Computational science expert awarded UQ fellowship

A world expert in using computational science to study disease is joining The University of Queensland's Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB), after receiving a $4 million fellowship to study chemotherapy-resistant ovarian cancers.

Professor John Quackenbush, from the Harvard School of Public Health and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, has been awarded an Australia Fellowship by the National Health and Medical Research Council.

The fellowships are designed to attract and retain leading health and medical researchers such as Professor Quackenbush, who worked on the Human Genome Project and has more recently focused on using advanced computing methods to study women's cancers.

He will team with IMB's Professor Sean Grimmond, who is Director of the Queensland Centre for Medical Genomics at IMB, the largest genome sequencing facility in Australia.

Professor Quackenbush will also use the opportunities afforded by the fellowship to explore fundamental questions about the rules that govern how cells “change state,” a process of transformation that occurs during normal development but which goes awry in disease.