Date/Time
Date(s) - 22/01/2026
5:30 pm - 7:00 pm
Categories
Do you like scientific discussion? And how about Pizza?
If we gained your attention with ‘scientific’, or at least with ‘Pizza’, then you are already looking forward to the right event!
Pizza Club is a regularly held Journal Club event co-organized by The Representatives of the Doctoral Programme in Systems and Molecular Biomedicine, part of the Doctoral School in Science and Engineering (DSSE); and the Uni.lu student association ISCB RSG Luxembourg.
In short, Students (PhD candidates) present a scientific paper (+- 20 mins) they find interesting or that inspired the development of their individual PhD project (doesn’t need to be authored by the speaker).
There will be an open discussion round after each scientific presentation (2-3 students per event), followed by informal and fun chatting with some pizzas around!
Francesco Nasta (Francesco NASTA – LCSB – University of Luxembourg I Uni.lu)
Brief Bio:
I am Francesco Nasta, a third year PhD student in biomedical data science research specializing in cellular imaging and interpretable artificial intelligence for Parkinson’s Disease. My current work focuses on integrating biomedical data, such as imaging cellular data and bulk RNA sequencing data in an artificial intelligence pipeline, in order to classify brain organoids to identify the mutation of Parkinson’s Disease and interpret possible biomarkers.
Article Title and Link:
“Deep Learning Approaches for Morphological Classification of Intestinal Organoids (Ciccheri et al. 2025, Published in IEEE Access 2025)
Short Abstract:
Intestinal organoids reproduce key structural features of native tissue, but their visual assessment still relies heavily on manual inspection, which limits scalability and consistency. The study presents one of the most recent comparative analyses of cellular imaging classification using deep learning architectures. In this research, a large, publicly available, and curated dataset of intestinal organoid images deriving from four classes is used to benchmark six deep learning models and a vision transformer, alongside classical machine-learning approaches used as baselines. The results show how deep models are able to support the work of researchers with noteworthy performance, indicating which automated image-based methods are most effective for the classification task, and ultimately setting an important example of comparative study for biomedical data scientists interested in using these pipelines for research.
Mirco Macchi (Mirco MACCHI – LCSB – University of Luxembourg I Uni.lu)
Brief Bio:
I’m a third year PhD student in Biomedical Data Science (BDS) group. I work mainly with omics data. Specifically, I worked with the integration of transcriptomics and epigenetic data at single-cell level in Parkinson’s Disease. As next step in my PhD journey, I am now moving towards proteomics-level investigation. I like pizza of course, but also black coffee, and lifting heavy things.
Article Title and Link:
“The Foundational Data Initiative for Parkinson Disease: Enabling efficient translation from genetic maps to mechanism” (Bressan et al., Cell Genomics, 2023)
Short Abstract:
This study presents the largest systematic iPSC-based investigation in Parkinson’s disease to date, generating over 20 terabytes of multi-omics data from 95 cell lines differentiated into dopaminergic neurons. The researchers tackle a major challenge in genomics: how to translate the 90+ genetic risk variants identified by GWAS into actual biological mechanisms. By combining single-cell RNA-seq (416,000+ cells), single-cell ATAC-seq, bulk transcriptomics, epigenetics, and longitudinal imaging, they successfully identify disease-relevant candidate genes and demonstrate how iPSC-derived neurons can model complex genetic risk. The paper showcases best practices for multi-omics integration. It provides a publicly accessible data portal, making it an excellent case study for computational biologists interested in translating genetic discoveries into functional insights.
Moreover, each presentation of peer-reviewed papers will be rewarded by 0.5 ECTS!
If we attracted your interest by now, feel free to join the monthly Pizza Club, either as part of Audience or as a registered Speaker. For the latter, please kindly use this form to sign up as an upcoming Speaker, by choosing your category of paper and desired month to present. Looking forward to seeing you at the next Pizza Club!