Genomic and Epigenomic approaches for Precision Diagnostics and Public Health Research Semiar
Dr Therese Murphy, School of Biological, Health and Sport Sciences was the first speaker and discussed her career journey and her research journey which included bioinformatics in complex diseases where she has particular interest in studies linked to depression and inflammatory disorders. She has merged her expertise in epigenomics with machine learning which has been enabled through a collaboration with Prof Sarah Jane Delaney. Therese has published her findings on the relation of biomarkers for depression in blood. Her research also includes Epigenetic clocks predictive of biological age based on DNA methylation. She also has a EU patent pending on her research of a novel oesophageal cancer biomarker which can determine both late or early stages of the cancer type.
Dr Leonard Koolman, School of Biological, Health and Sport Sciences gave an overview of his education journey and research career. He has experience of many areas of research from studies in Fermented Foods, Slurry microbiota, Food Spoilage, Salmonella in poultry to Pesticides and AMR and more recently focusing on Electrogenic bacteria. He is collaborating with Monash University on Klebsiella monitoring and AMR. He advised the audience to use resources such as KlebNET-GSP – A global genomic surveillance platform for Klebsiella pneumoniae which is a risk framework for global AMR. He also mentioned another useful resource for researchers Pathogenwatch which is a global scale genomic surveillance tools of pathogens. Leonard is excited to welcome his new Marie Curie Postdoctoral fellow in September 2026 to investigate progress his Electrogenic Bacteria research.
Dr Niamh Gilmartin, School of Biological, Health and Sport Sciences chaired the event. She facilitated a very active Q&A session following the talks.
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