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  • Coin Group

      Group Leader

    Dr Lachlan Coin

    Honorary Associate Professor
    Institute for Molecular Bioscience
    Researcher profile is public: 
    0
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    Body: 

    Highlights

    Professor Lachlan Coin is a mathematician with a research focus on developing genomics and bioinformatics tools in infectious disease and cancer. He was originally drawn by the rigour and intellectual challenge of pure mathematics but now uses his maths background as a toolkit for solving complex problems in analysing high throughput biological data.

    Professor Coin is best known for using approaches borrowed from machine learning, statistics and probability theory to interrogate genomic data.

    In particular, Professor Coin has focussed on using these approaches to uncover genomic deletions and amplifications and has identified changes that are associated with increased risk of obesity and diabetes.

    He has also developed approaches for finding minimal biomarker signatures associated with disease, and has applied these approaches to find biomarkers that distinguish bacterial from viral infection, and for the presence of active tuberculosis infection. He is also applying his methodology to develop a diagnostic tool for cancer from cell free DNA

    Ultimately, Professor Coin is motivated by making discoveries that are routinely used in clinical practice and to inform public policy to improve health outcomes.

    Professor Coin holds an Honorary Professor appointment with UQ, and is a Professor at the Doherty Institute at the University of Melbourne.

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      Researchers

    Dr Quan Nguyen

    Senior Research Fellow
    Institute for Molecular Bioscience
    Researcher profile is public: 
    1
    Supervisor: 
    Researcher biography: 

    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.

      Students

    Dr Son Nguyen

    Higher degree by research (PhD) student
    Institute for Molecular Bioscience
    Researcher profile is public: 
    0
    Supervisor: 

    Ms Miranda Pitt

    Higher degree by research (PhD) student
    Institute for Molecular Bioscience
    Researcher profile is public: 
    0
    Supervisor: 

    Mr Haojing Shao

    Higher degree by research (PhD) student
    Institute for Molecular Bioscience
    Researcher profile is public: 
    1
    Supervisor: 

    Mr Chenxi Zhou

    Higher degree by research (PhD) student
    Institute for Molecular Bioscience
    Researcher profile is public: 
    1
    Supervisor: 

    Mr Hyun Jae Lee

    Higher degree by research (PhD) student
    Institute for Molecular Bioscience
    Researcher profile is public: 
    1
    Supervisor: 

    Ms Janice Reid

    Honours student
    Institute for Molecular Bioscience
    Researcher profile is public: 
    1
    Supervisor: 

    Ms Dilys Li

    Honours student
    Institute for Molecular Bioscience
    Researcher profile is public: 
    1
    Supervisor: 

      Support staff

  • Our research aims to understand the molecular mechanisms behind pain
  • Postdoctoral Research Fellow
    Institute for Molecular Bioscience
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    Institute for Molecular Bioscience
  • Adjunct Professor
    Institute for Molecular Bioscience
  • Higher degree by research (PhD) student
    Institute for Molecular Bioscience

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The Edge: Genetics

People have known for thousands of years that parents pass traits to their children, but it is only relatively recently that our technology has caught up to our curiosity, enabling us to delve into the mystery of how this inheritance occurs, and the implications for predicting, preventing and treating disease.

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