2026-07-15 –, S1
This talk traces a meandering story of twenty years of invention, triumph and disaster, touching on theoretical physics, cloud computing, viral genetics, pandemic responses, and nearly dying in an NHS A&E queue. You'll pick up four generally applicable laws of complex systems, gain some superpowers for averting an apocalypse, and hopefully laugh a bit along the way. This isn't much of a technical talk and it is neither sanitised nor triumphant — expect sarcasm, most of all during the rough patches. My hope is that you'll leave seeing your own work differently, especially if it's quiet and unglamorous. Resilience is a property of systems, not their components, and it's the people who notice small changes and tend locally who make the biggest differences of all.
Imogen Wright (they/them) is a South African software engineer and bioinformatician who has spent the last two decades trying to make complex systems behave—in theoretical physics, HIV drug resistance and COVID genomics, healthcare communications, cloud technologies and even ad tech. They studied computer science and physics at Rhodes University, completed a masters in theoretical physics at the Perimeter Institute (where Stephen Hawking was guest of honour at their graduation), and earned a PhD in bioinformatics from the University of the Western Cape. Imogen co-founded Hyrax Biosciences, whose Exatype software helps track HIV drug resistance across Africa and assembled the first Omicron variant SARS-CoV-2 genomes. Their work has been recognised by the Innovation Prize for Africa, various publications, two patents, and a long list of disasters that now fuel their favourite stories.