interpret personal genomes, including machine learning and deep learning methods to predict the clinical impact of genome variation and to model variation in gene expression and other molecular and cellular phenotypes.Dr. Ioannidis was previously a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Biomedical Data Science at Stanford University, where she worked on several machine learning tools to predict the pathogenicity of single nucleotide variants, including the ensemble predictor REVEL for missense variants. During her PhD in Biophysics at Harvard University, she worked in the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT and developed methods to analyze the dynamics of intracellular particles using hidden Markov modeling and Bayesian inference. She also previously served as Research Director at the Jain Foundation, a non-profit foundation focused on the rare genetic disease dysferlinopathy.
Session Abstract – PMWC 2026 Silicon Valley
Track Chair: TBA
PMWC Award Ceremony Honorees
• Mark Daly, Broad Institute
• Daniel MacArthur, CPG/Genomes/gnomAD
• Gordon Sanghera, Oxford Nanopore
• Howard J. Jacob, Abbvie
The Data Factory: Building Systems to Integrate Millions of Genomes for Variant Interpretation
• Chair: Stephen B. Montgomery, Stanford
• Carlos D. Bustamante, University of Oklahoma
• Mark Daly, Broad Institute/FinnGen
• Manuel Rivas, Stanford
• Mark McCarthy, Genentech
• Nilah Ioannidis, UC Berkeley
Biobanks to Bedside: Cutting VUS in Cancer, Cardio & Rare—What’s Working Now
• Chair: Ben Neale, Broad Institute
• Daniel MacArthur, CPG/Genomes/gnomAD
Beyond the Read: Integrating Long-Read Data into the Clinical Variant Pipeline
• Chair: Gordon Sanghera, Oxford Nanopore Technologies
• Hanlee P. Ji, Stanford
DNA to FDA: How Genetic Targets Win Labels & Coverage
• Russ B. Altman, Stanford
Common Diseases in Clinical Cohorts – Not Always What They Seem
• Howard J. Jacob, Abbvie
DNA to FDA: How Genetic Targets Win Labels & Coverage
• Chair: Razelle Kurzrock, Medical College of Wisconsin
• Russ B. Altman, Stanford
25+ Years of the Human Genome — What Made It to the Bedside
• Chair: Ralph Snyderman, Duke
• J. Craig Venter, Craig Venter Institute (JCVI)
• Brook Byers, KPCB
• Lee Hood, Phenome Health
