RiP Thursday, May 15 2025,  3:00 PM (MT) – special hybrid session

7 views
Skip to first unread message

Michael Servilla

unread,
May 5, 2025, 4:29:59 PMMay 5
to Data science RIP

Hello Everyone,

Please join us on Wednesday, May 15th (3 – 4 PM MT) for a special Research‑in‑Progress (RiP) seminar, offered both in‑person and on our usual Zoom channel.

Speaker

Simon Handley, PhD
Senior AI/ML Solutions Architect, Healthcare & Life Sciences – Amazon Web Services
📧 sim...@amazon.com
🔗 Recent work: Pre‑training genomic language models on AWS (AWS ML Blog)

Talk

“Genomic Foundation Models: From Transformers to Drug Discovery”

Dr. Handley will

  • give a concise overview of foundation models and the emerging class of genomic foundation models;
  • unpack the transformer architecture and its key design trade‑offs;
  • share practical mental models for mapping genomic problems onto these architectures;
  • deep‑dive into two landmark models—Evo 2 and Geneformer—highlighting how they’re built and what they can (and can’t) do;
  • showcase real‑world applications, including accelerated target exploration and molecular design in drug discovery.

Whether you’re curious about large‑scale sequence modeling or already building ML pipelines for omics data, this session will ground you in the technology and spark ideas for your own projects.

How to attend

  • In person: Cancer Research Facility (CRF), Room G025

Research‑in‑Progress (RiP) meets on the second Thursday of every month to share work‑in‑progress and build community around data science and AI at UNM. We’re thrilled to add this special session—tell your colleagues!

Interested in presenting? Reach out to:
• David Arredondo – darre...@salud.unm.edu
• Michael Servilla – ch...@unm.edu

See you on May 15th!

—The RiP Organizing Team

Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages