Speaker Profile
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:
Ed Kim, City of Hope
PMWC Award Ceremony
• Mark Daly, Broad Institute / FinnGen
• Gordon Sanghera, Oxford Nanopore Technologies
The Data Factory: Integrating Millions of Genomes for Variant Interpretation
• Chair: Stephen Montgomery, Stanford University
• Carlos Bustamante, University of Oklahoma
• Mark Daly, Broad Institute
• Manuel Rivas, Stanford University
• Mark McCarthy, Genentech
• Nilah Ioannidis, UC Berkeley / UCSC
Beyond the Read: Long-Read Sequencing in Clinical Variant Pipelines
• Chair: Gordon Sanghera, Oxford Nanopore Technologies
• Hanlee Ji, Stanford University
• Barrett Bready, Nabsys
Keynote: Biobanks and the Road Ahead in Human Genetics
• Mark Daly, Broad Institute
AI & Evolution for Predicting Human Disease Genes
• Chair: Yuval Tabach, Hebrew University
• Nilah Ioannidis, UC Berkeley / UCSC
• Saša Jenko, European Commission
DNA to Drug, Label & Coverage
• Chair: Razelle Kurzrock, Medical College of Wisconsin
• Russ Altman, Stanford University
• Slavé Petrovski, AstraZeneca
• Wei Zhou, Broad Institute
25+ Years of the Human Genome: From Bench to Bedside to Beyond
• Chair: Ralph Snyderman, Duke University
• Craig Venter, J. Craig Venter Institute
• Brook Byers, KPCB
• Lee Hood, Phenome Health
PMWC Award Ceremony (Continued)
• Scott Gottlieb, Former FDA Commissioner




