David Ascher

Prof David Ascher is an NHMRC Investigator Leadership Fellow and Deputy Associate Dean (Research Partnerships) in the Faculty of Science at The University of Queensland. He also serves as Deputy Director of the Australian Centre for Ecogenomics and Head of Computational Biology & Clinical Informatics at the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute. Internationally, he sits on scientific advisory boards for A*STAR (Singapore), Fiocruz (Brazil) and the Tuscany University Network (Italy), and has been recognised with major honours including the Royal Society of Chemistry Horizon Prize.

A global leader in computational biology and personalised medicine, Prof Ascher develops advanced AI- and structure-based approaches to understand how genetic variation alters protein structure, function, and clinical outcomes. His group has built one of the world’s most widely used platforms for interpreting coding variants—over 90 computational tools, accessed more than 9.5 million times per year from 120+ countries. These tools underpin clinical diagnostics, guide drug development pipelines, and support international public-health responses to antimicrobial resistance and emerging infectious diseases.

His research has led to new molecular insights across infectious disease, rare disease, oncology and cardiometabolic health, and has been translated directly into practice—informing WHO policy, enabling early resistance detection in tuberculosis and leprosy, stratifying patients with hereditary cancers, and supporting vaccine design with partners including Pfizer. Many of his methods are embedded in globally used resources such as Ensembl VEP, PDBe, and the EMBL-EBI KnowledgeBase.

Prof Ascher has a longstanding commitment to interdisciplinary leadership and capability-building across UQ. As Director (Strategy) of the Biotechnology Programs and later as Deputy Associate Dean (Research Partnerships), he has driven initiatives to transform UQ’s biotechnology education, grow industry-embedded training, expand international partnerships, and diversify research income. He has led the development of UQ’s biotechnology–industry placement ecosystem, initiated new professional development programs adopted across multiple Faculties and Institutes, and established major collaborations with government, industry and global research organisations.

He has published more than 250 peer-reviewed papers (over half as senior author: FWCI 2.7), secured more than $30M in competitive research funding, and supervised over 60 HDR students who now hold leadership positions in academia, industry and government. His work appears in leading journals including Nature, Nature Genetics, Science, PNAS and Nature Microbiology, and is cited in over 100 policy documents and 40 patents.

Prof Ascher holds degrees in Biotechnology, Biochemistry, Structural Biology and Law. His research career has spanned Adelaide, Melbourne, Cambridge and Brisbane. After his PhD with Professor Michael Parker, he worked with Sir Tom Blundell at the University of Cambridge, where he led programs in structure-guided drug discovery and protein–protein interaction targeting. He established his independent laboratory at Cambridge and then at the University of Melbourne/Bio21 Institute, before moving to the Baker Institute in 2019 and joining UQ in 2021.