Come and hear from our group of panellists about careers in bioinformatics and computational biology! Our panellists represent a wide range of paths at different stages of their careers in both industry and academia. They will be offering their insights and advice on a wide range of topics important to research students.
Areas we aim to cover:
- Transitioning to industry after your studies
- How to be competitive in academia
- Working in Australia and abroad
- Valuable skills that are sought after in bioinformatics
- What employers are looking for in your CV
Roxane Legaie
Roxane has over 10 years experience working as a bioinformatician. Since completing a Master of Science (Informatique and Bioinformatique) in France in 2007, Roxane has worked in various institutions across Europe and Australia.
Roxane is highly experienced in building clinical bioinformatics pipelines, with her roles often requiring strong collaboration between people from research, the clinic and industry.
Roxane is currently the Lead Clinical Bioinformatician at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. Her work is at the cutting edge of cancer genomics, implementing targeted next generation sequencing panels into clinical practice for the diagnosis of cancer patients. Prior to working at Peter Mac, Roxane was a Senior Clinical Bioinformatician at Monash Health.
In addition to being a highly-successful professional bioinformatician, Roxane is also a strong advocate and passionate about the translation of research into clinical practice. She sits on several professional committees, including Women in Technology, R-Ladies Melbourne and is the Professional Bioinformatics representative for ABACBS.
Ann-Marie Patch
Ann-Marie is team head of the Clinical Genomics group at QIMR Berghofer. She is an expert in cancer genomics, with her current work focusing on identifying genomic heterogeneity of cancer and its effect on patient response to therapy. Other research interests include exploring the molecular basis of melanoma and mesothelioma. Ann-Marie is well-published across many high-impact journals including Science, Nature and PNAS with over 10,000 citations over the course of her career.
Ann-Marie has been the lead bioinformatician on several large cancer projects including the Australian Ovarian International Cancer Genome Consortium project and the Australian Mesothelioma Genomics project. Before moving to Australia, she was a post-doctoral fellow researching the genetics of inherited human diseases and was a bioinformatician within a NHS diagnostic medical genetics laboratory in the UK. Ann-Marie is active in training upcoming bioinformaticians and is part of the Bioinformatics training team for Bioplatforms Australia, delivering cancer genomics and the EMBL-EBI associated train-the-trainer courses.
Ben Goudey
Ben completed his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Melbourne in 2016. The focus of his PhD was on exploring novel computational and statistical methods to better identify associations between genetic variants and disease.
Ben currently works at IBM Research-Australia in Melbourne and holds an honorary appointment at the Centre for Epidemiology & Biostatistics at the University of Melbourne. He works in the Biomedical Data Science team and has two main areas of interest. The first is the development of novel machine learning and statistical methods and tools that help uncover the genotype-phenotype relationship from large-scale genomic data. The second is the development of robust and scalable tools for analysing with whole genome sequencing data that can enable the shifting of genomics from a research tool to a solution for applications in industry.
Ben has published across a broad range of journals targeted at bioinformatics, computer science and health science disciplines. In addition to being an interesting and successful early career researcher, he also holds US patents, one relating to a computer method to identify interacting DNA loci, the other for the diagnosis of heart disease using novel lipid biomarkers.
Chris Saunders
Chris graduated from the University of Washington in 2007 with a Ph.D in Computational and Molecular Biotechnology. He joined Illumina’s bioinformatics team in 2008 where he has been involved in a variety of primary and secondary analysis analysis efforts for Illumina’s sequencing products, including development of the Strelka somatic variant caller. More recently, Chris has been leading an Illumina team focused on developing efficient, automated secondary analysis methods to accelerate the application of whole genome sequencing to the treatment of cancer and rare genetic disease. These methods include the Manta structural variant caller, released in 2015, and the Strelka2 small variant caller recently published in Nature Methods.