New Human Genome Informatics Lead

Australian BioCommons recently welcomed A/ Prof Bernie Pope to the role of Associate Director: Human Genome Informatics. Bernie is a Victorian Health and Medical Research Fellow, based at Melbourne Bioinformatics, The University of Melbourne. His research focuses on applying computational techniques to biological questions, especially related to human genomics and cancer. Bernie is also a passionate educator and has extensive experience teaching at the university level.

Bernie is well known in the research community, having spent years collaborating as PI on many high profile national and international cancer projects while also teaching and undertaking his Fellowship, Translating genomics-driven bioinformatics into improved prevention and treatment of colorectal cancer. You may have seen him at the ABACBS 2020 Conference presenting Best practices for bioinformatics command-line software with Bionitio. You can watch Bernie talk about his latest tool in the BioCommons webinar, Bioinitio: building better bioinformatics tools.

Bernie's arrival marks an exciting new era for BioCommons, with the launch of two new Human Genome Informatics projects. We've had online kick off meetings for projects to establish the Gen3 Data sharing platform in Australia and to explore and deploy a raft of other global technologies and standards to improve the sharing of human genomics data for research in Australia.

We're excited to bring together a range of partners including ARDC, ZERO, AGHA, UMCCR, Garvan, QIMR-Berghofer and others, multiple infrastructure partners (including AAF, NCI, AARNet and others), as well as expert international groups (including GA4GH, the developers of Gen3, the ELIXIR Federated Human Data Community, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia D3b, Seven Bridges Genomics and others) to help ensure that infrastructure for responsible human genome data warehousing, sharing and analysis is implemented in Australia that adheres to various global best practice standards.