Summer interns arrive at VLSCI
VLSCI welcomes some fresh faces this month as a group of enthusiastic interns join us from institutions all over Melbourne. The group of talented young postgraduates will spend summer working with leading researchers in a diverse array of life science computation fields.
Mahtab Mirmomeni worked as a software developer for seven years before enrolling in the MSc(Comp.Sci.) program at the University of Melbourne. Her keen interest in genetics means she is excited to work with Professor Justin Zobel, LSCC Theme Leader in cancer genomics: “Being an intern in VLSCI provides me with the opportunity of exploring the computational life sciences area, learning from so many great researchers and using exceptional computing facilities.” Mahtab’s project will compare data assemblers and scaffolders on Assemblathon with LSCC data both to identify whether the Assemblathon results are useful to apply to real data and to examine the effects of scaffolding.
Janni Christensen graduates this week from her M(Biotech) at RMIT. While completing her thesis at Walter and Eliza Hall, she developed a passion for computational biology and was keen to gain more practical experience applying her new skills to “produce and analyse biological data on a massive scale”. Her internship will focus on proof of concept that long-term molecular dynamics simulations are a superior alternative to traditional drug docking techniques. Janni will have the opportunity to work with molecular modelling expert, Dr Mike Kuiper, from VPAC, and hopes her project will ultimately contribute to a more biologically accurate picture of the protein ligand interaction.
Ruchi Gupta is dividing her time between the VLSCI head office in Carlton and the LSCC research hub in Clayton so that she can work with the Head of Image Analysis & Informatics at Monash Biomedical Imaging, Dr David Barnes. Ruchi’s project aims to develop an improved skull thickness estimation for the reconstruction of 3D EEG brain images by using segmentations of a structural MRI scan of the same subject acquired at the same time.
David Wang is also working with Dr Barnes on a computational imaging project, using fast fibre tractography for magnetic resonance diffusion images. This project seeks to develop, implement and demonstrate an accelerated, scalable tractography algorithm to deliver very fast statistical fibre-based tractography, with potential applications to both clinical and research studies.
Andrew Brock brings a unique background in games technology and weather modelling to his project based at La Trobe University. Under the guidance of Dr Ira Cooke, Andrew will build a set of web-based visualisation tools for proteomics data that can be used within the Galaxy bioinformatics platform.
Two interns will work with IBM on a large project led by Professor John Hopper, that uses the unique Blue Gene/P architecture to perform genome-wide association studies (GWAS) on breast and prostate cancers. Given his background in mathematics and statistics, Zeyu Zhou will investigate complex statistical analyses of GWAS data. Final year Ph.D. student, Benjamin Goudey, will use his computer science experience to implement different algorithms and techniques aimed at reducing the time needed to run the various statistics.
Biochemist James Pham will soon be supervised by IBM’s Matthew Downton on an ongoing molecular modelling project.
We look forward to supporting the development of the interns’ expertise in their chosen fields and hope that their experience at VLSCI will encourage further enthusiasm like Mahtab’s: “the idea of one day being able to contribute something, even little, to the people’s health and wellbeing is very exiting for me. I’m very hopeful that my internship in VLSCI will give me an excellent head start for further research in this field.”
Keep an eye on the VLSCI e-news for details of the interns’ progress and announcements of the public presentation of their work.