Election of ABACBS Committee Members
Statements by candidates

Candidates for Ordinary Member

Nicola Armstrong (WA)

I was elected as an ordinary member of the ABACBS executive in April 2016 and would like to be re-elected to the executive committee in 2018. I believe it is essential that teaching academics are involved in the society, as well as representatives from outside the main bioinformatics centres in Australia. In the next year, I hope to continue working with others on the committee to promote bioinformatics as both a profession and a research discipline across the country.

I am a statistician by training, and my research focus has always been statistical applications in the fields of genetics and genomics. I have lived in the US, the Netherlands and Australia and have worked at both medical research institutes and universities. I am also mum to 3 boys aged 11 and under.

I was heavily involved in the bioinformatics community in Sydney for several years, where I started the Bioinformatics User Group (BUG) meetings at the Garvan/VCCRI as well as organising the Sydney Bioinformatics Research Symposium from 2011-14. In 2015 I was the co-convenor of both the ABACBS conference and BioInfoSummer. 2015 was also the year I relocated (back) to Perth, where I am a Senior Lecturer in Statistics at Murdoch University and the co-ordinator for the Bioinformatics unit taught as part of the Biostatistics Collaboration of Australia postgraduate program. In March 2017, I organised the first and very successful ABACBS event in WA and I will be the convenor of BioInfoSummer 2018, which will be held in Perth for the first time next year.

I am committed to developing the career prospects of bioinformaticians through mentoring, outreach and education. I believe that we need to create a strong sense of community and purpose within our discipline. I am also a firm believer in equity and representation for all.

I am currently the only teaching academic on the committee, which I believe gives me a unique perspective that is essential to representing all areas of bioinformatics. I am very keen to continue my involvement with ABACBS and advocating for bioinformatics in Australia, and hope to be re-elected to do so.

Ben Goudey (VIC)

I am an early-career researcher working at IBM Research - Australia, focusing on the application of existing and novel machine learning methods to genomic and other high-throughput biological data. I have been working in computational biology since 2007 and was awarded my Ph.D. in 2016 in Computer Science at the University of Melbourne.
I passionately believe that events that bring people together are one of the best tools to help develop a strong community. Part of my belief for this comes from my role as President of COMBINE, from 2011-2013, where I helped to revive the then-dormant group, re-establishing links with funding bodies and the ISMB Student Council, and helping to regain recognition of the group. During this time, we ran numerous workshops, social events and symposiums, helped to build the foundations for what the group has grown into today. I would like to use these experiences to help strengthen our professional community through participation in the ABACBS committee.
Working outside of a purely-academic setting has given me exposure to a range of issues including communicating scientific ideas to non-academic audiences, converting research ideas into protectable intellectual property and the challenges in building research links between universities and industry. However, as an early-career researcher, many of my personal concerns remain the same as a traditional post-doc: concerns about research career opportunities in Australia, building a strong scientific network and managing work and life balance, especially given I have a young family.
I am applying for a position on the ABACAS committee with the hope that my role as an industry-based early career researcher may help to provide a perspective not currently represented on the committee. In particular, I’d like to help:
- increase awareness about careers outside of traditional academic paths
- encourage greater connectivity between relevant industry and academic groups
- facilitate more networking and social events within the computational biology community
- provide representation for both early-career and non-academic computational biology professionals
I have always found the bioinformatics community within Australia to be extremely supportive and would love to give something back through participation on the ABACBS committee.

Alicia Oshlack (VIC)

I have been a bioinformatician for 14 years and I’m very passionate about the field. I lead a bioinformatics research group at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute where we work on many collaborative projects and develop methods in the areas of transcriptomics, epigenomics and clinical genomics. Members of my group come from a variety of backgrounds including computer science, statistics, physics, wet lab biology and software engineering.

It is important to me to ensure that the current students and early career researchers in bioinformatics and computational biology have meaningful careers, opportunities and future prospects in science in industry. I am also very passionate about building a collaborative and cohesive community of bioinformaticians in Australia as was demonstrated by our organisation of the inaugural ABiC meeting in 2014, the precursor to the ABACBS conference. I have extensive experience serving on professional society committees, having been a member of he Australasian Genomics Technology Association for 6 years. I am very committed to the discipline and to thinking of new and creative ways to engage and be successful.

David Powell (VIC)

I have been involved in bioinformatics research since my PhD in sequence alignment algorithms over 20 years ago. I have also worked in the tech industry for six years which has given me valuable experience that is often not possible from just working in academia.

Currently I lead a diverse research team of bioinformaticians and computational biologists, and I have invested significant effort at Monash University successfully advocating for support of our field as an area of research that needs to be both respected and funded properly. I wish to extend my advocacy of our community to the national level by joining the ABACBS committee. Also, it is important to me that bioinformaticians have a career path, and often this path will not follow the traditional academic track and I think that ABACBS has an important role to help define this for our field.

