Welcome! 🤓 💻 🧬

This is the site of the (probabilistic) Machine Learning bookclub at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. We aim to bring people interested in the underlying concepts/theory of ML applied to biological research and engineering.

We run sessions on Thursdays in N3-47 in the Morgan building (Wellcome Sanger Institute), and on Zoom! 🎯 The current time is 9:00AM (UK time) but could be adjusted in the future based on room/attendee availability. ⏰

Who are we? 🧑🏻

Sergio is a PhD student supervised by Debbie Marks (Harvard Medical School) and Ben Lehner (Wellcome Sanger Institute). He is working on AI for enzyme design.

Javier is a PhD student supervised by Josie Bryant (Wellcome Sanger Institute) and Craig MacLean (INEOS Oxford Institute for Antimicrobial Research). He is working on modelling antimicrobial resistance.

Types of sessions 💬

Sessions are chaired by one or two people. There are three types of sessions as of July 2025:

• 🏗️ Interactive workshops: the chair will introduce an interesting/fundamental ML topic interactively, with a presentation and potentially a quiz (Kahoot!)
• 📝 Study sessions: participants will study from a set textbook chapter (Probabilistic Machine Learning, Murphy) and potentially work together on a problem.
• 📕 Journal Club: a chair will introduce a recent bioML paper and talk through it with a presentation, whiteboard or simply sharing the screen.
  • If you want to suggest a paper for the Journal Club, you can let us know or add it to the shared JC spreadsheet! 🗓️
• 💼 Sharing work: a presenter will explain their current work or a paper that they have worked on to the audience with a presentation, whiteboard or simply sharing the screen.

Schedule and session info 📅

Public Service Announcement 🪧

Although we are working with ML and learning its theory, we are not ML scientists (yet), just PhD students. Therefore, we might make mistakes, or give explanations that are excessively convoluted. If you have expertise in a particular topic or in ML in general, we would highly appreciate your feedback and criticism. ✍🏻

Importantly, if you feel like sharing your knowledge and want to take part, please ask us to chair a session. There are many extremely knowledgeable ML scientists at Sanger, at the University and beyond, that could add great value. You could contribute by running a workshop, study session or presenting a paper. You could also simply present your BioML-related work to a different audience. Just reach out! 🧠