Old Members’ Trust Graduate Conference and Academic Travel Fund report  – Nic Steyn (2021, Modern Statistics and Statistical Machine Learning)

This spring I had the good fortune to attend the 2025 edition of the BioInference Conference. This is a small conference that has previously been held in Oxford and Warwick, although this time it shifted to Bardonecchia in Italy, to be closer to collaborators in Italy that had previously travelled to the UK.

This conference has always contained a fantastic mix of research topics, focusing on statistical inference in a range of biological and medical applications. This year included talks on  genetic discovery, scalable analysis of omics data, GPU-based implementations of Gaussian processes, physics-informed reinforcement learning, and many other topics. The mixture of novel methodology and a diverse range of applications allow connections to be drawn between topics and fields in ways that often aren’t possible in more specialised conferences.

My talk presented recent work on using sequential Monte Carlo methods (highly flexible methods for general statistical inference on time series data) to epidemic renewal models. As the paper the talk is based on (under review at Statistics in Medicine) is a primer, the talk was also presented as an introduction to the topics. This sparked a variety of interesting conversations afterwards with people who could see applications of these methods to their own fields. My talk was also voted the best early career researcher talk at the conference.

It was also great to reconnect with researchers who had attended previous editions of the conference. These people come from Italy, the UK, and beyond, and it is always a privilege to maintain and grow these academic relationships, particularly I prepare to shift into the next phase of my academic career.

Finally, as the conference was held in the mountains, networking activities included a hike on the second day. In addition to this, I also managed to hike to France and back during the lunch break on one day, making it back in time for a very interesting poster session.

Thank you to the Trustees of the Old Member’s Graduate Conference and Academic Travel Fund for allowing me to attend yet another incredible Bioinference conference!

Published: 4 July 2025

Explore Univ on social media