BDB-Lab January 2025 Updates
Wishing you a happy new year from warm & sunny Queensland
Focus of the quarter: the new lab members
Resulting from the move last year to Queensland, the group is undergoing a rapid turnover. This quarter, we focus on the lab members that joined us recently.
Anil Pokhrel comes from a wet lab background with experience in infectious diseases and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in Salmonella and Staphylococcus aureus isolated from various clinical samples. His previous thesis focused on the seroprevalence of scrub typhus in febrile patients attending a hospital in Nepal. Anil is currently an MPhil student at the Big Data Biology Lab at CMR, QUT, working on a project to develop a workflow for the outbreak detection and source attribution of foodborne pathogens. If you are working on a similar project and would like to connect, please reach him on LinkedIn.
Alexandre Areias Castro is a starting PhD student at QUT. He is a bioinformatician with a research focus on metabolic modelling of microbial communities, with previous experience in projects regarding the extension of current modelling methodologies to capture mechanisms promoted by interactions between members of microbial communities, with a focus on human gut microbes. His current projects involve the development of new tools to optimize community modelling, their applications, as well as his main project that will encompass the creation of new methodologies for capturing microbial mechanisms in gut microbial communities. He can be found on LinkedIn and X.
Macha Nithya Kruthi is a PhD student with a strong background in bioinformatics and biotechnology, holding an MSc from Amity University and a BSc from Osmania University. Her academic journey has been marked by a dedication to research and excellence. She brings hands-on experience with next-generation sequencing (NGS) data, particularly in cancer genomics where she has worked extensively with whole exome sequencing data. Additionally, she has engaged in various bioinformatics and machine learning projects, enhancing her analytical and computational skills. Her current research focuses on small proteins and their functions, exploring their roles in complex biological systems. Outside of her studies, Kruthi enjoys playing the violin and horse riding, which provide a delightful balance to her scientific pursuits. You can connect with her via LinkedIn, or follow her research on GoogleScholar.
Juan Inda is a new postdoc in our group. He defended his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics in November 2023 at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. The focus of his thesis was the implementation of AI-based methods for studying antibiotic-resistant bacteria. He is particularly interested in the development of transformer-based models for the functional annotation of short peptide sequences and the prediction of their antibiotic resistance potential. In addition to addressing antibiotic resistance problems, Juan has experience as a data scientist at Olink Proteomics AB, where he focused on product development and quality control, as well as other scientific research projects, including single-cell transcriptomics analysis.
Awards & recognition
Highly Cited Researcher: Luis was named a Highly Cited Researcher in the cross-field category for the third consecutive year by Clarivate.
Researcher of the Year: Luis was recognised as “Researcher of the Year” by the Faculty of Health, QUT for his excellent contribution in “research impact and outcomes”.
Manuscripts
The argNorm preprint has been published as a QUT ePrint (and is currently under review).
Conferences & talks
Vedanth presented argNorm at microbiome virtual international forum (mVIF) December, 2024. YouTube version:
Yiqian gave a presentation at Nanjing Agricultural University.
Anil presented at Queensland Alliance for Environmental Health Sciences (QAEHS) Seminar.
Anna presented her postdoc project in a public event organized by Red Investigadores China-Espana at Cervantes Institute in Shanghai.
Luis virtually presented at the Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Network (APBionet). He also spoke at the EMBL-China Alumni meeting in Shanghai and at Shanghai Pudong Hospital (Fudan University Pudong Medical Centre). As part of ABABCS2024, Luis gave a talk at the Symposium on Bioinformatics Excellence and Innovation (SBEI24). Finally, Luis was invited to present at the EMBL Human Microbiome conference in 2025.
Visitors
Marcus Wenne visited Brisbane as part of the SEARCHER collaboration and presented his work at QUT.
Yiqian visited Brisbane and presented at CMR.
Interns
Lisa Galamaga is doing vacation research experience scheme (VRES) with us.
Jasmine Eyles is doing work integrated learning (WIL) with us.
Get in touch. Feel free to get in touch, by email, by Twitter DM, schedule a Zoom coffee, or join our discord.
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