Skip to content

PSB 2026 — Keynotes and invited talks

Two keynotes, four "TERI Talks" (invited short talks), four session invited talks, and an NSF agency talk. Slot times from the official schedule PDF; keynote abstracts and bios from the keynote page.

Keynote 1 — Science keynote

Eric Green, MD, PhD — former Director, National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH Title: "From the Human Genome Project to the Realization of Genomic Medicine: Highlights from a ~35-Year Journey" Slot: Sunday, January 4, 12:00–1:00 p.m., Salon 2 & 3 · introduced by Teri Klein

Green directed NHGRI from 2009 to 2025 and spent more than 30 years at the institute — seven as Scientific Director, thirteen as Chief of the Genome Technology Branch, and twelve as founding Director of the NIH Intramural Sequencing Center. MD/PhD from Washington University in St. Louis (1987); elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2023.

A retrospective from the person who ran the US genomics program through its entire translational arc. For a corpus built around what genomics-derived models can and cannot yet do clinically, this is the institutional-memory counterweight to the meeting's foundation-model enthusiasm.

Luis Campos — Baker College Chair for the History of Science, Technology, and Innovation, Rice University Title: "The Best that Biochemistry and Starshine Can Do: Chance, Necessity, and Urgency" Slot: Tuesday, January 6, 7:25–8:30 p.m., Coconut Grove (following the banquet) · introduced by Russ Altman

Campos co-organized "The Spirit of Asilomar and the Future of Biotechnology," marking the 50th anniversary of the Asilomar conference on recombinant DNA. He wrote Radium and the Secret of Life (2015) and held the 4th Baruch S. Blumberg/NASA Chair of Astrobiology at the Library of Congress (2016–17).

Placing a historian of Asilomar in the ELSI keynote slot, in a year when the meeting's dominant theme is AI agents doing biology, is a pointed piece of programming.

TERI Talks

Invited short talks, from the schedule PDF. No titles were printed.

Speaker Affiliation Slot
Marina Sirota UC San Francisco Mon Jan 5, 8:40 a.m.
Mildred Cho Stanford University Mon Jan 5, 9:10 a.m.
Satoru Miyano Institute of Tokyo / University of Tokyo (as printed) Tue Jan 6, 8:40 a.m.
Yun Liu Google Tue Jan 6, 9:10 a.m.

Session invited talks

Speaker Session Slot
Anne O'Donnell-Luria Precision Medicine Sun Jan 4, 9:10 a.m.
Martin Steinegger Biological Molecular Function Sun Jan 4, 3:40 p.m.
Wenyi Wang Systems Biology & Network Analysis Mon Jan 5, 9:50 a.m.
Katie Shilton Fairness and Bias Wed Jan 7, 8:50 a.m.

Neither affiliations nor talk titles were printed in the schedule for these four.

Agency talk

Sorin Draghici, PhD — Program Director, Division of Information and Intelligent Systems, CISE Directorate, National Science Foundation Title: "A View from National Science Foundation" Slot: Sunday, January 4, 2:00–2:30 p.m., plus an open Meet-and-Greet Monday Jan 5, 1:00–2:30 p.m.

Other program items

  • Research Parasite Awards (funded by GigaScience, Jeff Stibel, Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Canon, and Drs. Casey and Anna Greene) and Research Symbiont Awards (Wellcome Trust, DragonMaster Foundation) — both acknowledged in the preface. 2026 recipients could not be verified; no award talk appears on the schedule.
  • "Real Magic Show" by Jonathan Chen at the banquet (Tue Jan 6, 6:45 p.m.)
  • Two optional art "Creativity Breaks" with BJ Morrison McKay
  • Waikoloa Dry Forest Initiative field visit (Tue Jan 6, 3:30–5:00 p.m.)

Open items

  • [ ] TERI Talk titles are unpublished — recoverable only from the video archive, if those talks were recorded.
  • [ ] Confirm which talks the YouTube playlist actually contains; PSB commits only to recording keynotes.
  • [ ] Identify the 2026 Research Parasite / Research Symbiont recipients.

Sources