High-quality T2T assemblies with Oxford Nanopore-only data a Singaporean case study | LC 25

Biography Prasad Sarashetti, an experienced bioinformatician with a master’s degree in bioinformatics from IIIT Pune, brings over a decade of expertise to the field. Currently serving as a Senior Research Officer at the Genome Institute of Singapore, he spearheads efforts in telomere-to-telomere genome assembly and pangenome construction for the Asian Reference Genome project. Prasad has excelled in various roles, including Senior Scientific Analyst and Analysis Head at companies such as Qiagen India Pvt. Ltd. and Genotypic Technology Pvt. Ltd. Francisco De La Vega DSc is the Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Platform R&D at Galatea Bio. He is a distinguished human geneticist and computational biologist, recognized for his expertise in clinical and population genomics and bioinformatics. He is also an experienced technical executive, having spent over a decade at Applied Biosystems/Life Technologies, developing several successful genetic analysis products, and afterward contributing to life sciences start-up companies focused on bringing genome sequencing into the clinic. More recently, Francisco was the Vice President of Hereditary Disease at Tempus AI, where he developed whole-genome diagnostic tests and conducted research on the links between genetic ancestry and cancer genome mutational profiles. Previously, he was the Chief Scientific Officer at Fabric Genomics, where he led the development of AI tools for diagnosing rare genetic diseases. He has held leadership roles in several breakthrough international projects such as the 1000 Genomes Project, the Genome-in-a-Bottle Consortium, and the International Cancer Genome Consortium. Francisco served two terms as a member of the Board of Directors of the International Society for Computational Biology and is currently an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Biomedical Data Science at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Yu Kang is a Professor at the Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. She received both her Bachelor’s and PhD degrees from Peking University and completed her postdoctoral training under Professor Jun Yu at the same institute. Her research centers on sequencing technologies, genome assembly, and genomic analysis. She led the successful assembly of the high-quality diploid genome of a Han Chinese individual (T2T-YAO), achieving a quality on par with the T2T-CHM13 reference. Yaw Bediako is a Ghanaian immunologist and entrepreneur with a PhD from Northwestern University in the United States and post-doctoral fellowships in Kenya and London. In 2020, Yaw founded Yemaachi Biotech to increase the representation of African data in oncology drug discovery. He is a 2021 Calestous Juma Science Leadership Fellow (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), a fellow of the Ghana Young Academy, and an affiliate member of the African Academy of Sciences. In 2022, Yaw was recognized as one of the top 40 under 40 businesspeople in Ghana, and in January of 2023 he was selected as one of the 100 most influential Africans by the New African magazine.