Speakers
April 28 – May 11, 2025, Northeastern University, Boston MA in person
Organizers: Olga Vitek and Michael Shortreed
Sponsor: Barnett Institute for Chemical and Biological Analysis, Northeastern University
Susan Abbatiello |
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Susan received a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry at the University of Florida and completed a postdoc at the University of Pittsburgh’s Hillman Cancer Center. Susan is currently a Senior Principal Scientist in the Global Research Organization at Waters Corporation. Her previous experience includes managing the MS Core Facility at Northeastern University, FAIMS Product Manager at Thermo Fisher Scientific, and Research Scientist at the Proteomics Platform of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Susan’s research focuses on the development of hardware and software workflows to streamline targeted quantitation of peptides and small molecules by LC-MS. |
Kylie Bemis |
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Kylie is Assistant Teaching Professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. She holds a B.S. degree in Statistics and Mathematics, a M.S. degree in Applied Statistics, and a Ph.D. in Statistics from Purdue University. In 2013, she interned at the Canary Center at Stanford for Cancer Early Detection, where she developed the Cardinal software package for statistical analysis of mass spectrometry imaging experiments. In 2015, she was awarded the John M. Chambers Statistical Software Award by the American Statistical Association for her work on Cardinal. In 2016, she joined the Olga Vitek lab for Statistical Methods for Studies of Biomolecular Systems at Northeastern University as a postdoctoral fellow. In 2019, she joined Northeastern as faculty, where she now teaches data science and develops curriculum for the M.S. in Data Science program. Her research interests include machine learning and large-scale statistical computing for bioinformatics. |
Ryan Benz |
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Ryan is a Data Scientist at Seer, working in the fields of Bioinformatics and Proteomics. He holds a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the Univeristy of California, Irvine. Prior to joining Seer, Ryan worked at Applied Proteomics as a Bioinformatics Scientist working on a wide range of Proteomics-based biomarker discovery projects and blood-based tests for cancer. Ryan is an avid R user with over 15 years of experience, and is a certified RStudio trainer. |
Arzu Tuğçe Güler |
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Arzu Tuğçe Güler is a Research Scientist at the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University and an affiliate scientist at Boston Children’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School. Her current research focuses on advancing AI applications in mass spectrometry-based metabolomics and multi-omics integration for biological and medical research. She holds a B.S. in Computer Engineering from TOBB University of Economics and Technology (TOBB ETU) in Ankara, Turkey. She completed her M.Sc. in Bioinformatics at KU Leuven in Belgium and pursued her Ph.D. at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, working on automating mass spectrometry-based proteomics data analysis. Before joining the Experiential AI institute, she conducted postdoctoral research at Amsterdam UMC, studying proteomics and metabolomics changes in Huntington’s Disease. Her research interests include AI-driven omics analysis, bioinformatics for neurodegenerative diseases, and data integration. |
Benjamin Gyori |
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Ben is Associate professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. His research combines computational modeling, machine learning, natural language processing, and human–machine interaction to improve our understanding of human biology. Ben’s lab creates computational frameworks that combine high-throughput data with the biological mechanisms that govern health. Since joining Khoury College in 2023, Ben has been leading several research projects focused on artificial intelligence approaches to complex systems modeling, biomedical data integration, and accelerating vaccine development. Ben is a recipient of a DARPA Young Faculty Award, the DARPA Director’s Fellowship Award, is supported by DARPA, DTRA, and the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. He is an advocate for open science and open-source scientific software. |
Devon Kohler |
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Devon is a PhD student at Northeastern University’s Khoury College of Computer Science in Olga Vitek’s lab. His research interests are in developing computational methods for mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteomics, specifically focused on the application of statistical and causal inference techniques. He is one of the lead developers of the MSstats family of R packages. He is the creator of a number packages, including MSstatsPTM and MSstatsLiP packages, as well as the R shiny-based GUI MSstatsShiny. He is currently researching applications of causal inference to biochemical systems; leveraging observational MS-based proteomics data and estimating the effect of perturbations on the downstream system. |
Brendan MacLean |
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Brendan worked at Microsoft for 8 years in the 1990s where he was a lead developer and development manager for the Visual C++/Developer Studio Project. Since leaving Microsoft, Brendan has been the Vice President of Engineering for Westside Corporation, Director of Engineering for BEA Systems, Inc., Sr. Software Engineer at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and a founding partner of LabKey Software. In this last position he was one of the key programmers responsible for the Computational Proteomics Analysis System (CPAS), made significant contributions to the development of X!Tandem and the Trans Proteomic Pipeline, and created the LabKey Enterprise Pipeline. Since August, 2008 he has worked as a Sr. Software Engineer within the MacCoss lab and been responsible for all aspects of design, development and support in creating the Skyline Targeted Proteomics Environment and its growing worldwide user community. Brendan was the inaugural recipient of the 2016 Gilbert S. Omenn Computational Proteomics Award of the US Human Proteome Organization |
Jeremy Muhlich |
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Jeremy is the Director of the Software Engineering Platform at the Harvard Medical School Laboratory of Systems Pharmacology. His research focuses on improving the accuracy, transparency, reproducibility and speed of data analysis and modeling as well as creating online tools and interactive data visualizations to communicate scientific results with high standards of information design, aesthetics and technical execution. He also teaches experimental scientists how to use computational tools to accelerate their research. Jeremy has extensive expertise in computational image analysis, data organization and management, development of data processing pipelines, and construction of public data repositories derived from his participation in numerous NCI-funded research consortia. |
Lindsay Pino |
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Lindsay is the co-founder and CTO of Talus Bio. She leads the development of Talus’s screening platform, guiding and coordinating scientific efforts across automated proteomics sample preparation and high-throughput mass spectrometry data acquisition and analysis. She has built and leads a team of multi-disciplinary scientists encompassing the breadth of scientific work at Talus, including chemical biologists, protein chemists, and computational biologists. Lindsay holds a Ph.D. from the University of Washington’s Department of Genome Sciences in the MacCoss lab. Prior to that, she worked at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. |
Olga Vitek |
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Olga is Professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, and was previously a Faculty and a University Faculty Scholar at Purdue. She holds a PhD in Statistics from Purdue University. Her research intersects statistical science, machine learning, mass spectrometry and systems biology. Statistical methods and open-source software MSstats and Cardinal developed in her lab are widely used in academia and industry. Olga is an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association, a recipient of the 2021 Gilbert S. Omenn Computational Proteomics Award of the US Human Proteome Organization, and of the Indigo BioAutomation Females in Mass Spectrometry Distinguished Contribution Award. She is a recipient of the CAREER award of the National Science Foundation, and of the Essential Open-source Software Award of the Chan-Zuckerberg foundation. |
Administrative Support
Roger Donaghy |
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Web Developer Northeastern University |
Samry Hehn |
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Ethan Rogers |
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Doctoral Student in Personal Health Informatics Northeastern University |