GCC2026 Highlighted Talks

Welcome to the highlighted talks for the 2026 Galaxy Community Conference. These keynote sessions bring together distinguished researchers, institutional leaders, and funding agency representatives to discuss strategic directions, large-scale infrastructure challenges, and opportunities for institutional collaboration. These presentations are designed for principal investigators, research directors, and senior scientists seeking to understand how Galaxy can advance institutional research priorities and support successful grant applications.

Galaxy Live! See Galaxy in action, on the stage!

Galaxy Live! showcases Galaxy's enterprise-level capabilities and institutional scalability through a real-world demonstration. This session illustrates how Galaxy's infrastructure supports large-scale research programs, facilitates multi-investigator collaborations, and enables reproducible workflows that satisfy funding agency requirements. Senior researchers will gain insights into Galaxy's capacity to handle institutional data management challenges, support diverse research teams, and provide the robust infrastructure needed for sustainable, grant-funded research programs.

Rayan Chikhi Talk title: Assembling and exploring the world's sequencing data for biological discovery Institut Pasteur, France

Rayan Chikhi is a computer scientist and group leader at Institut Pasteur, where he heads the Sequence Bioinformatics research group in the Department of Computational Biology. His research focuses on algorithms and data structures for large-scale analysis of biological sequences, with particular emphasis on genome assembly, k-mer-based methods, and scalable indexing of massive sequencing collections. Dr. Chikhi received his PhD in Computer Science from ENS Rennes in 2012. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Penn State University, he joined CNRS and later founded his research group at Institut Pasteur in 2019. He is the recipient of an ERC Consolidator Grant (IndexThePlanet, 2023-2028). He initiated the Logan project, an assembly and index of petabase-scale public DNA and RNA sequencing data, then used it to search the data at scale to discover new viruses and plastic-degrading enzymes.

Galaxy Community Update Highlights from the Galaxy community.

The Galaxy Community Update provides strategic insights into Galaxy's governance, funding landscape, and institutional adoption trends. This session highlights major institutional deployments, successful grant outcomes leveraging Galaxy infrastructure, and strategic partnerships between leading research organizations. Senior attendees will learn about Galaxy's roadmap priorities, opportunities for institutional influence on development directions, and models for sustainable Galaxy infrastructure at the institutional level. The session includes case studies of how major research institutions have successfully integrated Galaxy into their research computing strategies and secured funding for Galaxy-based research programs.

Panel Discussion Engage with a group of panelists to discuss hot Galaxy topics.

The Panel Discussion convenes principal investigators, research directors, and institutional leaders to discuss strategic challenges in scaling data-intensive research infrastructure. Topics include funding strategies for computational biology infrastructure, institutional models for sustainable Galaxy deployments, approaches to multi-PI collaborative research, and navigating funding agency requirements for open science and reproducibility. This interactive session provides a forum for senior researchers to share experiences, discuss strategic approaches, and engage directly with Galaxy leadership on institutional priorities and development roadmap decisions.

Galaxy in Research See how Galaxy is being used to help with some cutting-edge research.

This session showcases institutional success stories where Galaxy infrastructure has enabled major research breakthroughs, supported successful grant applications, and facilitated large-scale collaborative programs. Featured case studies highlight how principal investigators have leveraged Galaxy to secure funding, build sustainable research programs, meet funding agency requirements for reproducibility and data sharing, and establish productive multi-institutional collaborations.

Senior researchers will gain practical insights into positioning Galaxy in grant proposals, building institutional Galaxy capabilities, and demonstrating research impact to stakeholders and funding agencies. If your institution has achieved significant research outcomes using Galaxy, we encourage you to share your success story!