Dr Davis McCarthy

Head of Bioinformatics and Cellular Genomics and Holyoake Research Fellow, St Vincent’s Institute of Medical Research and Melbourne Integrative Genomics, Faculty of Science, the University of Melbourne

Davis started in Bioinformatics as a UROP student (and Honours student, and RA) with Gordon Smyth in the Bioinformatics Division at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne, Australia. He worked on differential expression methods for RNA-seq data, most notably the edgeR package. He completed a DPhil in Statistics at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Prof Peter Donnelly, before undertaking a postdoc in Dr Oliver Stegle’s group at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, UK. At EBI, Davis worked on single-cell methods development and on projects linking DNA variation to single-cell gene expression. He returned to Melbourne in late 2018 to start the Bioinformatics and Cellular Genomics group at St Vincent’s Institute of Medical Research, joint with the Melbourne Integrative Genomics unit at the University of Melbourne. His research team is broadly interested in how computational approaches can drive biological discovery. In particular, they are interested in developing statistical and machine learning methods and software tools for the analysis of clinical imaging and high-throughput sequencing data, with a focus on single-cell genomic data.

Dr Elisabeth Roesch

Sales Engineer, JuliaHub

At JuliaHub, Dr. Roesch shares her knowledge of the impact of Julia and Julia Computing products on Quantitative Systems Pharmacology. She earned her PhD in Theoretical Systems Biology from the University of Melbourne, Australia. She has researched and published about the use of the Julia programming language in Systems Biology.

Associate Professor Jennifer Flegg

ARC Future Fellow, The University of Melbourne

I’m an Associate Professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Melbourne. My research focuses on mathematical biology in areas such as wound healing, tumour growth and infectious disease epidemiology.

I was awarded a PhD in 2009 from Queensland University of Technology on “Mathematical modelling of chronic wound healing”. From 2010 – 2013, I was at the University of Oxford developing mathematical models for the spread of resistance to antimalarial drugs. From 2014 – April 2017 I was a Lecturer in the School of Mathematical Sciences at Monash University. In May 2017 I joined the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Melbourne as a Senior Lecturer in Applied Mathematics and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2020. In 2016, I started a Discovery Early Career Research Award to study and mathematically model venous leg ulcers. In 2022, I started a Future Fellowship to work on data integration methods for infectious disease modelling.

Dr Michael Blair

Gingko Bioworks

Michael joins Ginkgo Bioworks from the University of Melbourne’s Business Development team (Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences), and has experience across small molecule discovery and development, intellectual property rights and technology commercialisation.  Michael holds a PhD from Monash University (awarded 2010) and has interests in precision fermentation, green energy and bio-manufacturing.