A new decade for the professional bioinformatics community in Australia

Date/Time: Tuesday 23rd March 2021 at 12:00-1:30pm

Venue: Online (information will be sent to registered participants prior to the event)

RSVP: Please register for the event by 20th March 2021 by clicking here.

Event agenda

• ABACBS vision to develop the Australian professional bioinformatics community

  • Speaker: Dr Monther Alhamdoosh (Professional Bioinformatician Representative, ABACBS)

• Discussion panel on “A new decade for the professional bioinformatics community in Australia”

  • Panellists: Dr Denis Bauer (Group Lead, CSIRO), Dr Louise Carey (Principal Scientist, NSW Health), Dr David Wood (Head of Bioinformatics Operations, Microba), Dr Nathan Watson-Haigh (Deputy Head of Bioinformatics, SA Genomics Centre)

  • Facilitator: Ms Roxane Legaie (Lead Clinical Bioinformatician, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre)

• Form national working groups to address areas of interest for our community

  • Areas to be covered: Workforce issues, bioinformatics role definition and accreditation, industry bioinformatics research themes, bioinformatics hackathons, role of software engineering in bioinformatics, FAIR data principles, Building industry / companies catalogue, Building internship industry partners list.

• Closing

  Panellists

Dr Denis Bauer is an internationally recognised expert in artificial intelligence, who is passionate about improving health by understanding the secrets in our genome using cloud-computing technology. She is CSIRO’s Principal Research Scientist in transformational bioinformatics and adjunct associate professor at Macquarie University. She keynotes international IT, LifeScience and Medical conferences and is an AWS Data Hero, determined to bridge the gap between academe and industry. Her achievements include developing open-source bioinformatics software to detect new disease genes and developing computational tools to track, monitor and diagnose emerging diseases, such as COVID-19.

Louise Carey is an experienced Principal Hospital Scientist, with over 20 years’ experience in the field of Genetic diagnostics and laboratory management. Louise leads a team of 20 cytogeneticists delivering oncology, prenatal and postnatal Cytogenetic testing. She has a Fellowship in Medical Genomics from the Faculty of Science, Royal College of Pathologists Australasia and a Fellowship in Cytogenetics from the Human Genetics Society of Australia in Cytogenetics. She is the Past Chair of the Australasian Society of Diagnostic Genomics and has a special interest in reproductive cytogenetics and workforce development.

Dr David Wood leads the development of bioinformatic methodologies and data processing systems at Microba, providing fast-turnaround, cloud-based bioinformatics services for consumer products, external research services and internal research programs. Dr Wood specialises in genome informatics and bioinformatics software development and has as more than 15 years’ experience in both industry and academia across diverse domains in life sciences including mammalian transcriptomics, cancer genomics and clinical metagenomics. He is an author on more than 30 scientific publications and his knowledge of the biotechnology industry partners with his interests in the application and advancement of high-throughput genomics technologies to improving public health. His work has been supported by the Queensland Government through the provision of an Advance Queensland Founders’ Fellowship grant in 2018 as a founding member of Microba.

Nathan has a biology background, by undergraduate training, with a Master of Pharmacology from the University of Bath, England. Following this, Nathan’s career trajectory headed down the bioinformatics path. First by completing his PhD in molecular phylogenetics at the University of York, England where he investigated the location of the root, the oldest part, of the eukaryotic tree of life. Nathan subsequently held a postdoc positions at the University of Sheffield, England where he learnt about omics data integration before moving to Australia to take up an OCE postdoc position at CSIRO Livestock Industries. Since then, Nathan has held senior bioinformatics positions at the Australian Wine Research Institute, University of Adelaide and more recently the South Australian Genomics Centre (SAGC). Nathan has almost 20 years’ experience in the field of bioinformatics with expertise in agricultural genomics, transcriptomics, system biology, phylogenetics, bioinformatics training, Linux systems administration, pipeline development, high-performance and cloud computing. At SAGC, Nathan focuses on the establishment and continual improvement of bioinformatics processes and pipelines, with a particular focus on species of agricultural relevance. Nathan is particularly interested in the field of de novo genome assembly from long reads and is a recognised leader in bioinformatics training.

Panel facilitator

Speaker

Monther obtained a PhD in Computer Science and Computer Engineering (with a major in Machine Learning and Bioinformatics) from La Trobe University, an MSc in Bioinformatics from the University of Bologna, and a BEng in Informatics (with a major in AI and NLP) from the University of Aleppo. His research interests include computational genomics, translational bioinformatics, computational intelligence, big data analytics and IoT healthcare. At CSL, Monther leads the Bioinformatics and Artificial Intelligence team in the Research Data Science group where his team contributes to solving cutting-edge problems in the biopharmaceutical industry. His team works very closely with global groups at CSL Research to identify new biomarkers and understand the mechanism of action of drug targets and diseases with a strong focus on improving patients’ lives.