Prof David Ascher is currently an NHMRC Investigator and Director of the Biotechnology Program at the University of Queensland. He is also Head of Computational Biology and Clinical Informatics at the Baker Institute.
David’s research focus is in modelling biological data to gain insight into fundamental biological processes. One of his primary research interests has been developing tools to unravel the link between genotype and phenotype, using computational and experimental approaches to understand the effects of mutations on protein structure and function. His group has developed a platform of over 40 widely used programs for assessing the molecular consequences of coding variants (>7 million hits/year).
Working with clinical collaborators in Australia, Brazil and UK, these methods have been translated into the clinic to guide the diagnosis, management and treatment of a number of hereditary diseases, rare cancers and drug resistant infections.
David has a B.Biotech from the University of Adelaide, majoring in Biochemistry, Biotechnology and Pharmacology and Toxicology; and a B.Sci(Hon) from the University of Queensland, majoring in Biochemistry, where he worked with Luke Guddat and Ron Duggleby on the structural and functional characterization of enzymes in the branched-chain amino acid biosynthetic pathway. David then went to St Vincent’s Institute of Medical Research to undertake a PhD at the University of Melbourne in Biochemistry. There he worked under the supervision of Michael Parker using computational, biochemical and structural tools to develop small molecules drugs to improve memory.
In 2013 David went to the University of Cambridge to work with Sir Tom Blundell on using fragment based drug development techniques to target protein-protein interactions; and subsequently on the structural characterisation of proteins involved in non-homologous DNA repair. He returned to Cambridge in 2014 to establish a research platform to characterise the molecular effects of mutations on protein structure and function- using this information to gain insight into the link between genetic changes and phenotypes. He was subsequently recruited as a lab head in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Melbourne in 2016, before joining the Baker Institute in 2019 and the University of Queensland in 2021.
He is an Associate Editor of PBMB and Fronteirs in Bioinformatics, and holds honorary positions at Bio21 Institute, Cambridge University, FIOCRUZ, and the Tuscany University Network.
Tamara is a trained respiratory scientist and has 7 years' experience in measuring the lung function of children aged 3-18 years. She has recently completed her PhD whereby she validated the use of normal healthy reference values for two lung function tests (spirometry and fractional exhaled nitric oxide) for children who identify as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander. She has a particular interest in childhood respiratory illnesses such as cystic fibrosis and asthma, emerging clinical measurement techniques, as well as Australian First Nations respiratory health. Her current research aims to better understand the mechanisms of early CF lung disease and to improve current clinical outcome measures to aid in appropriate CF management.
Dr Andrew Brooks is the Group Leader of the Cytokine Receptor Signalling Group at the University of Queensland Diamantina Institute (UQ DI) within the Translational Research Institute. Andrew completed his Honours research on Flaviviruses in 1996 at the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at James Cook University and then moved to the Department of Biochemistry to study Dengue Virus where he completed his PhD in 2002. He then moved to St Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, TN, USA where he researched the role of Epstein-Barr Virus in B-cell lymphomagenesis. He then joined the research group headed by Prof Michael Waters at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, UQ in 2006 and subsequently began his independent research group at UQ DI in 2014. Andrew’s research interests are in cytokine receptors, cell signalling, oncogenesis, and immunology. His current research focus is on the molecular mechanisms of class I cytokine receptor activation including the growth hormone receptor (GHR), thrombopoietin receptor (TpoR/MPL), IL-7 receptor, and IL-6 receptor (IL-6R). In addition, he is investigating the regulation of inflammation by HLA-G. His research has led to publications in journals including Science, Blood, Hepatology, Oncogene, Nature Cell Biology, and PNAS. He has been the secured of over $12 million in research and commercialisation funding from sources including NHMRC, ARC, Innovation Connections, and Merck. He has a number of national and international collaborations, a scientific founder of a start-up company, and is an Editorial Board member for the Journal Cancers and Human Cell. He was previously a committee member of Australian Early-Mid Career Researchers Forum (AEMCRF) launched by the Australian Academy of Science.
