Virtual Interview - April 2021
To celebrate the amazing talent within the Australian bioinformatics community, we will be featuring fellow COMBINE members and senior researchers every month. We are also working on a student profile page on our website to showcase the diverse research conducted across Australia. We welcome students across any stage of their bioinformatics journey to submit their profile via this google form to be included in either the monthly interviews, our socials, or featured on our website.
Dr Sonika Tyagi
1. What is your current role?
I am working in the department of infectious diseases at Monash University. My research is in the health informatics area to implement machine learning approaches to study diseases. My current focus is on studying antimicrobial resistance and superbugs by integrating genomics and healthcare data.
2. How did you end up in bioinformatics?
It was kind of unplanned. Bioinformatics was a new thing when I was finishing my undergrad. I favoured computers over working on the bench, and decided to do a Masters with a major in bioinformatics. My Masters research thesis was on developing algorithms to study genomics of pathogens. Later, I did an advanced postgraduate diploma and PhD in bioinformatics. As a graduate student, I implemented natural language processing and machine learning approaches to study gene regulation. Since my postdoctoral studies I have delved more into analysing multi-omics data, and have been exploring and developing methods to integrate data of multiple modalities.
3. One sentence to describe your experience with bioinformatics.
This interdisciplinary field is constantly evolving to adapt to growing amounts and types of biological (research and health) data and solutions.
4. Any advice for the students who start to join the bioinformatics club?
The field is wide and highly interdisciplinary. Take time to review where your skills, interests and career aspirations align. For example, you can choose to be a bioinformatics user, engineer or scientist. There are career opportunities both in industry and academia. Keep informed, and stay connected with the community- join groups such as COMBINE.
5. What was your most recent published/publicly available work/software/code?
There were two projects we have recently submitted (one is accepted for publication): 1) A deep learning model to annotate long noncoding RNA https://gitlab.com/tyagilab/
6. What is your favourite figure from the data you generated or analysed?
I would say a figure from our recent article (Fig 3; doi: 10.1093/gigascience/giaa064). ‘Data integration’ is becoming very popular to study complex biological systems, and it was interesting to see how researchers have been misusing the term or having a different meaning in different contexts. We tried to do an illustration to bring some clarity to the concept and summarise dominant methods of performing data integration or as we call it “harmonisation” from multiple data types.
7. What are your non-science hobbies?
In my free time, I like to spend time in nature. I would like to do hiking, biking trails or camping at any given opportunity.
Follow Sonika on Twitter:
@tsonika