Sean Vittadello
Training and Career Development Committee
Research Fellow
- sean.vittadello@unimelb.edu.au
Dr Sean Vittadello is a Senior MACSYS Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at The University of Melbourne, within the Theoretical Systems Biology group. His academic background is in both pure and applied mathematics, specifically C*-algebras and mathematical biology, and he has published research in peer-reviewed journals in both mathematical fields. His general research interests originate from the interplay between pure mathematics, applied mathematics, and biology. In particular he is interested in mathematical systems biology, and the complexity and holism of living organisms from the perspectives of structure, function, and (self-)organisation at all biological scales.
In previous work Dr Sean Vittadello developed and analysed mathematical models, involving ordinary/partial/delay differential equations, for cell migration and proliferation based on experimental data employing fluorescent cell cycle indicators. For this, he performed all of the experimental work within a cell culture laboratory.
More recently his work involves using mathematics to generate, or provide a framework for generating, new ideas and new conceptual relations regarding complex biological systems. Examples include: a model comparison framework based on simplicial complexes and group actions; a mathematical framework for developing models of cell fate dynamics based on random dynamical systems theory; a framework for studying the organisational structure of biological systems based on directed graphs; and, an abstract modelling formalism for systems biology that generalises chemical reaction networks, stochastic Petri nets, and chemical hypergraphs, based on hypergraph theory.
Thomas Williams
Training and Career Development Committee
Research Fellow
- williams.t1@unimelb.edu.au
Dr Thomas Williams is a mathematical and computational biologist at the University of Melbourne with a special interest in spatiotemporal processes, both at the between- and within-cell scale. His work applies a ground-up, inference-based approach, and has a focus on biological application.
Dr Williams completed his PhD at the University of Melbourne under the supervision of A/Prof James Osborne and Prof James McCaw. His work, modelling the spread of viral infections within the host, identified key features of the dynamics where spatial structure played an essential role, with consequences for the design of both model and experiments. A collaboration with researchers at the University of St Andrews, where he completed his Masters, also led to publications on spatiotemporal modelling of tumour invasion.
Anthony Hart
Training and Career Development Committee
Research Fellow
- anthony.hart@monash.edu
Anthony is a computational biologist who uses mathematical modelling and software engineering to tackle questions about complex cellular systems. He undertook his undergraduate studies, biochemistry and molecular biology, and post-graduate studies, drug resistance mediated by protein signalling network structure, at Monash University. He trained under Lan Nguyen and Sungyoung Shin in the Integrated Network Modelling lab, where he is currently working as a post-doc.
Anthony’s area of expertise is in protein signalling networks and their computational modelling. He has extensive experience in ODE modelling and using global optimisation tools to calibrate his models using biological data. He is fluent in a number of different programming languages including MatLab and Python and is currently expanding this repertoire to include C++ and Julia.
Robyn Araujo
Training and Career Development Committee
Chief Investigator
Dr Robyn Araujo has a long-standing record of excellence in developing novel mathematical techniques and models to study cellular signalling networks. She is currently an Associate Professor in Applied Mathematics at the University of Melbourne.
Dr Araujo has previously held appointments at the National Cancer Institute/National Institutes of Health in Washington DC, and at the Centre for Applied Proteomics and Molecular Medicine at George Mason University in the United States. She holds an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship and is developing new mathematical methods for studying the systems biochemistry of cellular protein networks. Dr Araujo’s contributions to this field that have been recognised by many recent invitations to speak at local and national conferences, including a plenary lecture at the 2021 Australian Mathematical Society annual meeting.
Dr Araujo’s research is internationally recognised through widespread media coverage. Her 2018 Nature Communications publication on adaptation in complex cellular signalling networks attracted national and international media coverage, including Cosmos magazine and Networking Women. Her mathematical contributions to tuberculosis biomarker sequestration, published in Science Translational Medicine was featured in the New York Times and New Scientist.
Richi Nayak
Training and Career Development Committee
Chief Investigator
Professor Richi Nayak is an internationally recognised data scientist with expertise in data and text mining (NLP), machine learning, and web intelligence. She is a Professor in the School of Computer Science and Leader of the Complex Data Analysis Program at the Centre for Data Science, Queensland University of Technology.
