HIDA Lecture: Understanding resistant bugs with AI
Speaker: Lara Urban, University of Zurich/ Helmholtz AI
Date: 18.11.2025, 10:00 am
Title: Squiggles to the rescue: How AI can support our understanding of resistant bugs
Abstract:
Nanopore sequencing holds the promise of integrating genomics in rapid One-Health frontline strategies at the intersection of environmental, animal, and global health.
In this lecture, Lara Urban will first show how nanopore sequencing can empower our understanding of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in the clinical and environmental setting.
She will then highlight the extant major shortcomings for rapidly translating nanopore data into actual frontline strategies and how leveraging raw nanopore data, or squiggles, and AI-based analysis might help us tackle these shortcomings.
Lara Urban
Lara Urban is a statistical geneticist and ecologist with a PhD in computational genomics from the University of Cambridge and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and independent research experience with the national Department of Conservation as a Humboldt Fellow in New Zealand.
Since 2022, she has led her own research group, now on the professorship track at the University of Zurich and its Food Safety and One Health Institutes and as invited member of the One Health Advisory Council of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, and previously as Helmholtz Principal Investigator at the Helmholtz AI Institute with a faculty position at the Technical University of Munich. Lara Urban was named the Young Scientist of the Year by the German Association of University Professors in 2023.
