The QFAB Team

Jeremy Barker, CEO

Mr Barker is the founding Chief Executive Officer of QFAB 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.

Dr Dominique Gorse, General Manager

Dominique Gorse is leading the development of QFAB’s platform for integrated and accessible bioinformatics which is designed to support large multi-institution research projects and to provide advanced bioinformatics solutions to the biotechnology, pharmaceutical, clinical and research communities. Dominique has over 19 years' experience in software development, information management, data mining and data modelling applied to life science. Over the years, he has developed expertise in using Agile project management methodologies for the efficient delivery of quality projects and their alignment with business objectives. He has a strong record of growing technology companies such as Synt:em, (France, 1996-2001), and Bio-Layer (Australia, 2001-2007).

Dr Cas Simons

Cas Simons has over six years experience in bioinformatics and molecular biology research. His current role in QFAB focuses on working with QFAB collaborators and clients to develop bioinformatic solutions to maximise the outcomes of their research. He has experience using a wide range of bioinformatic tools and techniques including extensive programming experience.

Cas also has molecular biology wet-lab experience working with a variety of model organisms including yeast, plants, cyanobacteria and zebrafish. Cas received his PhD in genomics and computational biology from the University of Queensland and has an honours degree in biochemistry from the University of Otago.

Pierre-Alain Chaumeil

Pierre-Alain Chaumeil is a recent graduate from the University of Bordeaux (France) with a Bachelor of Science majoring in Biology of Organisms and a Master degree in Bioinformatics. He has programming skills in different languages such as Java, Perl, Eiffel, C/C++ and Python. Pierre-Alain is currently working on the development of QFAB Systems Biology Platform to provide Australian researchers in R&D organisations and industry with direct, scalable access to the most internationally comprehensive, expert-curated and integrated genomic, proteomic and metabolic datasets available, and to industry-standard tools for data integration, analysis, visualisation and electronic collaboration.

Dr Kim-Anh Le Cao

Kim-Anh Le Cao is a biostatistician with the Queensland Facility for Advanced Bioinformatics. She is currently developing statistical approaches to analyze high throughput data. Her research focuses on 'variable selection', i.e. how to identify relevant information in such large data sets. This can be done using classification approaches, as well as exploratory approaches. One of her favorite research interest lies in the integration of 'omics' data to select transcripts, metabolites or other types of variables that are related to the biological study. She is particularly interested in working in a multidisciplinary field and has been doing so since her Ph.D. Kim-Anh received her Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Toulouse, France, in 2008, which was awarded as the best applied statistics thesis from the French Statistical Society. She then moved to Australia to hold a post-doctoral research appointment in ARC Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience before joining the QFAB team

Dr Melissa Davis

Melissa is currently a Data Modeller with the Queensland Facility for Advanced Bioinformatics, where she is developing systems biology and bioinformatics research projects in pathway and network analysis of molecular interaction networks that are separately implicated in breast cancer and childhood obesity. This work is particularly interesting due to the challenges of integrating experimental results with biomolecular networks to add value to both bioinformatic and experimental analyses. Previously, Melissa held a post-doctoral research appointment in ARC Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, where she developed a number of projects both in ontological engineering and network analysis. Prior to her research appointments, Melissa worked as a knowledge management consultant for a Brisbane-based management company and as a consultant for a Canberra based systems engineering company where she provided specialist consulting services in the areas of knowledge management, ontological engineering, systems biology and biotechnology. Her research interests include, but are not limited to: Systems biology, specifically of the nuclear receptor super-family of transcription factors, and the application of bioinformatics to experimental and translational research. Melissa holds a PhD in Computational and Molecular Biology, and a BSc majoring in genetics, both from the University of Queensland.

Nick Rhodes

Nick Rhodes has worked in the application of computer-based techniques to scientific problems for nearly thirty years. An Oracle-certified Database Administrator, he worked as DBA and SysAdmin to Bio-Layer Pty Ltd before joining QFAB. Prior to this he taught on the world's first MSc in Chemoinformatics in the Department of Information Studies at the University of Sheffield, and as an Oracle DBA in the same department. Nick has extensive experience programming in a variety of languages (most recently SQL, C++ and Python) and a particular interest in data mining and data warehouses.

