Hi, I’m Gerry Ma, Technology and Development Manager here at Millennium Science. I joined Millennium Science a few months ago, having come from commercial roles across the flow cytometry, single-cell genomics, and spatial transcriptomics fields. I now spend a good portion of my time talking to scientists and technology developers about where the field is heading and what tools ANZ researchers need to do their best work. 

In early June, I attended two conferences back-to-back: the Festival of Genomics (FOG) in Boston, and the European Association for Cancer Research congress (EACR) in Budapest. Two very different audiences (genomics and AI in Boston; translational cancer research in Budapest), but the overlap in themes was more striking than the differences.

This is the first in a short series of Field Signals blogs where I’ll share what stayed with me. Not a comprehensive conference review, but the observations I kept coming back to upon returning home, and the ones I think matter most for how research is going to look over the next few years. 

Before diving into the technical themes, I wanted to share one personal highlight that set the tone for everything else. 

At FOG, George Church (Harvard Medical School), Mark Adams (The Jackson Laboratory for Genomics Medicine), and Sorin Istrail (Brown University) discussed the future of genomics in a session that also served as a tribute to the late J. Craig Venter, who was originally meant to speak. Their conversation ranged across multiomics, in situ genomics, xenotransplantation, national-scale sequencing programmes, and the role of AI in biological data at population scale. 

But what stayed with me was simpler than any of those topics. Watching three scientists who shaped the field reflect on the history of genomics and past conversations with Craig Venter was a reminder that the technologies we now take for granted were built by people who had genuine scientific progress as their primary motivation, and who thought in decades rather than quarters. 

That framing stuck with me through both conferences. The decisions being made right now about how we integrate multiple data types from different platforms, how we standardise methods, and how we shift toward new experimental models are the decisions that will define the trajectory of the next decade of biological research. These decisions deserve the same kind of long-term thinking.

Over the next few posts, I’ll unpack the themes that came through most clearly: 

• Part 2 will cover the convergence of multiomic workflows and the maturing spatial biology landscape. 

• Part 3 looks at AI integration and a quieter but potentially more consequential shift in experimental models. 

• Part 4 wraps up with a personal perspective on why mechanistic depth still matters more than breadth.