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 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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Professor Brandon Wainwright AM is a geneticist, renowned for discovering the genetic pathway that causes most human cancer. He is skilled in molecular genetics, where he is using genetic approaches to dig through DNA and find the genes that cause disease.

He commenced using these skills to locate the cystic fibrosis gene, but it was when isolating a gene responsible for a rare form of brain cancer called Medulloblastoma, that he discovered the ‘Hedgehog Pathway.'

He discovered not only the first brain cancer-causing gene but also a pathway involved in most cancers of all types.

The primary focus of his current research is brain cancer because it is the most common cause of death in children and the most common cause of cancer-related death in people under 40. He is also applying his expertise to common cancer generally (particularly skin cancer), and neurodegenerative disease.

Success for Professor Wainwright will be seeing a child cured of brain cancer that would otherwise have died. And he is confident that he can help make it happen.

He is formerly Director of UQ's Institute for Molecular Bioscience, where he proudly leads a team of talented discovery scientists translating their findings to life-changing applications.

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Professor Koopman earned his PhD from the University of Melbourne in 1986 for research on stem cell differentiation. He moved to London soon afterwards for a postdoctoral appointment in the Mammalian Development Unit at the Medical Research Council, where he conducted medical analyses of mouse embryo development. During a second postdoc, with the National Institute for Medical Research, he was part of the team who isolated the mouse Y-chromosome gene (now known as SRY) and demonstrated its role in sex determination by reversing the sex of XX-chromosome mice. The discovery is widely regarded as one of the major achievements in molecular genetics of the 20th century.

In 1992 he took a role at The University of Queensland, and now heads a research team whose work focuses on genes that regulate embryonic development, with special emphasis on the molecular genetics of sex development, fertility, gonadal cancers and intersex conditions. He’s also extensively involved in research training, having co-founded the Australian Developmental Biology Workshop in 2001. The workshop is a training-ground for the next generation of developmental biologists in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region.

Between 2007 and 2012 he was a Federation Fellow of the ARC, and in 2008 was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science.

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Mark Ragan is an Emeritus Professor at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, The University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.

He was founding Head of IMB's former Division of Genomics & Computational Biology (2000-2014), founding Director of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence in Bioinformatics (2003-2015), and co-founder of QFAB Bioinformatics.

Mark is a graduate of the University of Chicago (Biochemistry) and Dalhousie University (Biology). His 200+ peer-reviewed research publications in biochemistry, molecular biology, evolutionary biology, genomics, algorithmics, bioinformatics and computational biology have attracted more than 13500 citations.

Core technologies in his research group (integration of large bioscience data, scalable algorithms on trees and networks, bioinformatic workflows, high-performance and data-centric computing) were applied to problems of genome sequencing and de novo assembly, comparative evolutionary genomics, and inference of biomolecular networks particularly in the coral reef symbiont Symbiodinium, and in targeting therapies against DNA damage repair networks in familial breast cancer.

Mark was also involved in national and international infrastructure initiatives in genomics, computing, data and bioinformatics services.

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