Trainers
Meet Our Trainers
Dr. Sonika Tyagi
Lead Scientist, Monash Data Futures Institute, Central Clinical School, Monash University, AustraliaDr. Sonika Tyagi is a Machine Learning lead scientist at Central Clinical School Monash University Australia. Her expertise is in developing new machine learning (ML) tools and pipelines, and applying these methods to solve biological and clinical research questions. Her current research focuses on integrative approaches to health informatics and genomics. Her group applies deep learning and natural language processing techniques to study genomes.
Sonika is a past member and contributor of ISCB Education COSI and chair/member of the GOBLET’s Standards, and EMBL-ABR and ABACBS’s education & training committees. She is currently a steering committee member of the Life Science Trainers group and affiliated with both Galaxy-Australia and Galaxy-India.
Sonika is a NHMRC chief investigator to computationally study human birth (2017) and for Targeted Delivery of Nucleic Acid Therapeutics for Preventing Preterm Birth (2022-25). In 2020 she was also awarded an AISRF Early Mid Career Research (EMCR) fellowship by the Australian Academy of Science to develop AI models for the diagnosis of preterm birth. She has received industry funding (2018-22), and University grants (2019-20) for developing AI resources to study genetic diseases. Sonika was a finalist for Women in AI (WAI) awards - Australia-NewZealand 2022 in the "AI in Health" category.
Dr. Harpreet Singh
Working on using about 15 years of experience gained in the corporate and academic sector to strengthen the skill set of the students in the field of Bioinformatics and to contribute to developing the best human resource in this field. As a member of International organizations and being involved in collaborative research with teammates from various countries, I wish to bring awareness about the latest trends as well as the best opportunities available in Bioinformatics and allied fields. I am currently working as a Head PG Department of Bioinformatics, Hans Raj Mahila Maha Vidyalaya, Jalandhar, Punjab, India. I am appointed as Secretary APBioNET, Finance Secretary (November 2017 to January 2022) Bioclues.org, and Representative GALAXY India. I have obtained a Ph. D in Biotechnology from GNDU, Amritsar, and Advanced PG Diploma in Bioinformatics from JNU, New Delhi. My research interests cover the areas of Structural Bioinformatics, Molecular Graphics, Data Analytics, and Machine learning. I have published 21 research papers and 5 book chapters in journals of International repute.
Ashar J. Malik, PhD (NZ)
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Bioinformatics Institute, A*Star, SingaporeAshar completed his PhD, in 2018, in the area of computational biochemistry from Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand and has since been working as a postdoc at the Bioinformatics Institute at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research in Singapore. His primary work focuses on providing clinicians with the capacity to explore polymorphisms in the human genome and their phenotypic effects. Additionally he also explores the area of structural phylogenetics and quantum computing. He is also a science communication enthusiast and loves to engage with in coming researchers on potential new computational methodologies that can be employed to enhance the quality of research. He is also an instructor with Software Carpentry and routinely conducts scientific computing workshops in different countries.
Celia van Gelder
Programme Manager/Project Manager, Bioinformatics Training & Education, Dutch Techcentre for Life Sciences (DTL), UTRECHT, NetherlandsCelia van Gelder is Training Programme Manager of the Dutch Techcentre for Life Sciences (DTL), which is also the Dutch node of ELIXIR (ELIXIR-NL). She is a bioinformatics education manager, coordinator and trainer with extensive experience in initiating and managing bioinformatics education and training projects at institute, national and international level. Target audiences for her training projects include high school students and teachers, BSc & MSc students, PhD students and other life science researchers. She is co-lead of the ELIXIR Training Platform, that aims to build a sustainable training infrastructure in Europe. The Platform has built a community of trainers across the 23 ELIXIR Nodes, offers the portal TeSS to register training materials and events and has implemented a Quality & Impact strategy. The Platform also strengthens national training programmes and helps develop training capacity in the ELIXIR Nodes, a.o. by a train-the-trainer programme. In the global arena of bioinformatics training Celia is Chair of GOBLET, the Global Organisation for Bioinformatics Learning, Education and Training. Recently, she was appointed as member of the Working Group Training & Skills of the EOSC (European Open Science Cloud).
Dr Gitanjali Yadav
Lecturer in Genomics and Structural BiologyDr. Gitanjali Yadav is a Lecturer at the University of Cambridge, on a joint appointment with the Govt of India. She has a diverse educational background, with a Ph.D. in Microbial Immunology (from the National Institute of Immunology, New Delhi India), a Master's degree in Biomedical Research and graduate degree with Honors in Botany, from the University of Delhi. She is a specialist in Genomics and Structural Biology with focus on food security and plant communication.
Dr. Yadav has received several awards in recognition of her work, including the Hamied Fellowship from the University of Cambridge (2019), Exceptional Talent Award from the Royal Society of London (2017), the INSA Medal from the Indian National Science Academy (2011), the Innovative Young Biotechnologist Award (IYBA) by the DBT, and the Women's Excellence Award (WEA) from the Ministry of Science and Technology, Govt of India (2014).
She actively promotes science as a way of life to underprivileged students from rural India, especially girls. Over the past year, she has been a Mentor for Women in Science Program of the British Ecological Society, as well as an ambassador of Indian Women in Science, at the CNRS Indo-French Women in Science Program, the Asia-Pacific Network for Bioinformatics (InCoB), as well as the Middle Eastern South Asia (MESA) Conference for Promotion of Science.
Dr.Melissa Burke
Melissa joined QCIF in September 2020 as the Training and Communications Officer for the Australian BioCommons. This is a joint appointment with the University of Queensland’s Research Computing Centre (RCC).In this role, Melissa works with a national network of bioinformatics experts and trainers to design, develop and organise bioinformatics-focused webinars and workshops. She joined the team from the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in Cambridge, UK, where she worked as a Scientific Training Officer managing the day-to-day running of EMBL-EBI’s bioinformatics e-learning program..
A molecular parasitologist by training, Melissa applies her scientific expertise to connect biologists with the bioinformatics training they need.
Tyrone Chen
Tyrone is a bioinformatics PhD student at Monash University, supervised by Dr Sonika Tyagi. He works together with biologists, bioinformaticians and statisticians on developing and applying computational methods for identifying informative patterns in large biological datasets. More specifically, his focus is on multi-omics data integration using machine and deep learning.Originally he was a laboratory biologist working on plant physiology and the molecular biology of non-coding RNA. He later got interested in bioinformatics, and for his honours project developed software for motif discovery using an information theory approach. He then worked as a bioinformatics research assistant in the Stemformatics project led by Professor Christine Wells, where he curated and processed several hundred transcriptomics datasets in an interdisciplinary environment to build a reference database for the community. He also teaches introductory programming and machine learning workshops as part of Software Carpentries, Monash Data Fluency and COMBINE. A full list of his projects and publications is available for reference.
His software is open source and any contributions are welcome. If you want to discuss method development, data analysis or the best restaurants within Melbourne, Malaysia and Singapore, please contact him directly.
