David Kainer

I am a computational biologist with a centre-wide research role in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Plant Success in Nature and Agriculture, based here at UQ. I spend my time researching new computational techniques for predicting complex quantitative traits by integrating multiple layers of 'omics data (amongst dozens of other things!).

Areas of interest:

• Machine Learning, AI and high performance computing to learn and exploit functional connectivity in biological data
• Gene Expressions networks
• Multiplex networks, information propagation and perturbation
• Genomic Prediction

My goal is to aid crop and forestry breeders in selecting parental lines more accurately, which gives us a pathway to improving certain plant species. I also spend time developing new data analysis techniques that are being applied to human disease and conditions such as Autism and substance addiction.

David completed his PhD at Australian National University in 2017, focusing on the genome-wide basis of foliar terpene variation in Eucalyptus. He then undertook a postdoc at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a US Dept of Energy lab with a focus on big data. After a stint as a staff scientist at Oak Ridge, David arrived at the Centre of Excellence in 2023 in the role of a Senior Research Fellow.