Dr Quan Nguyen is a Group Leader at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB), The University of Queensland. He is leading the Genomics and Machine Learning (GML) lab to study neuroinflammation and cancer-immune cells at single-cell resolution and within spatial morphological tissue context. His research interest is about revealing gene and cell regulators that determine the states of the complex cancer and neuronal ecosystems. Particularly, he is interested in quantifying cellular diversity and the dynamics of cell-cell interactions within the tissues to find ways to improve cancer diagnosis or cell-type specific treatments or the immunoinflammation responses that cause neuronal disease.

Using machine learning and genomic approaches, his group are integrating single-cell spatiotemporal sequencing data with tissue imaging data to find causal links between cellular genotypes, tissue microenvironment, and disease phenotypes. GML lab is also developing experimental technologies that enable large-scale profiling of spatial gene and protein expression (spatial omics) in a range of cancer tissues (focusing on brain and skin cancer) and in mouse brain and spinal cord.

Dr Quan Nguyen completed a PhD in Bioengineering at the University of Queensland in 2013, postdoctoral training in Bioinformatics at RIKEN institute in Japan in 2015, a CSIRO Office of Chief Executive (OCE) Research Fellowship in 2016, an IMB Fellow in 2018, an Australian Research Council DECRA fellowship (2019-2021), and is currently a National Health and Medical Research Council leadership fellow (EL2). He has published in top-tier journals, including Cell, Cell Stem Cell, Nature Methods, Nature Protocols, Nature Communications, Genome Research, Genome Biology and a prize-winning paper in GigaScience. In the past three years, he has contributed to the development of x8 open-source software, x2 web applications, and x4 databases for analysis of single-cell data and spatial transcriptomics. He is looking for enthusiastic research students and research staff to join his group.

Doctor Anthony Verderosa is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB) at the University of Queensland (UQ). Verderosa is the head researcher of a team dedicated to the design, synthesis, and microbiological evaluation of antibiotic conjugates. Their project involves synthetically linking different antibiotics and/or antibiotic adjuvants to generate novel dual-acting antimicrobial conjugates to treat resistant bacterial infections. Verderosa is an early career researcher (ECR) with expertise in synthetic organic chemistry, molecular bacteriology, antimicrobial testing, drug development, and biofilm remediation. His PhD (2020) involved transdisciplinary work (chemistry/microbiology) that focused on discovering and developing nitroxide-functionalised antibiotics - new drugs for treating and eradicating microbial biofilms. After submitting his PhD, Verderosa accepted a Postdoctoral Research position in molecular bacteriology and bacterial pathogenesis, where he developed new methods and strategies for tackling antimicrobial resistance.