Team

Group leader

From April 2026, I will be a group leader at the VIB Center for AI & Computational Biology and a professor at the Department of Mathematics, Computer Science, and Statistics at Ghent University. I am a member of ELLIS, a European network of machine-learning researchers.

I studied computer science and theoretical physics in St. Petersburg, Russia, and in 2013 obtained PhD in bioengineering from Imperial College London. I then worked as a postdoc at the Champalimaud Centre in Lisbon, and later as a group leader at the Hertie AI institute at Tübingen University.

I am interested in developing machine-learning tools that can help to make sense of biological data, with particular focus on dimensionality reduction, manifold learning, and contrastive learning. I am often driven by trying to understand how certain machine-learning methods work, when they succeed and when they fail, and how to make them more transparent. Apart from that, I am interested in statistical forensics and have been involved in the analysis of electoral falsifications, Covid- and war-related excess mortality, and LLM adoption for academic writing.