Career panel
Sarah Beecroft - Bioinformatics Applications Specialist - Pawsey supercomputing centre
Dr Beecroft completed a Human Biology degree at ECU in 2014 before undertaking Honours at UWA under Professor Nigel Laing AO. In 2016, Dr Beecroft started her PhD as the Fred Liuzzi Foundation Neuromuscular Scholar, working to discover new disease genes in rare neuromuscular diseases. After PhD completion, Dr Beecroft obtained a dual fellowship, split between ongoing neuromuscular research and supporting bioinformatics at the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre. She now works for Pawsey as a Bioinformatics Applications Specialist. In this role, she works to support bioinformatics users through workflow development and optimisation, training, and advocacy, plus significant collaboration with the Australian BioCommons.
Thom Quinn - Bioinformatician turned Data Scientist
Thom Quinn is a bioinformatician who came to Australia to pursue a PhD in 2016. After completion, he worked as a post-doc with the Applied Artificial Intelligence Institute at Deakin University for a couple of years. Recently, he has taken up a job as a data scientist at a government organization (but still considers himself to be a member of this wonderful and welcoming Australian bioinformatics community). He is looking forward to sharing his experience working as a post-doc and as a data scientist, and to answering questions about the transition away from academia.
Sonika Tyagi - Senior Lecturer - Monash University
Dr. Sonika Tyagi has a Ph.D. in Computational Biology and over 15 y of work experience in academia & industry. Throughout her postgraduate studies in India, she was awarded a merit-based or competitive research fellowship. In 2004 she visited the University of Queensland, Australia on a research fellowship. After 3y of postdoctoral research, she worked in industry leadership roles for 7y. In 2018 she joined a teaching and research position at Monash University to establish her research program. She is currently a Machine Learning lead in the SuperbugAI flagship project. Her expertise is in developing new machine learning tools and pipelines, and apply these methods to solve biological research questions. Tyagi has developed novel probabilistic models based on natural language processing to predict non-coding RNA structures ab-Initio and has implemented deep learning approaches to predict functional motifs on these structures. She applied these methods to successfully predict novel miRNAs and detected DNA variants causing melanoma. All of these methods are openly accessible to the community via GitLab. Tyagi was a chief investigator on an NHMRC funded project to computationally study human pregnancy (2017). In 2020 she was also awarded an Early Mid Career Research fellowship by the Australian Academy of Science to develop AI models for the diagnosis of preterm birth. She has received industry funding (2018), and University grants (2029-20) for developing AI resources to study diseases.
Etsuko Uno - Biomedical Animator - Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research
Etsuko Uno is a biomedical animator working at WEHI in Melbourne, Australia. Her animations span diverse topics from immunology and gene regulation to cancer and disease. Her works have won numerous awards including the NSF Visualisation Challenge and have been selected by multiple film festivals such as the prestigious SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival. Her animations have amassed over 1.5 million views on Youtube. Etsuko majored in Biochemistry and Pharmacology at the University of WA. She the completed a Masters in Biomedical Science at Rockefeller University, USA. She also holds a Diploma of Animation from RMIT, Melbourne.