Extending Genomic Language Models to Microbial Communities and Drug Design

Wednesday, October 29, 2025

2:30 PM-4:00 PM

BIOMED Seminar

Title:
Extending Genomic Language Models to Microbial Communities and Drug Design
    
Speaker:
Gail Rosen, PhD
Professor
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
College of Engineering 
Drexel University 

Details:
Microbes are found in every nook and cranny of the world and regulate the planetary carbon and oxygen cycles that are vital to life. Through high-throughput DNA/RNA sequencing, we can collect a vast amount of data about communities of microbes in diverse environments. 

In this talk, I will discuss development of genomic language models (GLMs) to tackle the first step in understanding this vast amount of data for taxonomy/gene identification, including antimicrobial resistance. Then, I will  demonstrate our efforts to predict overall microbiome phenotype from metagenomic data and drug interactions using omics data. Finally, I will address uncertainty quantification and scalability of GLMs that will enhance their utility and sustainability.

Biosketch:
Gail Rosen received a BS, MS, and PhD from the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is a recipient of an NSF CAREER award, a Drexel Faculty Career Development award, and Drexel Provost's Fellowship. Dr. Rosen serves on the editorial board of the Association for Microbiology's mSystems, BMC Microbiome, and IEEE TCBB journals. She heads the Ecological and Evolutionary Signal-processing and Informatics (EESI) lab, organizes the Center for Biological Discovery from Big Data, and serves on the board and is a founding member of the University Research Computing Facility at Drexel. 

Dr. Rosen co-organized the 2025 ACM Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics conference by using her experience organizing a 2-week Drexel-Rowan-UChicago Biological Data Science summer workshops, which reached 10,000+ participants around the world in the pandemic. Her sabbaticals have been at Weill Cornell Medicine and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Dr. Rosen's interests are in machine learning, microbes, and evolution.

Contact Information

Carolyn Riley
cr63@drexel.edu