Conference Program

Location

SBEI will take place at the University of Sydney Business School in Building H70 within ABS Case Study Lecture Theatre 1050 - to see an interactive map click here, or see below for images.

Speaker Bios

Jasper Wang

Reimaging Bioinformatics in the Cloud

Jasper is a Google Cloud Data AI Specialist and Deepmind Partner Engineer. Google Cloud uniquely partnering with Deepmind will provide insight into how and why we are the only platform that can predict proteins at a massive scale, concurrently. Come to this session to discover how delivers Google Cloud with Vertex AI has scaled the platform to create a purpose built platform for scientists, with governance and visibility with granular control. We will share active research use cases and examples of how we can Predict big complex proteins with multiple iterations successfully without crashing, and with no IT operations management overhead. We will also cover the high throughput processing of reproducible pipelines used for genomic sequencing and drug discovery.

Pauline Kelly

Achieving bioinformatics excellence with AWS

Pauline is a Solutions Architect for public sector in Australia and New Zealand at Amazon Web Services (AWS). She is passionate about helping healthcare organisations realise their visions of improving patient outcomes and experiences, and bridging the chasm between medical technology research and practice. Pauline also assists customers with realising novel applications of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications in a cost effective, sustainable, and responsible manner.

Nick Lucas

Partly Cloudy: Navigating Cloud Platforms for Bioinformatics.

Nicholas joined XENON Systems in July 2024 as a Solutions Architect. Prior to XENON Systems, Nicholas worked at Lenovo for 14 years where he was a Solutions Consultant designing and supporting customers with HPC and Data management solutions.

Nicholas has worked with many customer segments from Small-Medium Businesses, Large enterprise, K-12, TAFE's, Universities, Hospitals, Research institutes as well as Local/State/Federal Government. Nicholas expertise is creating solutions across Private cloud, Hybrid cloud and Public cloud for a wide range of applications and workloads.

For his HPC / eResearch customers, Nicholas enjoys seeing the final product and hearing how the solution not only helped the researcher but also how the solution will help humanity.

Sunil Raja (CSL)

A seasoned digital thought leader with over 20 years of expertise in data management, data science, programming, and regulatory standards, driving digital transformation and business value through advanced technologies. Proven success in leading global data management and programming teams to leverage science and data for impactful digitization. Known for optimizing talent and resources to build high-performing teams across India, Australia, the US, Europe, China, and Singapore, fostering leadership development and continuous learning. Areas of expertise include data engineering, data architecture, governance, regulatory compliance, project management, and operational excellence.

Kristy Horan

Taming the AMR beast – an accreditation journey

Kristy completed a PhD in Biochemistry and Immunology in 2007, and after a series of post-doc positions in Europe returned to Australia and retrained as a bioinformatician, obtaining a Master Bioinformatics from University of Melbourne in 2017. Kristy has worked at MDU PHL, since early 2018 and is now a lead bioinformatician with Austrakka. Kristy's major focus is in translating, developing and implementing bioinformatics tools in a clinical and public health, providing robust and actionable results to public health and healthcare professionals."

Laura Perlaza-Jimenez (Monash)

Bioinformatics Workflows and Operational Workflows: same, same, but different

Laura Perlaza-Jimenez (PhD) is the newest manager of the Bioinformatics Node at the Monash Genomics and Bioinformatics Platform (MGBP). With over a decade of experience in bioinformatics, she has worked extensively in transcriptomics and genomics (among others). Laura is a biologist who holds a PhD in Bioinformatics from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology (Germany) and a Master of Science focused on Microbial Genomics (Colombia). Starting as a senior bioinformatician at the MGBP, Laura played a hands-on role in conducting complex data analysis across a range of topics. This direct experience with bioinformatics research and analysis has provided her with unique insight into the operational needs of bioinformatics projects.

Now, as the manager, Laura uses her understanding of both the technical and analytical requirements to design effective processes and strategies that streamline project management in bioinformatics. Operating under a cost recovery model, the platform adheres to ISO:9001:2015 standards. Her talk will focus on how to integrate bioinformatics expertise into project management, ensuring that technical challenges are addressed efficiently and that operational workflows are designed to support high-quality research outcomes.

