Alicia Yinema Kate Nungarai Oshlack is an Australian bioinformatician and is Co-Head of Computational Biology at the

Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre The Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, also known as the Peter MacCallum Cancer Institute and commonly abbreviated as Peter Mac, is an Australian oncology research institute, cancer treatment and professional oncologist training centre located in ...

Melbourne Melbourne ( , ; Boonwurrung language, Boonwurrung/ or ) is the List of Australian capital cities, capital and List of cities in Australia by population, most populous city of the States and territories of Australia, Australian state of Victori ...

Victoria Victoria most commonly refers to: * Queen Victoria (1819–1901), Queen of the United Kingdom and Empress of India * Victoria (state), a state of Australia * Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, a provincial capital * Victoria, Seychelles, the capi ...

, Australia. She is best known for her work developing methods for the analysis of

transcriptome The transcriptome is the set of all RNA transcripts, including coding and non-coding, in an individual or a population of cells. The term can also sometimes be used to refer to all RNAs, or just mRNA, depending on the particular experiment. The ...

data as a measure of

gene expression Gene expression is the process (including its Regulation of gene expression, regulation) by which information from a gene is used in the synthesis of a functional gene product that enables it to produce end products, proteins or non-coding RNA, ...

. She has characterized the role of gene expression in

human evolution ''Homo sapiens'' is a distinct species of the hominid family of primates, which also includes all the great apes. Over their evolutionary history, humans gradually developed traits such as Human skeletal changes due to bipedalism, bipedalism, de ...

by comparisons of humans,

chimpanzees The chimpanzee (; ''Pan troglodytes''), also simply known as the chimp, is a species of great ape native to the forests and savannahs of tropical Africa. It has four confirmed subspecies and a fifth proposed one. When its close relative the ...

orangutans Orangutans are great apes native to the rainforests of Indonesia and Malaysia. They are now found only in parts of Borneo and Sumatra, but during the Pleistocene they ranged throughout Southeast Asia and South China. Classified in the genus ' ...

, and

rhesus macaques The rhesus macaque (''Macaca mulatta''), colloquially rhesus monkey, is a species of Old World monkey. There are between six and nine recognised subspecies split between two groups, the Chinese-derived and the Indian-derived. Generally brown or g ...

, and works collaboratively in data analysis to improve the use of clinical sequencing of RNA samples by RNAseq for human disease diagnosis.

Early life and education

Alicia Oshlack was born in Roleystone, Perth in 1975. She graduated dux from

Warrnambool College Warrnambool College is a government high school (years 7–12) in the regional town of Warrnambool in south-west Victoria, Australia Victoria, commonly abbreviated as Vic, is a state in southeastern Australia. It is the second-smallest st ...

Victoria, Australia in 1993. She completed a Bachelor of Science (Hons) (1994–98) from the

University of Melbourne The University of Melbourne (colloquially known as Melbourne University) is a public university, public research university located in Melbourne, Australia. Founded in 1853, it is Australia's second oldest university and the oldest in the state ...

, majoring in physics. She remained at the University of Melbourne to complete a

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

astrophysics Astrophysics is a science that employs the methods and principles of physics and chemistry in the study of astronomical objects and phenomena. As one of the founders of the discipline, James Keeler, said, astrophysics "seeks to ascertain the ...

, which she completed on the topic of the central structure of radio quasars (1999-2003).

Career

Oshlack made a career transition to apply her mathematics to genetics after moving to the

Walter and Eliza Hall Institute WEHI (), previously known as the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, and as the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, is Australia's oldest medical research research institute, institute. Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet, who won the Nobe ...

, where she worked as a research officer (2003–07) and then senior research officer (2007–11) in the Bioinformatics Division. Oshlack moved to the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Melbourne in 2011 to take up the post of Head of Bioinformatics. She was appointment as the co-chair of the Genomics and Bioinformatics advisory group for The Melbourne Genomics Health Alliance in 2013. She was also on the organising committee of Beyond the Genome in 2013. In 2019 Oshlack was appointed co-Head of Computational Biology at the

. She was elected a Fellow of the

Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences The Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences is an academy to promote health and medical sciences in Australia. It was established in June 2014. It cites "The Academy will serve the three purposes identified as of high priority in the 2 ...

in 2021. In 2022 she was nominated and highly commended in the Research Australia Frontiers Award.

Research

Gene expression analysis

Oshlack's research has focused on methods for the analysis of genome expression, notably computational and statistical analysis of

data. This includes work on background correction methods for two-colour microarrays, normalisation of microarray data, comparative analysis of RNAseq data and normalisation of methylation patterns in human DNA beadchip data.

Human evolution

Oshlack's methodology has enabled gene expression levels between humans and other primates to be analysed in an unbiased manner. Her work comparing gene expression levels from liver tissues of five individuals from four different primate species: humans, chimpanzees, orangutans, and rhesus macaques, identified the rapid evolution of transcription factors in humans. Further related work looked at the expression level changes for these factor across multiple human tissues. For this work Alicia Oshlack was awarded the Ruth Gani Medal for Human Genetics from the Australian Academy of Science in 2011.

Clinical gene expression analysis

Oshlack has developed a software pipeline for performing clinical grade analysis of DNA sequencing data for diagnostic purposes. These tools are currently being used for the analysis of sequencing data in the diagnosis of cardiomyopathies at the Victorian Clinical Genetics Service. She has also developed tools for the analysis of tumour data, specifically detecting mutations caused by rearrangement of the tumour genome resulting in oncogenic fusion genes.

Personal life

Oshlack's views on work life balance in science and communicating what bioinformaticians do to a general audience at parties have been published.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Oshlack, Alicia Australian bioinformaticians Australian women scientists University of Melbourne alumni Scientists from Perth, Western Australia Living people 1975 births Fellows of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences