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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.

In my PhD I analysed and modelled biophysical processes (light interception, transpiration and photosynthesis) and their relationships in apple and pear trees during the growing season and at different levels of plant water status. During this time I collaborated in the upgrade of a functional-structural peach model (L-PEACH). Later I focused my research on the effect of carbohydrates on grapevine and berry growth, as well as the effects of light, temperature and VPD on carbon assimilation and transpiration both at leaf and canopy level.

Currently, I am undertaking research on improving management practices in avocado, macadamia and mango. I am focused on studying architecture, vegetative vigour, crop load and light interception using functional-structural plant modelling to understand the interactions between management practices, environmental factors, plant carbon balance and growth.

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.

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Associate Professor Kelvin Tuong is an NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow and Deputy Director and group Leader of the Ian Frazer Centre for Children’s Immunotherapy Research (IFCCIR), Child Health Research Centre. He is interested in single-cell analysis of immune cells and harnessing adaptive immune receptors for understanding immune cell development and function in health and in cancer.

A/Prof Tuong was born and raised in Singapore and moved to Brisbane, Australia, after completing national service in Singapore and obtaining a Diploma in Biomedical Laboratory Technology (Ngee Ann Polytechnic).

A/Prof Tuong was originally trained as a molecular cell biologist and gradually transitioned into bioinformatics during his post-doctoral training. He has been very prolific for an early career researcher, having published >70 articles since 2013, with nearly a third of them as first/co-first or last author and has a stellar track record of pushing out highly collaborative work in prestigious journals including Nature, Cell, Science, Nature Medicine, Nature Biotechnology J Exp Med etc. He has the rare combination of having excellent laboratory and bioinformatics skill sets which provide him a strong command of both fundamental immunology and computational approaches.

A/Prof Tuong completed his undergraduate Bachelor's degree in Biomedical science with Class I Honours, followed by his PhD in macrophage cell biology and endocrinology at UQ (Prof Jenny Stow lab and Emiritus Prof George Muscat lab, IMB, UQ). He then went on to a post-doc position with Emiritus Prof Ian Frazer (co-inventor of the Gardasil cervical cancer vaccine, UQ Frazer Institute, Translational Research Institute) where he worked on HPV immunology, cervical cancer and skin cancer. In his time in the Frazer lab, he developed an interest in bioinformatics analyses as a means to tackle and understanding immunology problems in health and disease. He then moved to the UK and joined Prof Menna Clatworthy's lab at the University of Cambridge and Prof Sarah Teichmann's lab at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. He has focused his interests on single-cell analyses of tissue immune cells, including T and B cells and their specific receptors (TCR/BCR). He has developed bespoke bioinformatics software, including one tailored for single-cell B Cell Receptor sequencing analysis, Dandelion, which he used in one of the largest combined single-cell transcriptomic, surface proteomic and TCR/BCR sequencing dataset in the world, published in Nature Medicine, and more recently in Nature Biotechnology where we introduced a TCR-based pseudotime trajectory analysis method.

A/Prof Tuong is now leading the Computational Immunology group at the IFCCIR and his lab is focused on investigating how pediatric immunity is perturbed during cancer at the cellular level and how this information can be used for creating novel warning systems for children with cancer. For potential students/post-docs/trainees interested in joining the team, please contact A/Prof Tuong at z.tuong@uq.edu.au.