Candidates for Professional Bioinformatics Representative

Ben Goudey (VIC)

Roxane Legaie (VIC)

It has been a great pleasure being the interim Professional Bioinformatician Representative for the last 6 months and I would like to renew here my expression of interest.

Firstly, I would like to describe what I call a “professional bioinformatician”: working on a professional salary scale and/or not having a PhD degree. Although this definition is largely vague and up to each individual to consider themselves an academic or professional.

Over my 10 years career as a professional bioinformatician, I have often witnessed the lack of support and recognition given to us in comparison to our academic peers. Most positions, both at universities and outside the academic world, still give preference to candidates with a PhD degree, even if the position is not research focused. Similarly, most bioinformatics positions are funded through academic grants where the success rate of the candidates is based on their number of publications, whereas it is well known that most professional roles do not encourage or even allow the writing of papers.

Despite these challenges, professional bioinformaticians have often been acknowledged for their crucial input in the scientific world, in particular, for their critical role in indispensable and growing fields such as clinical genomics in diagnostic labs.

I am applying for the Professional Bioinformatician Representative positon because I believe it is essential that we retain professional bioinformaticians in the scientific community. In particular, I aim to achieve the following:

increase awareness about professional paths for junior bioinformaticians
provide advice and mentoring to students in bioinformatics related fields
encourage equal job opportunities for professional bioinformaticians
represent the interests of professional bioinformaticians in the planning of conferences, training events, workshops and so on.

Another important issue that is close to my heart is the gender gap in Science, in particular in IT related fields such as Bioinformatics. Using my experience with Women in Technology and R-Ladies, I would like to promote women in the field and provide them with tailored career advice.

Candidates for Post-doc Representative

Ralph Patrick (NSW)

None provided

Alan Rubin (VIC)

I am currently a postdoc in the Bioinformatics Division at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute. I received my PhD in 2013 from the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA where I worked with Phil Green. My primary research interests are functional genomics, genome technology, and cancer evolution.

For the last three years, I have been heavily involved in ECR advocacy and leadership. I served as President of the WEHI Postdoctoral Association where I focused on increasing opportunities for postdocs across the institute to learn new skills and network with professionals outside traditional academia. I organized the first Bioinformatics Miniconf at Linux Australia 2016 to build bridges between the bioinformatics and open source technology communities, and have been invited to participate again in 2018. I was also an organizer for the highly successful Postdoc Methods Symposium in 2015, which brought together ECRs from across the Melbourne area and an ABACBS regional event in Melbourne in 2017, Joining the Dots: the Art and Science of Data Visualisation, which brought together researchers from the sciences and digital humanities.

Being from the United States, I bring an international perspective that would be helpful as the society continues to develop global connections and support other scientists transitioning from overseas. With a daughter in primary school, I have experienced some of the difficulties ECRs face when trying to manage both career and family obligations.

As current ABACBS ECR Representative, I have made sure our diverse concerns are voiced and helped the society advocate on our behalf with the NHMRC, ARC, and other funding bodies.

Candidate for Student Representative

Leah Roberts (QLD)

Candidate for Treasurer

Annette Mcgrath (QLD)

Candidate for Secretary

Joshua Ho (NSW)

Candidate for Vice President

Aaron Darling (NSW)

Candidate for President

Tony Papenfuss (VIC)

I have worked in computational biology / bioinformatics for 17 years—initially in medical imaging and mathematical modelling, and since 2003 in comparative genomics, cancer genomics and other areas of bioinformatics. I run a joint lab at WEHI and the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, and am Head of the Computational Cancer Biology Program at Peter Mac and the Centre for Computational Biology at WEHI. My research spans bioinformatics methods development and computational biology, and has a strong focus on cancer research, but includes other diverse areas.

I was closely involved in the process of creating our national professional and scientific society from the time discussions about forming a new society began in early 2013. Together with a small group of committed individuals, I helped drive its formal creation in 2014 and was elected the inaugural president.

My aim for the society is for it to help develop and support a vibrant community in a responsible and sustainable way. In part, this is about vision: what should we be doing and how should it operate; what should our annual conference be like; how can we support diversity and career development; and so on. In part, it is about practicalities: running and supporting events means we need a bank account, commerce tools, website, and insurance so that event organisers are protected from financial liabilities. A quick look at the ABACBS website highlights the already remarkable and still growing number of activities and initiatives the society is now involved in.

I have been fortunate to work closely with many fantastic executive committee and sub-committee members, who have been wonderful to work with, have a passion for what they do and take their roles seriously. The society is still in a critical, formative phase. It cannot be fast and loose. It generally needs to operate through collective decision making and consensus-building, so that it is representative and taken seriously when it advocates on behalf of the community to funding agencies and government.

Election of ABACBS Committee MembersStatements by candidates