People
Management Committee
Peter Turnbull, Chairman, QFAB
Professor Mark Ragan, 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 Paul Grieve, Department of Employment, Economic Development and Innovation (DEEDI), Queensland Government
Jeremy Barker, CEO, QFAB
Executive Management
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.
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Dr Dominique Gorse, General Manager, QFABDominique Gorse ihas been General 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 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).
Operational Team
Matthew Bryant |
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 Pierre-Alain Chaumeil |
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 Dr Melissa Davis |
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 Dr Kim-Anh Le Cao |
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Roxane Legaie |
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 Amanda Miotto |
 Dr Felicity Newell |
Dr Jeremy Parsons |
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Dr Cas Simons |
 Sarah Williams |
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Angeline Stelling |
Executive Assistant a.stelling@uq.edu.au +61 7 3346 2604 |
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).
Operational Team
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Sarah Williams
Sarah has previously worked for four years in the bioinformatics team at AGRF (Australian Genome Research Facility). Her current focus in QFAB is on next-generation sequence data analysis. She studied a Bachelor of Applied Science (Biotech) and Information Technology at Queensland University of Technology and is currently studying a coursework masters in Molecular Biology at University of Queensland.
