2026-08-13 –, Room 4
The BioJulia organization began as Bio.jl circa January 2014 (julia v0.2 era) and has grown into a loosely organized collection of packages for computational biology, from plotting protein structures (BioMakie.jl) to performing matrix manipulations on single-cell RNA sequencing data (SingleCellProjections.jl) to low-level biological file type I/O (Automa.jl, FASTX.jl, XAM.jl). Here, we will provide a brief history of the Org and recent efforts to provide more structure for the community, as well as growth areas and a vision for the future.
Computational biology has a rich history, and in many ways julia is an ideal language for working biologists, as it provides high-level interactivity, an excellent data stack, and the ability to optimize low-level performance. Yet growth of the Bio community has been slow. The purpose of this talk is threefold:
- To provide a history of the organization, highlighting the unique aspects of julia for computational biology development, and the contributions that BioJulia community members have made to the broader julia ecosystem.
- To describe recent and on-going efforts to improve the structure of the organization and community.
- To share a vision for the future growth of BioJulia, and to solicit feedback from the community on priorities and opportunities for outreach.
Kevin Bonham asked his first Stack Overflow question about dictionaries in julia in June of 2014, and has been an active contributor across the julia ecosystem for more than 10 years. He became an admin of BioJulia sometime around 2020.
I am an assistant professor at Tufts Medical Center with nearly 11 years in computational biology and bioinformatics, much of that time spent coding in Julia. I study the relationship between the gut microbiome and human development. I am a co-maintainer of the BioJulia organization and maintain or contribute to packages in the Biology, Data, Ecology, and Statistics ecosystems, and have worked on educational material for Pumas.ai and JuliaHub.