Brendan Hosking

Bringing Sustainable Bioinformatics to the World: Scalable Genomics for Population-level Data in the Cloud

Brendan Hosking is a Senior Software Developer specializing in cloud-native development and sustainable bioinformatics solutions. At CSIRO, he manages the cloud infrastructure for the Transformational Bioinformatics group, focusing on leveraging cloud technologies to enhance the speed, cost-efficiency, and scalability of bioinformatics tools. He plays a key role in developing sBeacon, a serverless implementation of the GA4GH beacon protocol, and was first author on its publication in Nature Biotechnology. His current focus is on developing cloud serverless architectures to create innovative, sustainable services in the bioinformatics space.

Luis Pedro Coelho

For long-term sustainable software in bioinformatics

Luis Pedro Coelho is a group leader at the Centre for Microbiome Research (QUT) and an associate investigator at the Centre for Data Science (QUT). His research focuses on using very large scale datasets of the global microbiome to understand microbial ecology. His group is also known for developing high-quality open source research tools, most notably SemiBin which uses self-supervised learning and neural networks for metagenomics binning. Before moving to Australia in 2023, Luis got a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in the (US), worked at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Germany, and was a faculty member at Fudan University in Shanghai (China).

Zhiliang Chen

Operationalise your bioinformatics in a secure and compliant data environment

Zhiliang is currently a Bioinformatics Sales Specialist at Illumina. Her role includes providing pre-sales consultation and support of Illumina’s bioinformatics product to Australian & New Zealand customers.

Sean Liu

QIAGEN Digital Insights: accelerating bioinformatics from discovery to clinical insights

Sean Liu is the Strategic Account Manager for ANZ at QIAGEN Digital Insights. He has extensive experience in genomics SaaS and NGS sales development, supported by a strong background in functional genomics and cancer research.

Jason Li

Challenges and Opportunities in running a Bioinformatics Core Facility

As the Head of Bioinformatics Core Facility, Dr. Jason Li leads a team of bioinformaticians and computer scientists to provide consulting and analysis services to Peter Mac research laboratories, and develop and maintain computational pipelines to process high-throughput sequencing data. Jason holds a Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from the University of Melbourne. He joined Peter Mac Research in 2007 and was appointed Senior Core Facility Manager of Bioinformatics in 2017. Jason’s expertise lies in the analysis of large-scale genomics data derived from high-throughput sequencing/microarray experiments, and currently leads multiple Artificial Intelligence initiatives across the organisation. Jason has supervised multiple postgraduate and undergraduate research students and is devoted to training up bioinformaticians from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. Current research activities include the application of Large Language Models in clinical report analysis, and deep learning in cancer multi-omics and medical imaging.

Conrad Leonard

Platforms and Infrastructure at Australian BioCommons

Conrad is the Technical Lead in the Human Genome Informatics Division at Australian BioCommons. As a data scientist and research software engineer, he has expertise in human genomics and bioinformatics systems design, and his mission is to build platforms that translate the potential of genomic technologies into equitable clinical practice. He is excited to be delivering the NCRIS-funded GUARDIANS program, a major national research data infrastructure initiative for human genomics. Prior to his current role, Conrad was responsible for the data architecture of the core human genomics data analysis platform in the Genome Informatics group at QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, where he also played a pivotal role in genomiQa, a startup focused on precision genomics. Earlier, at the Queensland Centre for Medical Genomics, he spent five years developing bioinformatics pipelines, designing databases, and automating data flows for the Australian node of the International Cancer Genome Consortium project, contributing to one of the largest human cancer genome sequencing efforts to date.

Matha Zakrzewski

Matha is a scientist with a broad multidisciplinary background encompassing molecular biology, genetics, bioinformatics and biostatistics. Matha has seven years research experience in medical, biotechnological and industrial environments, with research interests in studying microbial communities in human health and diseases and in biotechnological processes and genome research of parasites. Matha's work entailes developing new computational and statistical tools for the analysis of high-throughput sequencing data (Illumina, 454, Pacbio).