A/Prof Lucy Burr is an experienced respiratory physician, training supervisor and clinical trials researcher at Mater Health and Mater Research – University of Queensland (UQ). She has a PhD (2017) in bronchiectasis microbiology and is an Associate Professor at the School of Medicine, UQ. She is the Director of Respiratory, Sleep and Cystic Fibrosis medicine at the Mater Hospital, Brisbane.
As well as directing the respiratory clinical service at the Mater, Lucy has an active role in teaching both specialist trainees and medical students. She is a RACP college supervisor and trains one advanced trainee and four basic trainees per year. She directly supervises four medical students in her clinical team per year. Lucy is also currently supervising 5 PhD students, researching diverse fields such as glucose control in cystic fibrosis, asthma, fatigue, IL-22 and the effect of sleep on social cognition.
Lucy is recognised nationally for her clinical work on respiratory infections. She is the chair of the Acute and Critical Care panel for the National COVID-19 clinical evidence taskforce and a member of the guideline leadership group. Additionally, she is the recent chair (2020-2022) of the expert reference group on COVID-19 for the Royal Australasian College of Physicians. She is a recent (2019- 2021) convenor of the respiratory infectious disease special interest group of the Thoracic Society of Australia and New Zealand, the Queensland TSANZ branch president and past president (2017-2020), a recent board director of the TSANZ national body and current Chair of the Australian Bronchiectasis Consortium. Lucy is currently serving on the TSANZ annual scientific meeting and World Bronchiectasis conference steering committees. She is recognised internationally for her work on Cystic Fibrosis (top 1.8% expertscape February 2024) and Bronchiectasis (top 2.2% expertscape February 2024) and has published in high impact clinical journals including the New England Journal of Medicine and the Lancet Respiratory Medicine, across a range of respiratory and infectious disease subjects, with >1500 citations in the past 5 years.
In addition to her clinical work, Lucy is the custodian and manager of the David Serisier Research biobank at Mater Research, a clinical repository of human samples from patients living with respiratory diseases. Lucy is also an experienced principal investigator on many pharmaceutical studies ranging from phase 1b to phase 4 studies investigating therapeutics for CF, IPF, COPD, COVID, influenza pulmonary hypertension and bronchiectasis. She has designed and lead non-pharmaceutical interventional studies investigating the role of macrolide in modulating inflammation in healthy adults. She is the group leader of the respiratory clinical trials unit at Mater Research, and the program lead for the chronic and integrated care program at Mater Research.
Lucy has a proven track record in collaborative and translational research. She is currently a consultant on 2 peer reviewed external grants totalling $1,306,000, including one involving biobanked samples, and is a chief investigator on a 2021 Ideas grant and a 2021 MRFF grant totalling more than $3 million dollars.
Professor Dan Chambers is a thoracic transplant physician, interstitial lung disease expert, and translational clinician researcher. He is an internationally recognised authority in the fields of lung fibrosis, cell therapy for lung disease and lung transplantation. His research focuses on the mechanisms and treatments for lung fibrosis, silicosis, transplant rejection and post-transplant complications.
Graduating from UQ in 1993 with the William Nathaniel Robertson Medal and a University Medal, Dan’s career has continued to be recognised by being named one of Australia’s top 200 researchers in all fields and the most highly cited in the field of transplantation for the last three years. Dan was the immediate past Director of the International Lung and Heart-Lung Transplant Registry, the first Australian to be appointed to that role. The Registry remains the most important source of evidence to guide the practice of transplantation globally.
Dan is Executive Director of Research at Australia’s’ largest health service, Metro North Hospital and Health, and heads one of the world’s largest clinical trials programs in lung fibrosis. He is Chair of the Pulmonary Fibrosis Australiasian Clinical Trials Network (PACT). His research program, located at UQ Thoracic Research Centre at Prince Charles Hospital, has attracted over $20 million. He has authored over 150 original papers and book chapters. He is a regular reviewer for all the highest ranked journals in respiratory and transplantation medicine and is Deputy Editor of the Journal for Heart and Lung Transplantation, the highest impact journal in the field.
