About
The Institut Convergence INCEPTION is organizing its 6th annual meeting on next 24 and 25 November. This is an opportunity to 
present and discuss the progress of the projects launched within the institute. We are pleased to welcome two keynote speakers:
Erica Charters from Oxford University who will deliver a lecture on How epidemics end
and
Alexander Pritzel from DeepMind who will talk about AlphaFold, the AI system revolutionizing research in biology
Join us at the Institut Pasteur-Paris – Auditorium François Jacob on 24 and 25 November, 2022. Registration is free but mandatory (deadline on November 17th) : Meeting registration
Contact: maha.david[a]pasteur.fr
Keynote Speakers’ Biographies
Erica Charters is Professor of Global History of Medicine at the University of Oxford. Her research examines the history of war, disease, and bodies, particularly in the British and French empires. In the context of COVID-19, she is coordinating a multidisciplinary project on How Epidemics End. More specifically, her research focuses on manpower during the eighteenth century, examining the history of bodies as well as the history of methods used to measure and enhance bodies, labour, and population as a whole, including the history of statistics. Since disease was the biggest threat to manpower in the early modern world, she looks at how disease environments – throughout the world – shaped military, commercial, and agricultural power, as well as how overseas experiences shaped European theories of medicine, biology, and race alongside political methodologies such as statistics and censuses.
Alexander Pritzel holds a PhD in Theoretical High Energy Physics from Ludwig-Maximilians-University. He is Staff Research Scientist at DeepMind working on AlphaFold, an AI system that predicts a protein’s 3D structure from its 1D amino acid sequence. This is the first computational approach capable of predicting protein structures to near experimental accuracy in a majority of cases. In doing so, AlphaFold has solved the “protein folding problem”, a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology.
DeepMind and EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) have created AlphaFold database to make the predictions freely available to the scientific community.