Bio:

Prof. Stein Aerts has a multidisciplinary background in both bio-engineering and computer science. During his Ph.D. he was trained in bioinformatics, and during his Postdoc he worked on the genomics of gene regulation in Drosophila. Stein now heads the Laboratory of Computational Biology at the VIB and University of Leuven. His lab focuses on deciphering the genomic regulatory code, using a combination of single-cell, machine-learning, and experimental approaches. His recent scientific contributions include new bioinformatics methods for the analysis of single-cell gene regulatory networks, namely SCENIC and cisTopic; new experimental assays for single-cell ATAC-seq (HyDrop) and for massively parallel enhancer reporter assays; deep learning implementations for enhancer modelling (DeepMEL, DeepFlyBrain, DeepLiver); and methods for AI-driven design of synthetic enhancers for gene therapy. Stein co-founded the Fly Cell Atlas consortium and generated a single-cell atlas of the ageing Drosophila brain. Stein was awarded the 2017 Prize for Bioinformatics and Computational Science from the Biotech Fund and the 2016 Astrazeneca Foundation Award Bioinformatics. He is EMBO member since 2022, obtained an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2016, and an ERC Advanced Grant in 2022. In 2023 Stein founded VIB.AI, the VIB Center for AI and Computational Biology, where he is currently the Scientific Director.