Reminder! Meeting today

[Data science RIP]

Please join us today, Thursday, 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

• Zoom: https://unm.zoom.us/j/93770730211
  Meeting ID: 937 7073 0211 Passcode: ds‑rip
  
  

  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!
  
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  Interested in presenting? Reach out to:
  • David Arredondo – darredondo@salud.unm.edu
  • Michael Servilla – chico@unm.edu

  —The RiP Organizing Team