Units of Study:
- INFO1103: Introduction to Programming
- 2008: Computational Methods for the Life Sciences (COMP3456).
This will be a third-year unit that addresses with well-known advanced
algorithms some of the current problems in computational biology and
bioinformatics.
Student Projects
- PhD: I am interested in anyone able to work on the cophylogeny
problem, which is of estimating from the evolutionary histories of
ecologically linked groups of organisms the history of their
associations. Approximately 70-75% of emergent diseases are
zoonotic, that is, they come from other species: Ebola, SARS,
HIV, Chicken 'Flu to name a few. To date methods of analysing such
shared histories are still in dire need of development. The problem
requires mathematical thinking, not just mathematics training,
and some biological understanding. A knowledge of statistics and
mathematics would round off the picture nicely. Is this you? Please
say it's you. Update 2008.04: I have a PhD student working on this
now but there's a LOT to do so there's room for more!
- PhD: Gene Regulatory Networks describe the interactions of
regulation — turning "off" or "on", "down" or "up" (to 11) either
singly or in concert. GRNs thus describe some of the most important
interactions that take place in the cells of all living things, yet they
are not well understood as networks. I am very interested in
how the various motifs in networks have come to be, and why they are
selected for. Is it natural selection? Is it drift? Is it an
unavoidable consequence of the way in which GRNs can change? Are there
graph-theoretic properties that can be estimated of the few "known"
GRNS, that would tell us the answers to some of these questions? Are
you curious, or confused, or both?
Previous Projects
- BINF3101 Bioinformatics project (2006, Semester 2)
on microarray analysis (private access).
- BINF3101 (2) Another Bioinformatics (2006, S2)
project I'm slightly involved in, on a drug database (private access).
- INFO3600 Software Development Project for Avega
Systems (private access)
- SOFT1002 A first year Software Development project
(private access)
Research Projects
- DP0985137 ARC Discovery Project on the
Heterarchical modelling of nutritional ecology: from individuals to
communities (private access)
- DP0770991 ARC Discovery Project on the Origin
and Evolution of Animal Phyla (private access)
- TreeMap development (private access)
University of Sydney
Software
Conferences