People
Research Groups
Click on each group leader for more information about their research.
-
David Balding
Computational statistics applied to population, evolutionary, medical and forensic genetics
-
Yao-ban Chan
Application of mathematical and statistical methods to phylogenetics and evolutionary biology
-
Irene Gallego Romero
Functional, regulatory and comparative genomics; pluripotent stem cells as systems for genomic studies in non-model mammals
-
Kim-Anh Lê Cao
Multivariate statistics, ‘omics data integration, feature selection, microbiome, computational statistical learning, R software
-
Stephen Leslie
Statistical genetics with a particular interest in developing methods for, and applying them to, studies of population structure and immunogenetics
-
Davis McCarthy
Computational statistics, statistical genetics and bioinformatics, multi-omic data analysis
-
Heejung Shim
Statistical and computational approaches for the analysis of complex and large-scale genomic data with applications to functional genomics and molecular/trait evolution
-
Michael Stumpf
Statistical, mathematical, evolutionary and functional analysis of molecular interaction networks and dynamical processes in biological systems
-
Vanessa Rossetto Marcelino
Microbiome ecology, metagenome-wide metabolic modelling, host-microbe interactions, microbiome manipulation
Current students & staff
















































Alumni & Former Staff
-
PhD students
Katalina Bobowik
Project title: Transcriptomic characterisation of immune and disease-related traits within Island Southeast Asia
Github link
Supervisor: Irene Gallego RomeroQian Feng
Project title: Phylogenetic modelling of malaria var genes
Github link
Supervisor: Yao-ban Chan/Heejung ShimAnubhav Kaphle
Project title: Statistical methods for trans-ethnic genetic studies
Google Scholar link
Supervisor: David BaldingAli Mahmoudi
Project title: Inference under the coalescent with recombination
Github link
Supervisor: David BaldingElisabeth Roesch
Project title: Hybrid modeling in Systems Biology
Github link
Supervisor: Michael StumpfGeorgia Tsambos
Project title: Statistical techniques for studying admixture and local ancestry
Github link
Supervisors: Damjan Vukcevic & Stephen LeslieDavide Vespasiani
Project title: Functional analysis of archaic variants in modern Indonesians
Google scholar link
Supervisor: Irene Gallego RomeroYiwen (Eva) Wang
Project title: Managing batch effects in microbiome data
Github link
Supervisor: Kim-Anh Lê Cao -
Postdocs
Al J Abadi
Bio: Al has an extensive academic and industrial background in computational science and modeling with versatile applications in Engineering, Pharmaceutics, and Computational Biology. His research at MIG is primarily focussed on novel approaches in multivariate integrative data analysis methods with applications in high-throughput single-cell sequencing technologies.
GitHub link
Supervisor: Kim-Anh Lê CaoChristina Azodi
Bio: Working at the interface of data science and bioinformatics to study the effects of DNA variation on gene expression at the single-cell level.
GitHub link
Supervisor: Davis McCarthyAshley Farlow
Website
Google scholar link
Supervisor: Stephen LeslieAnissa Guillemin
Project title: Stochastic gene expression implications in cell fate decision-making.
Bio: I did my PhD in Biology in the Laboratory of Biology and Cell Olivier Gandrillon. We developed research projects with multidisciplinary approaches with particularly interest in understanding cell decision-making. Since February 2019, I have been working as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Theoretical Systems Biology group at MIG with Michael Stumpf (Group Leader).
Google scholar link
Supervisor: Michael Stumpf -
Former Staff
Andrew Siebel - Research Manager
Andrew completed his undergraduate BSc(Hons) degre
e in Zoology and Physiology at The University of Melbourne (1996-1999). His PhD was in the field of Reproductive Endocrinology enrolled through the Department of Zoology, the University of Melbourne and Howard Florey Institute. Andrew then received a prestigious NHMRC Early Career Research Fellowship (2005-2009) to work on developmental programming of adult disease in the Department of Physiology. He moved to the Baker IDI Heart & Diabetes Research Institute in 2009 to work firstly in the Human Epigenetics laboratory, then the Metabolic and Vascular Physiology laboratory (2010-2015). His research interests include cardiovascular physiology, glucose metabolism, lipid biology and interventional clinical trials.
Bobbie Shaban (in memorian) - Genomics Data Specialist
Originally from Perth, Bobbie obtained a double degree in Molecular Biology and Computer Science at Murdoch University. He has worked in a number of Bioinformatics roles including as a bioinformatics officer at the Centre for Comparative Genomics at Murdoch University, the Health Protection Agency UK (Now Public Health England) where he worked on The FF100 Swine flu database and also the Enteric Molecular Typing Network for the 5 nations and at the Australian Genome Research Facility here in Melbourne. In previous roles he was the administrator of the Cluster scheduling software (Sun Grid Engine) and was a Bioinformatician specialising in Genomic Assembly, RNA virus discovery, High performance computing and software pipeline optimisation. He also has experience in Web development, Database admin and creation, a number of computing languages including PERL, PHP and the MVC Frameworks Laravel and Ruby on Rails.
-
Former Faculty
Damjan Vukcevic
Dr Damjan Vukcevic is a statistician and data scientist, specialising in statistical genetics. He completed a Bachelor of Science (Honours) degree at the University of Melbourne in 2004, including an Honours project in bioinformatics with Professor Terry Speed. He was then awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship to study at the University of Oxford, where he completed a DPhil in statistical genetics with Professor Peter Donnelly. Dr Vukcevic has contributed to a number of important genetic studies, including the landmark multi-disease genome-wide association study by the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium, published in Nature in 2007. This received a number of awards, including Research Leader of the Year from Scientific American. Dr Vukcevic has experience working in both an academic and non-academic environment, with a strong grounding in statistical theory, computation and practical data analysis.
Dr Vukcevic is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics at Monash University.
-
Past visitors
- Garrett Hellenthal (University College London, UK)- April-June 2019
- Murray Cox (Massey University, New Zealand)- February-March 2019
- Hanaisa Sant'Anna de Pla (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil) - August 2018-August 2019
- Sebastien Dejean (Toulouse University, France)- July-August 2018
- Jukka Corander (University of Oslo and University of Helsinki, Finland) - December 2017-January 2018; November 2019
- Tatiana Hessab (Perito Criminal do IPPGF, Rio de Janeiro Area, Brazil) - July 2017-January 2018
- Laetitia Cardonnna (IRSTEA, France) - November-December 2017 & April 2019
- Olivier Chapleur (IRSTEA, France)- September-December 2017 & April 2019
- Solange Pruilh (INSA Toulouse, France) - July-September 2017
- Doug Speed (Aarhus University, Denmark) - April-May 2017
- Paul O'Reilly (King's College London, UK) - April 2017
- John Whittaker (GSK, UK) - April 2017
Recent Visitors
- Marko Terzin, PhD candidate, James Cook University, May – July 2023.
- Yi-Wen Hsiao, PhD candidate, July 2022 – July 2023.
- Prof Ivy Chung, University of Malaya, April 2023.
- Quentin Le-Graverand, PhD candidate, INRAE Toulouse, Dec 2022.
- Pedro Salguero García, PhD candidate, Polytechnical University of Valencia, Dec 2022.
- Attila Csala, PhD candidate, University of Amsterdam, Nov 2019 – March 2020.
- Prof Malu Calle Rosingana, University of Catalunya, January 2019.
- Stijn Hawinkel, PhD candidate, Ghent University, March – May 2019.