EMBL Australia

Over 200 attendees from all over Australia and the world came together for BioInfoSummer in Adelaide at the end of November 2016 to learn the newest trends and methods in bioinformatics and take this new knowledge and inspiration back to their labs. EMBL Australia was an official supporter of this symposium and the Mäkinen Group from the SA node was involved in its organisation and delivery.

Tanja is a member of the Provis Group at the John Curtin School of Medical Research, at the Australian National University (ANU) where she is in the final stages of her PhD candidacy. Last year, Tanja volunteered to Co-convene EAPS 2016. Her enthusiasm and abundant organisational abilities helped make EAPS 2016 the success it was.

Julienne is a PhD candidate from St Vincent’s Institute for Medical Research and the University of Melbourne where she is a member of Dr Andrew Dean’s team. Julienne is studying the rare and inherited syndrome, Fanconi Anaemia.

From the author of ‘Struck by Lightning: Curious World of Probability’, mathematician and comedian Professor Jeffrey Rosenthal is touring Australia with his new talk ‘From Lotteries to Polls to Monte Carlo’.

The EMBL Australia South Australia Node hosted a delegation from the University of Oulu in Finland at the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute (SAHMRI). The visitors, all members in the Computational Medicine Research Team, specialise in population-based large-scale metabolomics and genetics of common human diseases.

Dr Seán O’Donoghue is a biodata visualisation expert who spent his early research career in the Structural and Computational Biology program at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), and at Lion Bioscience AG (EMBL’s first start-up company), both in Heidelberg, Germany.

Australia’s national bioinformatics conference was held in Brisbane at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) October 31 to November 2.

Marcus Heisler was the first Group Leader to be appointed under an EMBL-Australia Faculty Development Program after Australia became an Associate Member of EMBL in 2008.

The Heisler Group focuses on investigating fundamental plant development questions such as how tissues are organised and patterned. Recently they have investigated how leaves grow flat, publishing a paper in PNAS.