Professor Annette Dobson's research interests are in: Biostatistics (generalised linear modelling, clinical biostatistics, statistical methods relevant to longitudinal studies), and Epidemiology (tobacco control, cardiovascular disease, women's health).
I am a dedicated clinician with 15 years experience in clinical medicine including specialist training in Anaesthesia, Intensive care and Neurology. Passionate about advancing clinical research and advocating for clinician-researchers, I balance research leadership, teaching and mentoring alongside my own research and active medical practice.
My research portfolio is diverse. I am most passionate about harm minimisation (especially neurological injury) in operative and critical care settings.
To achieve this, bringing together expertise from different disciplines is key to innovativce discovery and advancing perioperative medicine and research. To this end, I invest considerable effort in building research capacity through collaboration with national and international research institutions, recruit and supervise senior scientisists, clinician-researchers and top PhD and MPhil students.
Kwun is a Thoracic and Sleep Physician at The Prince Charles Hospital and University of Queensland Thoracic Research Centre (UQTRC). His research interests are focussed on making and translating research discoveries to improving outcomes and the health of people who are affected by lung disease particularly lung cancer screening/early detection and biomarkers. The UQTRC is also passionate at enabling productive collaborations to maximise research impact and scale with contributions to The Cancer Genome Atlas Project, Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG), IASLC Lung Cancer Staging Project and others.
Maher Gandhi received his medical degree in the UK in 1989, and then trained as a haematologist, including a Fellowship in malignant haematology at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, Toronto. He was awarded a PhD in immunology at Cambridge University under Patrick Sissons. In 2003 he moved to Brisbane, and works as a Senior Staff Specialist (Pre-Eminent Status) in the Haematology / Oncology Department of the Princess Alexandra Hospital. He leads his own laboratory group and has established an international reputation studying immunity and identification of novel biomarkers in lymphoma, with continuous NHMRC funding since 2005. He was Chair of Laboratory Sciences for the Australasian Leukaemia and Lymphoma Group between 2010-2016, won the prestigious Australian Society of Medical Research Clinical Research Award in 2010 and in 2012 took up the inaugural John McCaffrey Cancer Council of Queensland / Office of Health and Medical Research Clinical Research Fellowship. Between 2011-2014 he was privileged to serve as Chair of the Metro South Human Research Ethics Committee. In 2013 he was appointed Professor of Experimental Haematology, University of Queensland, based at the Translational Research Institute, in 2014 became the inaugural Leukaemia Foundation Chair of Blood Cancer Research at the University of Queensland Diamantina Institute, and was appointed Diamantina Cancer Program Head in 2016. In 2018 to current, he moved to Mater Research, where he is Executive Director, as well Director of MRI-UQ.
Dr Gordon’s research is focused on the formation and maintenance of the blood and lymphatic vascular systems. Vessels form complex branched networks that supply oxygen and nutrients to all body tissues. The signals controlling blood vessel expansion, identity and migration are all downstream of a single, common complex at the cell surface, yet exactly how this diverse range of functions is differentially regulated, depending on the physiological need, remains unknown.
The specific focus of Dr Gordon’s research is to determine the precise molecular signals that control cell adhesion within the vessel wall the surrounding environment. If the signals controlling cell adhesion become deregulated, normal vessel growth and function is lost. This contributes to the progression of a wide range of human diseases, including cancer growth and metastasis, diabetic eye disease and stroke. Dr Gordon aims to use novel biological models, biochemical assays and imaging techniques to better understand vessel biology, which will enable improved treatment of disease and aid in the development of vascularised, bioengineered organs.
Dr Gordon received her Bachelor of Science (2005) and PhD (2011) from The University of Adelaide, after which she undertook six years of postdoctoral studies at Yale University in the USA and Uppsala University in Sweden. With the support of an ARC DECRA Fellowship, Dr Gordon relocated to IMB in 2017 to establish her independent research career as an IMB Fellow. In 2019, she was appointed as Group Leader of the Vessel Dynamics Laboratory.