Professor Nayak has successfully managed over 25 industry-related projects, attracting a total income exceeding $15M. Professor Nayak has a successful track-record of combining knowledge in her diverse areas of expertise to solve real-world problems encountered in the Social and Biological Sciences as well as Engineering. She has delivered innovative automated data-driven systems, built upon novel machine learning algorithms, which have been adopted by both industry and Government.
Professor Nayak was awarded the 2016 WiT (Women in Technology) Infotech Outstanding Achievement Award for exemplary service to the field of data analytics.
Lan Nguyen
Training and Career Development Committee
Chief Investigator
Dr Lan Nguyen is an independent expert in the mechanistic modelling and integrative analysis of cellular signalling networks. His expertise and training span both mathematical modelling and systems and cell biology, enabling him to build a research lab comprising both dry- and wet-lab capabilities.
Dr Nguyen established and leads the Integrated Network Modelling Laboratory at Monash University where he holds a prestigious Victorian Cancer Agency Mid- Career Research Fellowship (2019-2023). He was previously a group leader at Systems Biology Ireland (SBI), a leading research-intensive institute dedicated to systems biology in Europe. Nguyen has an excellent track record in the field of modelling cellular signalling networks with his work appearing in high-impact journals such as eLife, Cell Systems, Nature Cell Biology, Nature Communications, and PLOS Computational Biology.
Richard Morris
Training and Career Development Committee
Chief Investigator
Dr Richard Morris is a theoretical physicist interested in investigating and quantifying the behaviour of living systems. He is currently a group leader in the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) Australia program, and has a joint position at the UNSW Sydney between Single Molecule Science and the School of Physics.
His work focuses on applying and developing concepts from statistical and theoretical soft-condensed matter physics, as well as applied mathematics, to describe biological systems.
Dr Morris has made research contributions across a wide range of areas, covering topics such as molecular signalling, membrane channels, cytoskeletal remodelling, vesicular trafficking, tissue morphogenesis and more. His work has been published in journals such as Nature Physics, Physical Review Letters, and Developmental Cell.
Wenjie Zhang
Training and Career Development Committee
Chief Investigator
Professor Wenjie Zhang is a computer scientist specializing in databases, data management and big data analytics. She is currently a Professor in Computer Science in the Data and Knowledge Research Group at the UNSW Sydney and has served as the Deputy Head of School (Research) since 2019.
Professor Zhang’s long-term research interests lie in accelerating data-intensive applications, focusing on the most fundamental problems and pushing the boundaries of state-of-the-art techniques in terms of efficiency, effectiveness and scalability. Professor Zhang has previously held an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award where her research focused on uncertain data modelling and analysis, several ARC Discovery Projects investigating spatial-temporal and spatial-textual data mining and analytics, and her pioneering work in the area of large-scale graph processing, is supported by an ARC Future Fellowship (FT21).
Professor Zhang is a valued member of the international research community and has held many senior roles in international conference committees and journals. She has served on numerous promotion and recruitment committees and the Academic Board of UNSW (2021 – 2023), bringing experience in institutional governance.
Malcolm McConville
Training and Career Development Committee
Chief Investigator
Professor Malcolm McConville is a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Pharmacology at the University of Melbourne and Associate Director (Platforms and Infrastructure) of the Bio21 Institute. He is an internationally recognised leader in microbial metabolism and the development of new analytical and computational tools in quantitative biology.
Professor McConville has been continuously supported by prestigious research fellowships throughout his career and has been recognised with the Australian Parasitology Society Bancroft Mackerras Medal (2012) and Howard Hughes International Scholar awards (2001-05). His international standing across the disciplines of microbiology, biochemistry and analytical chemistry is evidenced by his membership of the editorial boards of top journals in these disciplines and regular requests to write high profile reviews.
Professor McConville has published over 270 journal articles that cover diverse aspects of primary and secondary metabolism of bacteria, fungi and protists, and developed analytical techniques for systems level understanding of microbial metabolism.