May 2020: Guy Kol speaks in the first virtual Salon

The sixth Edmond J. Safra Biomedical Informatics Entrepreneurs Salon (and the first online salon) took place on May 7 2020. Some 55 participants from academia and industry joined the meeting via Zoom.

Prof. Ron Shamir, head of the Edmond J. Safra Center, opened the event. Prof. Noam Shomron, Edmond J. Safra Center member (Medicine) and Chair of the Salon organizing committee, introduced the speaker, Mr. Guy Kol, co-Founder and VP R&D of NRGene.

Guy gave an exciting talk titled "NRGene: Better analysis of the global natural genomic diversity to supply the world with more food". He described his professional history, starting from MSc studies at TAU and culminating in the foundation of NRGene, with the mission to build cutting edge analytical solutions for improved crop production based on very large scale genomic data. The solutions, incorporated in leaders of the Ag-Biotech industry, aim to use bioinformatics to improve plants and animals. The talk featured NRGene’s cloud-based bioinformatics platform that is currently used by several of the largest seed companies in the world. Guy described the theoretical and practical considerations that drive the software development process and NRGene’s journey from a concept to a global company. The talk was followed by Q&A.

The Salon series, an initiative of the Center launched last year, is a forum to promote entrepreneurship at the convergence of biology, medicine, and computing. It aims to create a meeting, interaction and networking forum for academics, industry, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists interested in joining together biology, medicine and computing. The series is a collaboration with the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and the BIES series.

For the talk click here.