Variant Effects Seminar Series (VESS)

In this series, early-career scientists from around the globe share and discuss their research related to interpreting human genetic variation. Seminars are held on the 1st Tuesday each month from 9-10am Pacific (4-5pm UTC).

NEXT SEMINAR: May 5th, 2026

9-10am Pacific timezone converter

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Previous Seminars

Upcoming Speakers

Towards predictive models of variant effects on protein abundance (by learning from mutational scanning on different proteins)

Thea Schulze

Joe Greener Lab - MCR Laboratory of Molecular Biology (UK)

Presentation Date: 5 May 2026 1st speaker

EVENT FLYER for VESS_May_2026

Thea did her PhD research in the Lindorff-Larsen lab at the University of Copenhagen and is currently a postdoc with Joe Greener at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. During her PhD, Thea researched how missense variation affects the cellular abundance of a protein. Concretely, she combined data from abundance MAVEs (VAMP-seq) on several proteins to study the cellular abundance of variants across protein backgrounds. Thea's talk will focus on what can be learned from such large-scale analyses and why it can be difficult to combine variant scores from several MAVEs to supervise variant effect predictors.

Social: @tkschulze.bsky.social

Modeling variant effects in FACS-based deep mutational scans with Lilace

Jerome Freudenberg (He/Him)

Pimentel Lab, UCLA (USA)

Presentation Date: 5 May 2026 2nd speaker

EVENT FLYER for VESS_May_2026

Jerome is a Bioinformatics PhD student in the Pimentel lab at UCLA. He is interested in models that use experimentally induced and natural genetic variation to understand the foundations of human traits and disease. His research focuses on modeling variant effects with deep mutational scanning data.

Social: @jeromics.bsky.social

Seminar series FAQ's

When is it?

1st Tuesday of each month (9am Pacific)
Start time is 9am Pacific (timezone converter)
We have members and presenters from around the globe (multiple time zones)
Our inaugural seminar was Tuesday, September 7th, 2021

Who presents?

Early career scientists: Students, postdocs, and new faculty (<1 year in position)

If you are interested in presenting or would like to recommend someone, please fill out this online SPEAKER NOMINATION FORM

What is the format?

One hour long virtual meetings (zoom)
Each month, two presenters discuss their work in 20-minute talks, followed by lively Q&A sessions.
Questions from the audience can be asked using chat or Q&A during the webinar
AVE members can also follow / continue conversations on our VESS AVE Slack Channel (#variant-effects-seminar-series)

Who can attend?

Our meetings are over Zoom and anyone is welcome to attend.
We use the webinar format, but participants can ask the speaker questions using the chat or Q&A

Do you need to be a member of AVE to attend?

Anyone can attend. However, if you are interested in becoming a member of the Alliance, please sign up > HERE

Who are the organizers?

The Variant Effect Seminar Series Committee members are listed here https://www.varianteffect.org/vess-committee/

Are the talks recorded?

If speakers consent, the recordings will be publicly available on our YouTube channel
Speakers can also now link their VESS talks to bioRxiv preprints!
You can also find a list of previous speakers and talks > HERE

Where can I find the zoom link and calendar invite link?

Here! > VESS ZOOM LINK
and here! > Add these events to your calendar.

Future Seminars

We are looking for speakers, including students, postdocs, and new faculty (<1 year in position)!!

If you are interested in presenting or would like to recommend someone, please fill out this online >> SPEAKER NOMINATION FORM

or contact one of the VESS Organizers on our AVE slack channel!

(sign up to become a member and join conversations on slack https://www.varianteffect.org/membership/)