Clara Jiang is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, the University of Queensland. Clara’s research focuses on using genomic and transcriptomic analysis to investigate the genetic basis of cardiovascular and psychiatric disorders, with a particular focus on female health, as well as using statistical genomic approaches to explore possible opportunities for drug repurposing. Clara graduated from the University of Queensland with Bachelor of Advanced Science (First Class Honours) in 2017, and was awarded the University Medal. Clara was awarded her PhD at the University of Queensland in 2021, where she utilised bioinformatic approaches and molecular experiments to decipher the genetic aetiology of breast cancer, specifically the regulatory role of transposons or ‘jumping genes’ in modulating the transcriptional landscape in the cancer state. Clara is also a UQ Wellness ambassador and an advocate for promoting equity, diversity and inclusion in academia.
Dr Moni holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence & Data Science in 2014 from the University of Cambridge, UK followed by postdoctoral training at the University of New South Wales, University of Sydney Vice-chancellor fellowship, and Senior Data Scientist at the University of Oxford. Dr Moni then joined UQ in 2021. He also worked as an assistant professor and lecturer in two universities (PUST and JKKNIU) from 2007 to 2011. He is an Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision & Machine learning, Digital Health Data Science, Health Informatics and Bioinformatics researcher developing interpretable and clinical applicable machine learning and deep learning models to increase the performance and transparency of AI-based automated decision-making systems.
His research interests include quantifying and extracting actionable knowledge from data to solve real-world problems and giving humans explainable AI models through feature visualisation and attribution methods. He has applied these techniques to various multi-disciplinary applications such as medical imaging including stroke MRI/fMRI imaging, real-time cancer imaging. He led and managed significant research programs in developing machine-learning, deep-learning and translational data science models, and software tools to aid the diagnosis and prediction of disease outcomes, particularly for hard-to-manage complex and chronic diseases. His research interest also includes developing Data Science, machine learning and deep learning algorithms, models and software tools utilising different types of data, especially medical images, neuroimaging (MRI, fMRI, Ultrasound, X-Ray), EEG, ECG, Bioinformatics, and secondary usage of routinely collected data.
I am currently recruiting graduate students. Check out Available Projects for details. Open to both Domestic and International students.
Associate Professor Andy Moore is a Paediatric Oncologist and Director of Research at Children's Health Queensland Hospital & Health Service (CHQ). He is also Director of the Queensland Children's Tumour Bank, a unique resource located on the Queensland Children's Hospital precinct, facilitating local, national and international collaborative research across all childhood cancer types and supporting enrolment of children on clinical trials. A/Prof. Moore's clinical and research interests focus on childhood leukaemia, particularly acute myeloid leukaemia (AML), an aggressive form of leukaemia with a poor prognosis. He also holds a number of leadership and advisory roles, including Deputy Chair of the Australian & New Zealand Childrens Haematology / Oncology Group (ANZCHOG).
Dr. Daniel P. Morin earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Cornell University in 1995, graduating with Honors and Distinction. He earned his medical degree from the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and his Master of Public Health degree from Harvard University, both in 2000. He then served his internship and residency in Internal Medicine at Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts. Thereafter, he completed advanced fellowships in cardiovascular disease and cardiac electrophysiology at New York Presbyterian Hospital - Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York, New York. He is board certified in Cardiology and Clinical Cardiac Electrophysiology. He is a Fellow of the American College of Cardiology and the Heart Rhythm Society. Dr. Morin's clinical interests are in device therapy for cardiac dysfunction (including cardiac resynchronization therapy) and treatment of cardiac arrhythmias via medical therapy and/or catheter ablation.
In addition to his full load of clinical work, Dr. Morin serves as Director of Electrophysiology Research and Director of Cardiovascular Research for the Ochsner Health System. He heads an active team researching such diverse subjects as risk stratification for sudden cardiac arrest, new applications for cardiac resynchronization therapy, the effects of ablation on cardiac contractility, and relationships between the environment and cardiac tachyarrhythmias.
