Dr Helen Gunter

Associate Professor Cheong Xin Chan is a computational biologist and genomicist at the School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences, The University of Queensland. He completed his PhD in Genomics and Computational Biology at UQ and postdoctoral training at Rutgers University in algal genomics, before returning to UQ in 2011 as one of the inaugural Great Barrier Reef Foundation Bioinformatics Fellows. He now leads a research group at the Australian Centre for Ecogenomics (ACE) and is an affiliate of UQ's Centre for Marine Science. His research focuses on genome evolution and innovation, the hologenomics of coral-algae symbiosis, and scalable phylogenomics using alignment-free methods. With over 100 published works, his contributions include demonstrating a single origin of Archaeplastida, uncovering molecular mechanisms of coral bleaching, and developing large-scale genomic inference tools.

Professor Phil Hugenholtz is a microbiologist who heads the Australian Centre for Ecogenomics. He has made significant contributions in the field of culture-independent analysis of microorganisms. He discovered and characterised numerous previously unrecognised major bacterial and archaea lineages and has developed a systematic genome-based classification for prokaryotes.

Gourab Chowdhury, an international student from Bangladesh, is pursuing his Ph.D. at the University of the Sunshine Coast. He completed a B.Sc. in Fisheries from Sylhet Agricultural University and an M.Sc. in Marine Environment and Resources from the University of the Basque Country (Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree). He is currently investigating molecular and endocrine regulation of ovarian maturation in the black tiger prawn, Penaeus monodon.