Alun has more than 28 years of experience in biological mass spectrometry in both academia and industry in the UK, Canada and USA. During this time, he has developed HPLC-mass spectrometry interfaces, methods of analysis for natural products, drug and pesticide analysis, peptide and protein analysis.

Angelika Christ is Facility Manager of the IMB Sequencing Facility, where she leads a team of sequencing and bioinformatition specialists, producing high-quality sequencing libraries and next-generation sequencing data.

Angelika and her team help find researchers the best approach to their sequencing projects — ranging from agriculture, to drug development and medical research — and ensure the best outcomes.

Angelika has 13 years of commercial and research laboratory experience. She has worked in the field of next-generation sequencing since 2010 on various technology platforms and applications.

Angelika holds a Dipl.-Ing (FH) (equivalent to masters degree) in Biochemistry from the Mannheim University of Applied Sciences in Germany and a brings experience in organic chemistry and peptide chemistry as well as cell culture and assay development to her work at the IMB Sequencing Facility.

View Angelika's publications via PubMed

  Cellular reprogramming and ageing group

Highlights

Professor Grant Montgomery uses genetic approaches to discover critical genes and pathways increasing risk for reproductive disorders. He applies state of the art genomic techniques to identify risk factors and understand how these genetic differences regulate gene expression and epigenetics to alter disease risk. The goal is to understand disease biology and help develop better methods for diagnosis and treatment.

A major focus is women’s health and the pathogenesis of endometriosis. Together with colleagues in Brisbane, he led a recent large international study on genetic risk factors for endometriosis which confirmed 14 regions of the genome are associated with the disease, including 5 novel regions. His research is now moving to functional studies to identify the target genes in each region and determine how changes in the regulation of these genes contribute to disease. Professor Montgomery has published the first examples of likely target genes for two regions.

He is also using genomic approaches to help understand environmental risk factors for this disease. Environmental risk factors may leave epigenetic signals on DNA that are associated with disease and he is part of an international study on global methylation analysis in endometriosis.

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Professor Alpha Yap is a cell biologist. After training in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Cell Physiology, he undertook postdoctoral research with Barry Gumbiner at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (New York) before returning to Australia to establish his independent research group.

His research is at the leading edge of a rapidly developing field of science called mechanobiology. Mechanobiology explores how mechanical forces influence biology. Professor Yap is particularly interested in understanding how cells communicate by exerting force upon one another.

Collaborating across disciplines with colleagues from physics, developmental biology and mathematics, his research group has been instrumental in discovering how mechanical forces are generated, and sensed, to coordinate cell behaviour in tissues. Focusing on the epithelial tissues that are the major barriers of the body, Professor Yap believes that their cells monitor force to detect changes in the health of the tissue. This has important implications for understanding diseases such as cancer and inflammation.

Professor Yap currently serves on the editorial boards of several major international journals, amongst them Developmental Cell, Current Biology and Molecular Biology of the Cell.

He was the recipient of the 2013 President’s Medal of the Australia and New Zealand Society for Cell and Developmental Biology and is a Principal Research Fellow of the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia.

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