2025 DeMets Lectures
The 9th annual DeMets Lectures will consist of one presentation titled AI Methods in Biomedicine.
Date: November 20, 2025
Location: Morgridge Hall Seminar Room (7560 Morgridge Hall)
Time: 12:30-1:30 pm.
In-person only
Poster: DeMets_LecturePoster2025-final
Abstract: This talk surveys a spectrum of AI approaches for biomedicine—from classical methods to current deep-learning techniques and emerging extensions involving agents and quantum computing. It focuses on modeling gene-regulatory and cell-communication networks to interpret brain disease, describing how cell-type–specific networks can be constructed from single-cell QTLs and co-expression data and then embedded into deep-learning frameworks to predict disease from genotype, prioritize pathways and genes, and model perturbations for drug-target discovery. The talk then highlights new LLM applications, including automatic code generation and benchmarking (Biocoder), collaborative multi-expert clinical reasoning (MedAgents), and end-to-end single-cell analysis workflows (CellForge). Finally, it addresses genomic-privacy challenges—first through classical approaches such as homomorphic encryption and hidden Markov models, and then through a quantum-computing framework that enables distributed genomic analysis without exposing individual-level data.
2025 DeMets Lecture Speaker
Mark Gerstein, PhD
Albert L Williams Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Professor of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry, of Computer Science, and of Statistics & Data Science
Mark Gerstein, PhD is the Albert L Williams Professor of Biomedical Informatics, and Professor of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry, of Computer Science, and of Statistics and Data Science. Dr. Gerstein earned his PhD in Biophysics and Chemistry from Cambridge University, followed by a postdoc in Bioinformatics at Stanford University.
Dr. Gerstein joined Yale University as assistant professor in 1997 and has served in a number of roles, including co-director of the Yale Computational Biology and Biomedical Informatics Program. His research interests focus on biomedical data science, machine learning, macromolecular simulation, human genome annotation & disease genomics, and genomic privacy.
Dr. Gerstein has been elected as Fellow in three organizations: the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAIA – 2024), International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB – 2015), and American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS – 2009). In 2023, he received the Accomplishments by a Senior Scientist Award from ISCB. He serves on a number of editorial boards, including PL0S Comp Bio, Genome Biology, Molecular Systems Biology, BMC Bioinformatics, Molecular and Cellular Proteomics, Protein Science and Molecular Biology & Evolution. He is the co-head of the Big Data & Analytics Section for the open access publishing platform F1000.
He has served on a number of committees, including co-chairing the NHGRI Analysis Working Group, several federal committees and study sections, and has been a trustee of the Churchill Cambridge Scholarship since 2022.