Featured researchers

Dr. Rheanna Mainzer, Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Dr Rheanna is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Biostatistics and Data Science at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute. As part of her role, Rheanna provides statistical support for the Respiratory group's research into chronic childhood respiratory conditions. She is also involved with research into multiple imputation methods for dealing with missing data. Rheanna has always loved working with numbers and is passionate about using mathematics and statistics to help answer research questions in medicine and public health. She has a Bachelor of Science, with honours, in Mathematics and Statistics, a Bachelor of Finance and a PhD in Statistics from La Trobe University.

Yuliya Karpievitch, Biostatistician 

Yuliya is a quantitative scientist working with the AREST CF team. She graduated with a PhD in Bioinformatics from the Medical University of South Carolina. She further worked as a lecturer in statistics as has always applied her expertise to the area of human health.

Currently, Yuliya works in the multidisciplinary field of biotechnology, where her daily activities at the Telethon Kids Institute Respiratory Research Centre, are to develop a variety of computational methods that aim to identify genes, metabolites, and proteins relevant to preventing Asthma and slowing down the progression of Cystic Fibrosis in young children. Yuliya applies cutting-edge technologies from multiple fields, such as statistics, fundamental biology, clinical science, image analysis and artificial intelligence to improve our understanding of the disease and helps in developing preventative methods for the affected children. Yuliya and her collaborators are currently using machine learning/artificial intelligence to develop automated methods for quantifying mucous plugging in the computer tomograph lung images and automated cell-tacking to determine the effects of various drugs on wound healing. 

Dr. Patricia Agudelo-Romero, Post Doctoral Research Officer

Dr. Patricia Agudelo-Romero is a mid-career postdoctoral. She is currently leading the bioinformatics research in the airway epithelial cell team within the Centre for Kids Respiratory Health, Telethon Kids Institute, Perth. 

She holds a PhD in Biotechnology from the Polytechnic University of Valencia (Spain) and graduated with the prestigious Extraordinary Doctorate Award in 2010. She also obtained a Master’s degree on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology in 2015 in Spain. During her postdoctoral stays, she worked in a European project between the University of Lisbon (Portugal) and University of Barcelona (Spain) for carrying out an innovative systems biology study through the integration of omics data (transcriptomics & metabolomics) to understand host response to fungal infections among other projects. For this pivotal work, she was awarded the CNOIV Innovation Award in 2016 (Portugal). Additionally, she held a Research Associate position at the University of Western Australia (UWA). During this time, she was working in variant calling in whole genome sequencing, gene expression analysis, de novo assembly for the detection of mobile elements and enrichment of known and de novo cis-regulatory elements.

Currently, her research is focused on exploring two key areas in Cystic fibrosis (CF) disease: (i) Host-pathogen interaction (i.e. mycobiome, bacteriome & virome), and (ii) The integration of multi-omics such as transcriptomics, metabolomics and epigenomics, as well as network analysis.

Under this framework, she is interested in the CF lung virome and its interaction with other microbiome parts such as bacteria and fungi. In addition, through the use of whole-transcriptome shotgun deep sequencing, she is looking for the first time make a catalogue of the full-length viral genomes present in the lung of children with CF. Since studying the viral diversity and its influence in the microbiome balance is important for the understanding of its impact during the lung function deterioration in CF.

On the other hand, she is also studying the transcriptomic and metabolic responses of primary epithelial cells of children with and without CF under a rhinovirus infection. By integrating those two omics, she is looking for specific biomarkers related to viral infections for therapeutic treatments.

Dr Luke Garratt, National Health and Medical Research Council Early Career Fellow. 

My NHMRC Early Career Fellowship is to lead an international collaborative study with CF researchers at Emory University, USA that closely investigates the behaviour of the immune system in the lungs of babies with CF. We seek to understand why the neutrophil, a key immune cell for controlling infections, so quickly becomes more harmful than helpful to the CF lung. If we can better control neutrophils, we can reduce the amount of progressive lung damage. I am monitoring how lung conditions vary between babies with CF in the initial stages of disease and how neutrophils respond to these conditions. More importantly, we hope to establish this approach as a way to test treatments targeting neutrophils in early CF.