Keynote Speakers
Introducing our 2025 keynote speakers, Dr. Facundo M. Fernández and Dr. Olatomiwa Bifarin!
Prof. Facundo M. Fernández is the Regents’ Professor and Vasser-Woolley Chair in Bioanalytical Chemistry in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his BSc and MSc in Chemistry from the Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Universidad de Buenos Aires in 1995, and his PhD in Analytical Chemistry from the same University, in 1999. Between 2000 and 2001, he was a postdoc in the research group of Richard N. Zare in the Department of Chemistry at Stanford University. Between 2002-2003, he joined the group of Vicki Wysocki in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Arizona as a senior postdoc and then research scientist. Prof. Fernandez is internationally renowned for his work in bioanalytical chemistry, with his research focusing on the development of new tools for assaying small volume samples, tissues, and single cells, and applying such methods to better understanding diseases such as cancer, CF and IBD. He is the author of 225+ peer-reviewed publications, has presented 225+ invited lectures, and graduated 31 Ph.D. and M.Sc. students. He is also the academic director for the Systems Mass Spectrometry Core (SyMS-C) at the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech, where he oversees a portfolio of 10+ mass spectrometers from most major vendors. He has received several awards, including the NSF CAREER award, the CETL/BP Teaching award, the Ron A. Hites best paper award from the American Society for Mass Spectrometry, and the Beynon award from Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry, among others. He serves on the editorial board of The Analyst and as an Associate editor for the Journal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry and Frontiers in Chemistry. His current research team of ~15 people is interested in metabolomics, development of new ionization sources, MS imaging, machine learning and ion mobility spectrometry. The research is supported by agencies such as NIH, NSF, NASA, IARPA and DoD. In his free time, he enjoys camping and off-roading with his family, kayaking, and climbing summits to connect with other nerdy people using a tiny ham radio.
Olatomiwa is currently a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Fernández Lab at Georgia Institute of Technology, specializing in the application of machine learning and AI to metabolomics research. In 2012, he earned a BSc degree in Microbiology from Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria. Following his graduation, he briefly taught Biology at a high school in Nigeria before moving to the United States to pursue an MS degree in Biotechnology at the Catholic University of America, which he completed in 2015. Subsequently, he received a Ph.D. degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Georgia, under the mentorship of Arthur Edison. During his time at the Edison Lab, he conducted research on xenobiotic metabolism in C. elegans and utilized metabolomics and machine learning to identify renal cell carcinoma biomarkers in urine samples. In the Fernández Lab at Georgia Tech, Olatomiwa has contributed to ovarian cancer metabolic biomarker discovery studies. He has also been instrumental in implementing automated machine learning and explainable AI in metabolomics data analysis pipeline. Currently, his research is centered on utilizing natural language processing (NLP) to delineate the landscape of metabolomics research, applying generative AI for data oversampling in metabolomics, and exploring agentic AI for scientific research automation. At his leisure he enjoys playing soccer, reading widely, creating video essays, writing AI apps, and maintaining an AI blog at theepsilon.substack.com.
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