Wednesday, June 10, 2:00am - 3:30am (EDT)
Register here : https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/high-resolution-spatial-transcriptomics-of-the-tumour-microenvironment-tickets-1988539720835
Join us for this seminar on advances in spatial and computational methods to help unravel the complexity of tumour biology.
Date: June 10th
Time: 3:30 – 5:00pm
Location: SAHMRI Auditorium
Refreshments and snacks provided
Catering Sponsor: AIM Discovery
Keynote Speaker:
Dr Dharmesh D Bhuva is an NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow (EL1) at the Frazer Institute, University of Queensland, who is passionate about understanding how complex systems of gene regulation and signalling lead to organisation of healthy and diseased tissues. He completed his PhD in 2020 at the University of Melbourne and WEHI where he developed new systems biology approaches to study molecular function and gene regulation in cancer. He then undertook his post-doctoral studies at the world-renowned WEHI Bioinformatics division, where he embarked on developing novel approaches to study cancer tissues using spatial molecular data. In 2023, he joined the computational systems oncology division at the South Australian Immunogenomics Cancer Institute (SAiGENCI) to continue his cutting-edge research in developing computational approaches to study tissue architecture. Computational methods developed by Dr. Bhuva have been downloaded >240,000 times globally. Dr. Bhuva has been recently awarded a MRFF grant and a NHMRC investigator grant (EL1) to identify spatial biomarkers in cancer systems, particularly biomarkers of response to immunotherapies in NSCLC.
Second Speaker:
Dr. Shani Amarasinghe is an EMCR and a bioinformatics scientist with over a decade of experience in computational biology. Since completing her PhD in plant transcriptomics at the University of Adelaide in 2018, she has built a strong track record at WEHI and Monash University, contributing to diverse projects spanning single-cell, long-read, spatial, and bulk transcriptomics.
Her work has been widely recognised, with over 2,300 citations since 2018 and publications in leading journals including Nature Communications, Nature Methods and Genome Biology. Shani has developed widely used bioinformatics tools, including long-read-tools.org and ScPipe, an R/C++ framework for preprocessing single-cell genomic data as part of a major Chan Zuckerberg Initiative–funded project.
Her research focuses on advancing transcriptomic technologies, including spatial transcriptomics, long-read isoform analysis and high-throughput CRISPR screening, and applying these approaches to complex biological systems in human and mouse models. She currently leads bioinformatics efforts across multiple collaborative projects within the Cancer and Stem Cell and Development programs within Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute.