We believe that shaping the future of precision medicine starts long before someone joins our team. It starts with students eager to learn.
Senior Bioinformaticians Yuanlong Liu and Ibai Irastorza recently connected online with Biomedical Master's students who are learning exploratory data analysis, machine learning, statistical analysis, data preprocessing and more at Mondragon University.
For Ibai, a Mondragon alumnus himself, it was a full-circle moment. He went on from Mondragon to a PhD in Bioinformatics and a postdoc at the Max Delbrück Center in Berlin, researching allele-specific chromatin structure and gene regulation. Yuanlong's path took him from a BSc in Mathematics in Beijing through a PhD in Statistical Genetics at INSERM in France and a postdoc in Computational Cancer Genomics at the University of Lausanne. Two remarkable journeys, openly shared with students who are just beginning to build their own. 🧬
Together, they introduced SOPHiA GENETICS and covered two concepts central to our work: variant calling, the process of identifying genomic variants from sequencing data, and liquid biopsy, a minimally invasive approach to detecting cancer-related signals from blood. For students already working with Python and machine learning, seeing how those tools connect to real clinical genomics workflows is a powerful bridge.
The Basque Country holds a special place for SOPHiA GENETICS, which made this collaboration even more meaningful. A sincere thank you to Mondragon Goi Eskola Politeknikoa and to professors Ane Alberdi Aramedi and Unai Ayala Fernandez for the partnership. 🎓
- Interns
