BrisBio Career & Professional Development Day

BrisBio Career & Professional Development Day

Event Details

Date: Friday 17 July 2026
Venue: TRI Auditorium, Atrium & Room 2003
Organisers: BrisBio, afternoon sessions in collaboration with ABACBS Professional Bioinformatics Community (APBC)

The Career & Professional Development Day equips students and early-career researchers with practical guidance, mentorship, and engagement with academic and industry leaders. Participants gain insights into career pathways, access training resources, and explore emerging trends and future directions in Queensland’s bioinformatics ecosystem. By combining professional development, networking, and sector engagement, the event strengthens both emerging talent and the broader bioinformatics community.

Focus: Showcase available careers, provide practical guidance, facilitate engagement with professionals, and highlight resources.

Goal: Provide guidance, mentorship, and sector insights for emerging bioinformaticians while highlighting career pathways and training resources.

Key Features:

💼	Career Pathways Panel – Academic, industry, clinical, and applied bioinformatics careers
🔮	Future Directions Panel – The evolving landscape of bioinformatics in Queensland
❓	Interactive Q&A Sessions – Direct engagement with panellists
🧑‍🏫	Mentorship Program – Pre-submitted CV feedback and guided networking
📚	Training & Resource Showcase – Courses, programs, and professional development pathways

Participant Feedback

Gold

Silver

Bespoke Partners

Career

Dr Wishva Herath

Bioinformatics Team Lead

Pathology Queensland

Wishva Herath leads the human bioinformatics team in the Genomics Discipline at Pathology Queensland, the NATA-accredited statewide diagnostic service. He joined as the first bioinformatician in the discipline and helped establish the service from the ground up, designing and building the custom NGS pipelines and processes. Before Queensland, he built one of the earlier cloud-based NATA-compliant NGS workflows at the Monash Health Translation Precinct and worked on genome-wide CRISPR knockout screens at the Hudson Institute of Medical Research. He holds a PhD from the National University of Singapore, where his thesis was among the early uses of RNA-Seq to study trophoblast biology, and postdoctoral experience from the Genome Institute of Singapore in single-cell RNA-Seq.

Dr Khoa Tran

Postdoctoral Researcher

Medical Genomics Group at QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute

Dr. Khoa Tran is a Postdoctoral Researcher within the Medical Genomics Group at QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute. He possesses a unique career trajectory that spans both academia and the private sectors, having previously worked as a Machine Learning Engineer at Australian startups specialising in the application of AI to precision medicine. In these roles, he focused on building and deploying cloud-based AI systems to solve complex challenges in oncology.

Prof Ian Scott

Clinical AI Consultant & Professor in Clinical Decision-Making

Metro South Hospital and Health Service

Dr Ian Scott is consultant general physician and former Director of Internal Medicine and Clinical Epidemiology at Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane. He is currently Clinical Consultant in AI at the Digital Health and Informatics Division of Metro South Hospital and Health Service, chairs the Metro South Clinical AI Working Group and Queensland Health Sepsis AI Working Group, and is Professor in Clinical Decision-making at the University of Queensland (UQ). He has co-authored multiple papers on the use of AI in healthcare, is principal investigator for several AI trials and has collaborations with colleagues within the UQ Digital Health Centre, the Centre for Health Informatics at Macquarie University, the CRC in Digital Health at Queensland University of Technology and the Clinical and Business Intelligence Unit of eHealth Queensland. He has longstanding research interests in clinical informatics, evidence-based medicine, clinical reasoning and quality and safety improvement.

Nicholas Matigian

Head of Bioinformatics

QCIF

Since joining QCIF Bioinformatics in 2018, Nicholas has played a key role in advancing collaborative bioinformatics support across partner institutions in Australia and now serves as Head of QCIF Bioinformatics. He leads a multidisciplinary team delivering expertise across genomics, transcriptomics, epigenomics, metagenomics, structural bioinformatics and single-cell and spatial transcriptomics analyses. A strong advocate for capability building, Nicholas is committed to mentoring and training the next generation of bioinformaticians.

Amanda Miotto

Science Leader

Department of the Environment, Tourism, Science and Innovation

Amanda is the Science Leader of IDSD in Department of Environment, Science, Tourism and Innovation, leading a team of HPC, WebApps and Data warehouse specialists. She started off in the field of BioInformatics and learnt to appreciate the beauty of science before discovering the joys of coding. She has had a career adventure crossing and connecting science, technology and business areas, from technology to data science upskilling, data management, reproducible research and translation.

Dr Helen Gunter

Senior Research Scientist and mRNA Analysis Lead

University of Queensland's Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology and the BASE mRNA Facility

Dr. Helen M. Gunter is a senior research scientist at the University of Queensland's Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology and the BASE mRNA Facility. With over 17 years of experience in genomics research across Australia, Germany, and the UK, her work focuses on developing tools to enhance the design, quality, and efficacy of mRNA medicines.

Dr Jake Bradford

Lecturer and Lab Head

School of Computer Science, QUT Faculty of Science

Dr Bradford is a lecturer in the School of Computer Science at Queensland University of Technology. He leads the bioinformatics stream of the Integrative Computational and Plant Genomics lab that spans into the School of Biology and Environment Science. His work is shaped by his background as an industrial software engineer and data scientist, alongside strong interests in high-performance computing (i.e., supercomputers and public cloud) and applied biotechnologies (e.g., CRISPR).