Greetings from Berlin

In December 2024, Yaron Trink traveled to Berlin as part of a collaboration between the Israeli Society for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (ISBCB) and Max Delbruck Center in Germany. Trink, a PhD student at Prof. Tomer Kalisky’s lab, spent three weeks in Berlin where he collaborated with German researchers and physicians from Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin hospital. “We employed unsupervised machine learning to characterize processes of deterioration in MS patients,” Yaron explains. “We used these methods to automatically divide patients into groups and characterize the specific process of deterioration in each sub-group.”

Yaron, 31, originally from Beit Shemesh, resides in Tel-Aviv with his wife Hana. He completed his bachelor’s degree in biophysics at Bar-Ilan University. He then joined Prof. Kalisky’s lab on a dual master’s/PhD track. “Our research focuses on characterizing heterogeneity in renal cancer such as renal cell carcinoma and Wilms tumors,” he explains. “We employ unsupervised learning techniques to explore latent spaces in different biological modalities, such as single cell RNA sequencing. Our current focus is on analyzing transcription factor regulatory networks to uncover how different genes collaborate to drive the progression of cancer.

In September 2024, Yaron approached ISBCB and offered to participate in a research project being conducted at the Max Delbruck Center in Berlin, in collaboration with the Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin university hospital. “They were looking for doctoral students with machine learning experience, and it sounded like a very interesting opportunity,” he says. “The project enabled me to use various methods which I studied in different courses at the Faculty of Engineering and ones we’ve developed at Tomer’s lab in the process of working on my PhD project, and I was privileged to have to opportunity to work with researchers and physicians from leading German institutions. We hope to continue this collaboration in Israel as well, and anticipate that it will benefit MS patients.”