Management Committee
Peter Turnbull, Chairman, QFAB
Peter Turnbull is a company director and corporate lawyer with over 25 years commercial experience gained with a number of Australia's largest listed companies as well as with regulatory authorities in Australia and Hong Kong. Peter is well versed in all aspects of doing business in many East Asian markets, Europe and the United States.
Peter is currently the Chairman or a Director of various private and unlisted public companies and is a former Director of the Securities and Futures Commission of Hong Kong. Peter is a business owner in the Australian tourism sector.
Peter's skills and senior executive experience span various business sectors (including mining and energy, technology, commercial property and industrial manufacturing) and a range of different business entities including listed public companies, regulatory authorities and government owned businesses. Peter has particular expertise in the commercialisation of new technologies, strategic planning, and complex legal, commercial and corporate governance transactions and alternate dispute resolution strategies.
Peter is currently President, and Chairman of Chartered Secretaries Australia and is a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.
Professor Mark Ragan, IMB
Mark Ragan is founding head of the Division of Genomics and Computational Biology at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience of The University of Queensland, a Professor in UQ's School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, and Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Bioinformatics.
He co-chaired ISMB-2003 and was General Chair of APBC 2003 and GIW 2008. Mark is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London, and serves on six editorial board and seven management and advisory boards in molecular bioscience, informatics and e-research. Before coming to Australia in 2000 he was a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, co-chief Investigator on the first Canadian whole genome-sequencing project, co-founder and host of the Canadian Bioinformatics Resource, and an active participant in Genome Canada and Genome Atlantic.
Professor Ragan has more than 160 peer-reviewed publications and research interests that include comparative, computational and evolutionary genomics, high-throughput bioinformatics, high-performance computing, and technologies for management and integration of large datasets.
Dr David Hansen, CSIRO
David is the Theme Leader for e-Health and a Principal Research Scientist at the CSIRO Australian e-Health Research Centre. The e-Health theme aims to create new ICT-based technologies that can securely and seamlessly acquire, manipulate, interpret and present data relevant to healthcare professionals, from a variety of sources. Research projects in this theme are in the areas of biomedical imaging, remote monitoring, health data integration and clinical terminologies.
Prior to this, David was the Development Manager for SRS at LION Bioscience, Ltd in Cambridge, UK. SRS is the leading genomic data and tool integration software, and is used by pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, such as Glaxo Kline-Smith, Celera and Affymetrix, as well as academic institutes, such as The European Bioinformatics Institute.
Before joining LION, David did a Bachelor of Science at the University of Queensland in Chemistry and Computer Science and then a PhD (Theoretical Chemistry) at the Australian National University.
Elizabeth Shannon, DEEDI
Professor Gillian Bushell, Griffith University
Professor Gillian Bushell is the Dean of the Faculty of Science at Griffith University and a member of the cell biology program and the Eskitis Institute for Cell and Molecular Therapies. Gillian has many years experience in cell and molecular biology, having worked on a variety of projects, including malaria vaccines, connective tissue disorders, and cell signalling processes.
Gillian's current research interests include the development of biosensors, molecular modeling, novel methods of drug delivery, and the role of Sin 1 in cell signalling processes.
Associate Professor James Hogan, QUT
James Hogan is a senior lecturer in the School of Software Engineering and Data Communications at QUT. His research interests are centred upon machine learning and its application to cognitive science and bioinformatics problems, with subsidiary interests in software engineering. In particular, his work is concerned with learning in visual domains with associated text, in the tradition of the Berkeley L0 project.
His most significant contribution in this area is a connectionist synthesis of bottom-up and top-down attentional systems as a model of spatial relations acquisition and processing. Additional contributions in the field of visual processing have centred on the classification of facial expressions through the use of novel neural network receptive fields - and subsequently within the support vector machine framework.
Within the pure textprocessing domain, Dr. Hogan is active in the development of a Hidden Markov Model approach to authorship attribution, with conceptually related work in the use of novel kernels for the identification of promoter motifs with bacterial genomes. More recently, he has taken a leading role in the development of software internationalisation work within Australia.
Dr Paul Grieve, DEEDI
Dr Grieve is currently General Manager, Crop & Food Science, Agri-Science Queensland within the Queensland Department of Employment, Economic Development and Innovation (DEEDI). This group is responsible for the broad acre cropping and food science capability within DEEDI.
He has held a number of senior science leadership positions within the department spanning a wide range of science disciplines and areas since moving into science leadership and management in 2000. These include: Director, Fisheries and Aquaculture, 2000-2003; General Manager, Emerging Technologies 2004-2009; General Manager, Plant Science and Emerging Technologies, 2010.
As General Manager, Emerging Technologies he was responsible for research units focusing on biotechnology, food science and climate adaptation & crop systems modelling. His research background is in protein/peptide chemistry; protein/peptide isolation and characterisation techniques (with specific expertise in biomolecular mass spectrometry); food enzymology; food waste stream by-product utilisation; bioactive (antibacterial) peptides and functional foods.
Dr Grieve also holds an adjunct position with Griffith University of Associate Professor in Biotechnology. He is a member of the Steering Committee for the Agricultural Simulation Modelling unincorporated joint venture between the Queensland Government, CSIRO and the University of Queensland. He is currently the department’s representative on the Steering Committees charged with the development of National RD&E Strategies for Grains and for Biofuels and Bioenergy under the auspices of Primary Industries Standing Committee (PISC) and Primary Industries Ministerial Council (PIMC).
Jeremy Barker, CEO, QFAB
Mr Barker is the founding Chief Executive Officer of the Queensland Facility for Advanced Bioinformatics which he joined full time in June 2007. He is responsible for the overall management of the Facility which provides advanced bioinformatics solutions to enable the global efforts of biotechnology, research biology, drug discovery and translational medicine. He was awarded a Churchill Fellowship in 2007 to undertake an international study on “Management Best Practice in the Delivery of Bioinformatics to Researchers.”Mr Barker has postgraduate qualifications in science, commerce and governance. He brings to QFAB 21 years of experience in the management of life science organisations including a number of Board positions for biotechnology companies.
