Date/Time
Date(s) - 2 Dec 2026
6:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Location
Rewley House
Categories
Professor Daniel Wilson, MA, DPhil
Professor of Infectious Disease Genomics
Artificial intelligence promises to transform medicine, but in the fight against infection, being able to predict something is not the same as understanding it. In this talk, Danny Wilson shows how machine learning and traditional statistics each help “genome detectives” read bacterial DNA: tracing food poisoning back to its source, uncovering why bugs we carry harmlessly sometimes turn deadly, and predicting which antibiotics will still work. Along the way he asks what AI can and can’t tell us, why the best predictions aren’t always the best answers, and why there is cause for hope against bacterial infections that claim millions of lives each year.
Danny Wilson is Professor of Infectious Disease Genomics at the University of Oxford. He is Director of Studies in Data Science at Oxford Lifelong Learning, based at Rewley House, and a Fellow of St Cross College. He leads a research group at the Big Data Institute, part of Oxford Population Health, where his research combines data science, statistics and genomics to understand where bacterial infections come from, why they cause disease, who is most at risk, and how resistance to antibiotics arises. He works with the Modernising Medical Microbiology and leads Bugbank, a project linking microbiology data to UK Biobank and Our Future Health.
Agenda
18:30 – In person Reception
19:00 – Branch Announcements and Special Guests
19:30 – Christmas Lecture
