Postgraduate Seminar Series – Computational Biology Theme hosted by Andrew Keniry, Nadia Davidson, Haloom Rafehi

Dr Martin Smith
Director – Ramaciotti Centre for Genomics, University of New South Wales

 

The hidden life of RNAs: long non-coding RNAs and RNA modifications in cancer

 

Davis Auditorium

Join via TEAMS

Including Q&A session

Dr Martin Smith is a computational biologist with a strong background in biology. As a child he grew up in Canada and he always dreamt of becoming a biologist. He majored as an undergraduate in microbiology and immunology at the University of Montreal, but he quickly realised this wasn’t his field. Switching to the emerging field of bioinformatics was an enthusiastic yet challenging decision for him, as it required rewiring his brain around abstract informatics concepts and discrete mathematics.

To this day, he is very passionate about bioinformatics and would recommend a cross-disciplinary career path to anyone. He has worked in 5 different cities across 3 different continents, namely Montreal (University of Montreal); Quebec City (Infectious Disease Research Centre—CHUL); Brisbane (Institute for Molecular Bioscience); Leipzig (Interdisciplinary Center for Bioinformatics); and Sydney (Garvan). He received his doctorate in Genomics and Computational Biology from the University of Queensland in 2012. His doctor’s thesis was supervised by Prof. Dr. John Mattick and Prof. Dr. Peter F. Stadler.

His research revolves around characterising the “regulome”, i.e. the biological mechanisms that control how genes are activated and repressed. He is particularly interested in how non-protein coding regions of the genome can regulate gene expression at the level of RNA.

All welcome!