Amanda Miotto

Amanda Miotto has recently graduated from the University of Southern Queensland with a Bachelor of Science majoring in Bioinformatics. She is currently situated at Griffith University working for the Research Computing Services and for the National Centre for Adult Stem Cell Research of the Eskitis Institute for Cell and Molecular Therapies. Amanda's current focus is on managing the Griffith mirror of UCSC genome browser

 Sarah Williams

Angeline Stelling, Excecutive Assistant 

Matthew Bryant

Matthew Bryant has worked for the University of Queensland in Brisbane for over 6 years in a high performance computing environment, supplying expertise in computing and storage solutions utilizing the latest in storage and processing technology. This includes resources such as large SMP machines, distributed clusters, SAN storage, backup and virtualization solutions.

Before this, Matthew worked with Williams Lea in London, programming a personnel information system to facilitate employee interactions from geographically dispersed offices. Matthew used his Perl, Linux, Apache and C skills to deploy a flexible system that meet the employee's needs.

Prior to this Matthew worked for over 6 years as a Senior System Engineer for GBST in Brisbane where he worked on stockbrokers’ sites to plan, install and manage high availability systems and networks responsible for 40% of all trades on the Australian Stock Market.

Matthew also participated in, then managed the central support team to maintain these system on a 24/7 basis.  Matthew has a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering specializing in Computer Systems from the University of Queensland.

Roxane Legaie

Roxane Legaie has recently joined the QFAB team as a Bioinformatician. After her first experience at INSERM [Nantes - France], where she was working closely with the customers of the microarray platform, she worked for two years in the Warwick Systems Biology Centre [Coventry - UK], developing pipelines, databases and web tools for the analysis of microarray data and next generation sequencing data.

Her university training has been both in Molecular Biology and Bioinformatics, before she graduated with a Masters degree in Informatics majoring in Bioinformatics from the University of Nantes [France]. She has strong programming skills, particularly in R, Perl, PHP and Java.

Roxane's main interest is currently in data analysis (next-generation sequencing, microarray, proteomics) and integration.

Anne Kunert

Anne Kunert joined the QFAB team as a developer in early 2012. Prior to joining QFAB, Anne was working with the UQ Protein Expression Facility where she was leading the development of an online ordering and analysis system for high-throughput services. She has experience in a diverse range of interdisciplinary IT projects and, in particularly, software development for life science research applications.

Anne graduated from the Technical University of Dortmund [Germany] with a Diploma Degree in Computer Science and Arts.

Dr Jeremy Parsons

Jeremy Parsons has more than a decade of experience as Bioinformatician working in Cambridge, England, The USA, The Netherlands as well as Singapore. Jeremy has also worked for many years in mainstream computing as a UNIX administrator and software developer in fields including arcade games, image processing and financial services.

His favourite language is Java and he has a special interest in parallel and graphical programming, particularly for data presentation and DNA alignment visualisation. Jeremy has gained a BSc. in Microbiology, an MSc. in Computer Science and a PhD from the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge.

Dr Leo McHugh

Dr Leo McHugh is a Senior Computational Biologist with QFAB.  He gained his doctorate at the University of Sydney Faculty of Medicine for his work in applying artificial intelligence techniques to high-throughput proteomics datasets.  This work was awarded Australia's highest doctoral research award by the peak body for biotechnology in Australia, AusBiotech. During his undergraduate study, Leo worked as a programmer at the Australian Naitonal Genomics Information Service based in Sydney. Leo holds degrees in Genetics (Hons), Computer Science, Innovation Management and Bioinformatics (PhD).

Leo's industrial experience includes three years at the STI Research Centre, based at Westmead Hospital in Sydney, where he was responsible for the coordination of medical research projects and data analysis including drug trials, risk modeling and research planning and two years at National ICT Australia (NICTA), Australia's Information and Communications Technology Research Centre of Excellence.  Leo's role at NICTA was as a researcher in the Symbolic Machine Learning and Knowledge Acquisition team tasked with developing novel approaches to mathematical programming for real-life science and engineering problems.

Leo's interests revolve around extracting meaningful insights from large or complex datasets.  He is motivated by the need to bridge the gap between results and understanding, so that the important and exciting research done by life-scientists can maximally benefit society.