Laurent Jacob

Laurent Jacob is a senior CNRS researcher based at the LCQB lab of Sorbonne Université in Paris. His work focuses on applying machine learning and statistics to address questions in genomics, particularly microbial and evolutionary genomics. He has contributed to advancing neural network models for biological sequences and developing methods like DBGWAS and CALDERA for genomic analysis.

Education: MSc in Machine Learning from ENS Paris-Saclay (2006), PhD from Mines ParisTech (2009). Postdoc at UC Berkeley (2010-2012). Previously affiliated with the LBBE lab at Université Lyon 1 until 2023.

Research interests include microbial genomics, drug resistance mechanisms, and evolutionary processes. He explores neural networks for sequence analysis and interpretable models in genomics.

Key contributions include Phyloformer for phylogeny estimation and SEISM for selective inference of sequence motifs. He has advised numerous PhD and MSc students in computational biology.

Active in organizing events like LEGEND conferences and the Sequence Analysis track at ISMB. His work bridges machine learning innovations with biological applications, emphasizing computational efficiency and interpretability.