W09: Transcriptomics for non-model organisms: from sequencing to analyses

James is the Chief Information Officer at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, where he oversees IT strategy, delivery, and operations in support of the Institute's objectives. With a diverse background spanning commercial, higher education, and research sectors, James has been dedicated to driving digital transformation and business change throughout his career.

Dr Natalie Thorne leads the multidisciplinary team behind Genomical, a clinical software-as-a-service platform used by six medical laboratories to manage genomic information for accredited genomic testing. Her expertise spans multiple disciplines: from healthcare, bioinformatics and pathology to software development and data governance.  Nat is passionate about bringing genomics into digital health systems, so that our DNA blueprint can safely and efficiently inform our healthcare when we need it. Last year she was named one of 25 Brilliant Women in Digital Health and one of 25 across Australia for the WILD program for women leaders in STEM.

Dr Denis Bauer is an internationally recognised expert in bioinformatics and artificial intelligence, who is passionate about improving human health research by understanding the secrets in our genome using cloud-computing technology. She is an adjunct associate professor at Macquarie University and AWS Data Hero. She was awarded Brilliant Women in Digital Health (2021) and Women in AI Innovation Award (2022). Her achievements include developing an open-source, artificial intelligence-based cloud-service that accelerates disease research and contributing to national and international initiatives for genomic medicine funded with over $500M. In 2020 she won the CSIRO Collaboration Medal for her work analyzing COVID-19 genome for vaccine development and molecular contact tracing.

Dr Marie-Jo Brion is Data Manager for Australian Genomics where she leads the data governance and sharing of national genomics cohorts, and delivery of national genomic data strategies. Dr Brion managed the first 5 years of the Australian Genomics data projects, which progressed national approaches to collecting, storing, and sharing genomic and medical data, from the Australian Genomics Flagship cohorts. Prior to managing genomic data projects, Marie-Jo obtained her PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Bristol UK, and spent 12 years as a research scientist analysing health data in populations from the UK, Brazil, Australia and USA. She currently leads the delivery of the National Approach to Genomic Information Management (NAGIM) Implementation Recommendations.

Life Whisperer Founder Dr Jonathan Hall FRSA, is Co-Founder and Director of the cutting-edge AI/ML company Presagen , MIT Technology Review Innovator under 35 (APAC) 2019, and was named among the InDaily 40 Under 40 Business Leaders in South Australia, receiving the Entrepreneurial Award in 2019. Jonathan Hall has dual PhDs in theoretical particle physics and nanotechnology specialising in biosensing in embryos, both of which have received awards in their respective fields. Jonathan chaired the international IONS-KOALA Conference on optics, atomic and laser applications. Jonathan was a member of one of the few teams to reach the inaugural CSIRO ON Prime pre-accelerator program for commercialisation in Sydney, and simultaneously won the Australian eChallenge awards for both Medical Innovations and Research Commercialisation for the invention of Life Whisperer.

Robert McLeay founded and led the scientific team behind DoseMeRx, the world’s leading individualised dosing tool – used in over 10 countries by more than 7,000 clinicians, and having calculated in excess of a million doses.  He completed his PhD at the University of Queensland in 2012 in bioinformatics focusing on tool developing using machine learning techniques. Applying skills and techniques from the world of bioinformatics, he crossed over to industry, and was forced to rapidly learn about commercialisation of a medical device, ranging from regulatory bodies (FDA, EMA, TGA) to how to raise venture capital to navigating its acquisition by Tabula Rasa Healthcare (NASDAQ: TRHC) in 2019.

Robert has received a range of awards for his work on DoseMeRx, including from Advance Queensland, ANDHealth, the Austraian , Asia-Pacific ICT Awards, and the University of Queensland Colleges’ Alumni Award 2022.

During his time at DoseMeRx, Robert developed an interest in clinical medicine, and has completed his MD and entered clinical practice. He recently has started foundational work on new startup in the ML/AI space in healthcare.

A/Prof Lutz Krause is passionate about improving health throughdevelopment of innovative therapeutics and diagnostics. He utilises mathematicsand artificial intelligence to advance understanding of human biology andimprove patient health. Lutz has worked in both academia and industry,including Nestlé, QIMR Berghofer, and the University of Queensland.  

In 2018, Lutz joined Microba Life Sciences, a Brisbane based company, that advanceshealth through precision microbiome science. Here, he has discovered novel therapeutic candidatesusing a data driven, AI supported approach. Several of these candidates areprogressing through pre-clinical development, with the lead candidate being inclinical stage. 

Arthur worked inacademia for over 12 years before moving to the industry. He joined CSL in 2019and is a Senior Scientist and Manager of Computational Genomics in CSL’sBioinformatics team. His team works on the early discovery stage ofpharmaceutical development, spanning several key areas, ranging from insilico target discovery, antibody genomics, gene editing and gene therapyinformatics to cell line and animal model genomic characterisation.Particularly in the gene therapy area, Arthur’s team has contributed to the FDAapproval of the gene therapy for haemophilia B, Hemgenix, that is now marketedin US and Europe. He is also the project scientific coordinator of a new genetherapy program targeting rare disease, bringing state-of-the-art genomics tothe project.

T.V Nguyen received his MSc in Intelligent Systems in 2011 and his Ph.D. in 2015from School of Computing and Information Technology, University of Wollongong. From 2015 to 2017, he worked as a machine learning engineer at Intelligent Systems Lab, University of Wollongong. From 2017 to 2019, he was senior machine learning engineer at Vin-group JSC. After that he joined Life Whisperer Diagnostics/Presagen as a Senior AI/Deep learning engineer. His research interests &expertise include computer vision, deep learning, traditional machine learning, distributed systems, decentralized federated learning, data cleansing and data analysis. His recent works were applied to a range of medical record/image problems such as embryo viability prediction, genetic modification identification, competent oocyte prediction which have been commercialized in many countries around the world under the brand name Life Whisperer.

Farhad Hormozdiari, a research scientist in the HealthAI team at Google Research, where he combines genetic data and deep learning techniques to improve disease understanding for a diverse set of populations. His long-term research aim includes utilising genetics and computational methods for better understanding of human diseases and complex traits. Prior to Google, Farhad was a postdoctoral fellow at Broad Institute and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health working on multi-omics data to understand the biological mechanisms of human diseases. He obtained his PhD in computer science from UCLA (2016) with focus on fine-mapping of complex traits and GTEx gene expression. Farhad obtained his M.Sc. in computer science from SFU in Canada and B.S. in computer science from Tehran University in Iran.

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