People

Management Committee

Peter Turnbull, Chairman, QFAB 
Professor Mark Ragan (Chair), Institute for Molecular Biology
Dr David Hansen, e-Health Research Centre, CSIRO
Elizabeth Shannon, Department of Employment, Economic Development and Innovation (DEEDI), Queensland Government
Professor Gillian Bushell, Griffith University
Associate Professor James Hogan, QUT
Dr Ralf G.Dietzgen, Qld Primary Industries and Fisheries
Jeremy Barker, CEO, QFAB

Executive Management

Jeremy Barker, CEO
Dr Dominique Gorse, General Manager

Operational Team

Executive Assistants

Angeline Stelling - a.stelling@uq.edu.au Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays

Kelly Mackrell - k.mackrell@uq.edu.au  Tuesdays and Wednesdays

Contact: +61 7 3346 2604

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Peter Turnbull, Chairman, QFAB

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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 buisiness 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 authorites 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

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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. He 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

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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

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Professor Gillian Bushell, Griffith University

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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

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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 Ralf G.Dietzgen, Queensland Primary Industries and Fisheries

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Dr Ralf G. Dietzgen is Science Leader, Molecular Bioscience Technologies, in the Emerging Technologies R&D Delivery unit of the Queensland Primary Industries and Fisheries (QPI&F). Ralf also holds an adjunct appointment as Associate Professor with the University of Queensland's School of Molecular and Microbial Sciences. He obtained his PhD in Microbiology from the University of Tuebingen, Germany and worked at the University of Cambridge, Cornell University, University of California at Berkeley and Davis and the University of Adelaide before joining QPI&F. His research interests are in gene discovery and biodiversity in viruses, plants and insects and he has published extensively on plant virus characterisation and genetic variability, diagnostic technologies and RNAi- mediated virus resistance.

Jeremy Barker, CEO

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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. 

Dr Dominique Gorse, General Manager

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Dominique Gorse is Technical Manager at QFAB since June 2007. In this role, he is leading the development of QFAB’s platform for integrated and accessible bioinformatics which is designed to support large multi-institution research projects. Dominique has over 18 years' experience in software development, information management, data mining and data modelling applied to life science applications. Prior to joining QFAB, Dominique was Head of informatics & computational chemistry with Bio-Layer where he designed and developed a full hardware and software system for collection, management, search and tracking of experimental data, including molecular structures, biological and analytical data. From 1997 to 2001, Dominique was team leader at Synt:em, a French biopharmaceutical company focused on the discovery of drug candidates for Central Nervous System diseases. He led the development of Synt:em proprietary software, Diverser, specifically design for molecular diversity analysis and compound library design in the context of Combinatorial Chemistry and High-Throughput Screening. Prior Synt:em, Dominique Gorse was ARC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Biochemistry of the University of Sydney and then at the John Curtin School of Medical Research in Canberra. During these two years, he developed a computation method based on molecular dynamics simulations to determine binding mode and free energy of binding of potential inhibitors of the dihydrofolate reductase. Dominique received his Ph.D. in computational chemistry from the University of Bordeaux, France in 1993 where he developed a computer program for the interactive study and visualisation of molecular systems in interactions.

Dr Annette McGrath, Head of Bioinformatics

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Dr Annette McGrath was appointed Head of Bioinformatics at QFAB in January 2010 where she is responsible for managing delivery of services and support to QFAB clients. She has over 13 years post-doctoral experience in Bioinformatics and Genomics. Prior to joining QFAB, Annette spent 8 years working at the Australian Genome Research Facility Ltd where she led a team of 10 bioinformaticians and analyst programmers who provided support and analysis for AGRF internally and for external clients and also managed development of the in-house LIMS system. From 1998-2001, Annette worked for Genesis Research and Development Corporation Ltd in Auckland, first as a bioinformatician to support extensive gene discovery projects in commercially significant plant and animal species. By 2000 she was leading the programming team, with responsibility for provision of in-house analysis and process management software tools. Her postdoctoral work was on multiple alignment of small subunit rRNAs with Professor Des Higgins at University College Cork, Ireland where she received her PhD and Honours Science degree in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry.

Matthew Bryant

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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.

Pierre-Alain Chaumeil

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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 Melissa Davis

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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.

Dr Kim-Anh Le Cao

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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.

Mhairi Marshall

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Mhairi Marshall worked for five years as a bioinformatician at the Sanger Institute, Cambridge UK where she was the web and database administrator for the Pfam, Rfam & miRNA registry websites. Before that she worked for three years as a website administrator at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne Medical School. Mhairi has extensive programming experience in Perl, Java, JSP, PHP and has administered both MySQl and Oracle databases.  Mhairi has an honours degree in Molecular Biology and a Masters degree in Information Technology from the University of Glasgow, UK.

Amanda Miotto

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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 current focus is on managing the Griffith mirror of UCSC genome browser.

Dr Felicity Newell

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Felicity is currently a Java Developer at the Queensland Facility for Advanced Bioinformatics where she is involved in the development of the Systems Biology Platform. She has knowledge of  programming languages such as Java and JavaScript. Felicity also has more than six years of experience in molecular and cellular biology research. Felicity held a post-doctoral appointment at the Diamantina Institute for Cancer, Immunology and Metabolic Medicine where she investigated the role of growth factors in the differentiation of human preadipocytes. Prior attaining her PhD, she also worked for a number of years as a research assistant in Brisbane and the UK. Felicity has a PhD in Medical Science, and a BSc majoring in biochemistry, both from the University of Queensland, as well as a Master of Information Technology from the Queensland University of Technology.   

Dr Mike Pheasant

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Mike has over 20 years experience in the IT industry including commercial software development for large corporations and web hosting for small businesses. He completed his PhD in molecular biology and bioinformatics in 2005, with research focusing on noncoding RNA and comparative metazoan genomics. He spent a year as a genome browser software engineer at UCSC and joined QFAB to develop next-generation genome browser technologies. 

Nick Rhodes

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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. 

Peter Scott

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 Peter Scott has over 15 years of web development, data analysis, integration and project experience. Peter has consulted extensively across the public and private sectors and recently moved from corporate computing to bioinformatics. Peter has a strong interest in applying his experience to problems within Systems Biology and High Performance Computing applications.  

Dr Cas Simons

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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 in Python and SQL. 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.