Co-Director, Dr. Adi L. Tarca will deliver a talk: Crowdsourcing-based Assessment of Machine Learning in Genomics followed by Q & A with MDS students Yikun Han and Zehua Wang (and faculty advisor Prof. Ambuj Tewari), who placed top (in a remarkable 4-way tie for 1st place) in the international DREAM Challenge this year.

DREAM Challenges use crowd-sourcing to solve complex biomedical research questions. Questions can be in any field as long as they are of broad interest to the research community and finding solutions can have a high impact on human health or understanding biological questions. Researchers from around the world can propose questions, which the DREAM Challenge Directors then evaluate. Over 30,000 individuals from around the world – with vastly diverse backgrounds and multi-disciplinary interests – have participated in or benefited from our Challenges.

Dr. Adi L. Tarca’s research interests lie at the intersection of computational biology, machine learning, and maternal-fetal medicine. He serves as a tenured Professor in the Center for Molecular Medicine and Genetics at Wayne State University (WSU). Previously, until 2023, he was the founding Head of the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Unit at the Perinatology Research Branch (NICHD/NIH). Dr. Tarca earned his PhD from Laval University, Quebec, where he developed methods for integrating qualitative prior knowledge into neural network training. After transitioning to bioinformatics, he developed several methods and R/Bioconductor software packages for omics data preprocessing, pathway analysis, and predictive modeling.

Dr. Tarca’s machine learning pipelines for genomics have achieved top rankings in several prestigious competitions, including the sbv IMPROVER Diagnostic Signature Challenge (2012), Species Translation Challenge (2013), Systems Toxicology Challenge (2016), and DREAM Single-cell Transcriptomics Challenge (2018). More recently, he led the DREAM Preterm Birth Prediction Challenge: Transcriptomics (2019) and the Placental Clock DREAM Challenge (2024), pioneering efforts to develop predictive tools for obstetrical diseases. This year, he joined the board of directors of DREAM Challenges, supporting the community in advancing machine learning applications in biology. Dr. Tarca has published over 225 articles and patents, with his work receiving more than 16,000 citations (h-index 66).