The 21st edition of the Conference will be held in Naples, Italy, on October 21-23, 2026, Naples, Italy. This year’s conference is being held in the Chiostro San Francesco, Via Luca Giordano, 2, Naples, Italy. Here is the Google Maps link.
The three days will include the main Conference Program and training activities: see below for the news concerning the three tutorial activities.
NEWS: Conference Program draft – updated September 29.
The main conference will take place from the early afternoon of October 21 through lunchtime on October 23. Training sessions #1 and #2 will be held concurrently on the morning of October 21. Training session #3 will be held on the afternoon of October 23.
Conference
- Confirmed Invited Speakers:
Prof. Diego Di Bernardo, Dept. of Chemical, Materials and Industrial Engineering, University of Naples “Federico II, Italy & Telethon Institute of Genetics and Medicine. Provisional title: “Engineering Gene Circuits to advance therapy of Rare Genetic Disorders: from mathematical modelling to experimental implementation”.
Prof. Dr. Manja Marz, Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Jena, Germany. “Full genome alignments with RNA secondary structures of RNA viruses”.
Prof. Irina Moreira, Faculty of Sciences and Technology, University of Coimbra, Portugal. Provisional title: “Structural Biology in the Age of AI: Integrating Bioinformatics and Translational Research”.
Dr. Alessandro Pandini, Department of Computer Science, Brunel University of London, UK. “Decoding Protein Molecular Dynamics with Graph Models, Residue Coevolution and Machine Learning”.
Prof. Richard Röttger, Dept. of Mathematics and Computer Science (IMADA) University of Southern Denmark (SDU), Odense M, Denmark. Provisional title: “Collaborative Data Science – From Real Estate to Spatial Transcriptomics”.
Dr. Martina Stella, Algorithmiq, Milano, Italy, Senior Scientist and Head
of Partnerships. Provisional title: “Redefining computation: quantum computing for real-world impact today”.
The main Conference Program will also include oral presentations and poster presentations/short oral presentations submitted by registered conference participants.
Training/WORKSHOP activities
Three half-day training activities are planned immediately before or after the main conference program. When registering for the conference, you will be asked to indicate your interest in participating, specifying the training event you have chosen. The activities will take place simultaneously, so you may select only one of the three activities. Places may be limited, and admission will be on a first-come, first-served basis.
Training #1: From Omics Data and Metadata to Clinical Meaning: Bioinformatics in Cancer and Rare Disease
October 21st, 9:00-13:00. The venue will be communicated to participants via email.
Instructors: Francesco Cecere, Senior Bioinformatic Researcher, and Eva Luna Tarallo, Junior Bioinformatic Researcher (UOS Laboratori di Ricerca e Biobanca AORN Santobono-Pausilipon IRCCS, Naples, Italy).
Short description
This tutorial offers a hands-on introduction to how biological and clinical data are organized, analyzed, and turned into clinically meaningful findings. Starting from the organization of metadata and biobanking, participants will follow a real dataset through an expression analysis to identify candidate biomarkers with downstream interpretation. Each module will be connected back to rare disease and cancer biology in a pediatric point of view, highlighting what makes them challenging as data analysis.
Requirements
– No coding required for most activities, everything will use pre-built and/or interactive materials.
-Basic familiarity with R is helpful for participants who want to follow the scripts or explore the analysis in more depth.
– A laptop to access the interactive materials during hands-on sessions.
Training #2: Introduction to Biological Network Analysis and Robustness Assessment
October 21st, 9:00-13:00. The venue will be communicated to participants via email.
Instructors: Annamaria Carissimo, Senior Researcher, Istituto per le Applicazione del Calcolo “M.Picone”, National Research Council of Italy, Naples, Italy; and Valeria Policastro, Junior Assistant Professor Department of Political Science, University of Naples ”Federico II”, Naples, Italy.
Short description
This tutorial will introduce the fundamental concepts of biological network analysis, including graph representation, network topology, community detection, and clustering evaluation. Participants will learn the principles of network robustness and explore how perturbation-based strategies can be used to assess the stability and reliability of community structures identified in biological networks. The tutorial will illustrate the idea that biologically meaningful communities should be preserved under controlled modifications of the network, whereas unstable partitions may indicate spurious or poorly supported patterns. Through hands-on examples, participants will learn how to evaluate the robustness of communities detected by different network clustering approaches, compare alternative network partitions, and interpret robustness measures in biological contexts. Applications to large-scale biological datasets, including single-cell transcriptomics data, will be presented to demonstrate how robustness analysis can improve the validation and interpretation of network-based discoveries.
Requirements
• Basic knowledge of R programming.
• Participants should bring a laptop with R and RStudio installed.
• No prior experience in network analysis is required.
Training #3: Hello, nf-core!
October 23rd, 14:30-18:30. The venue will be communicated to participants via email.
Instructor: Margherita Mutarelli, staff researcher, Institute of Applies Sciences and Intelligent Systems “Eduardo Caianiello”, Pozzuoli, Italy.
Short description
A hands-on introduction to nf-core, the community-curated collection of Nextflow pipelines built around open development, testing, and peer review. Through guided exercises, participants will run an existing nf-core pipeline, look under the hood at how it’s structured, and learn the essentials of the nf-core template: using pre-built community modules, writing your own, and adding input validation with nf-schema.
The aim is to give you the main concepts and the confidence to start building modular, scalable, and reproducible pipelines the nf-core way.