AIMS National Scientific Meeting 2021

Vanessa Hayes is Professor and Head of the Laboratory for Human Comparative and Prostate Cancer Genomics at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, Australia, and holds the Petre Chair of Prostate Cancer Research at the University of Sydney. Her research interest is in using variation in the human genome (the entire compliment of the human DNA code) to define human origins, evolution and disease, in particular prostate cancer. Her team uses the information hidden within the DNA code of living persons to not only define our living human history, but importantly to use this information to understand health disparities associated with prostate cancer risk and outcomes, with a focus on men of African ancestry. Vanessa believes that to understand human disease defined by our genetics we need to understand what has made us all survivors and to understand human survival, we need to trace our genetic history back to our common family, in southern Africa. Vanessa uniquely merges her state-of-the-art genomics laboratory in Sydney with her grass-roots mobile laboratory in southern Africa. Best known for leading the 2010 Nature paper that sequenced the first African human genomes and first for an Australian scientist, in late 2019 Vanessa again made world-news when she led another Nature paper that described a Botswanan homeland for all living modern humans.

Dr Denis Bauer is an internationally recognised expert in artificial intelligence, who is passionate about improving health by understanding the secrets in our genome using cloud-computing technology. She is CSIRO’s Principal Research Scientist in transformational bioinformatics and adjunct associate professor at Macquarie University. She keynotes international IT, LifeScience and Medical conferences and is an AWS Data Hero. Her achievements include developing open-source bioinformatics software to detect new disease genes and developing computational tools to track, monitor and diagnose emerging diseases, such as COVID-19.

Prof Wolvetang is a senior group leader at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology at the University of Queensland (Australia), co-director of the UQ Centre “stem cell ageing and regenerative engineering”, leads the “Cell reprogramming Australia” collaborative network, and was awarded the 2014 LSQ regenerative medicine prize. His team employs human induced pluripotent stem cells as in vitro disease models and CRISPR-enabled genome manipulation technologies to interrogate the investigate the molecular and cellular processes that underlie monogenic and complex neurological diseases. By differentiating genome-edited human stem cells into brain organoids, his lab is able to interrogate the interactions of different cell types during the disease process in vitro, investigate how this affects gene expression at a single cell level, and conduct functional analysis of neuronal function with multi-electrode array technologies. Concurrently robotic platforms are increasingly used to validate the pathogenicity of single and multiplexed gene variants at scale and for preclinical testing of therapeutics.