Wouter Saelens

Dr. Wouter Saelens is a postdoctoral researcher at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) working in the Deplancke Lab within the Center for Intelligent Systems (CIS). His research bridges molecular biology and advanced computational techniques.

His primary research interests focus on the interaction within and between cellular processes including differentiation and cell cycle, examining multiple molecular layers such as transcriptome, proteome, and chromatin accessibility. He specializes in combining probabilistic modeling with neural networks to deepen understanding of omics data and genetic variation.

Dr. Saelens' work contributes to the advancement of precision medicine through developing approaches that extract more information from DNA accessibility data by combining neural networks with Bayesian inference. His research aims to improve predictive power for genetic variations underlying diseases and study multifactorial effects of genetic perturbations on cellular phenotypes.

As a molecular biologist by training who began integrating machine learning during his PhD studies, his research represents an important interdisciplinary approach to understanding complex biological systems through computational frameworks.