Rate My Professor Alicia Oshlack

Professor Alicia Oshlack is Head of the Computational Biology Program and group leader at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, with affiliations to the Sir Peter MacCallum Department of Oncology in the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences and the School of Mathematics and Statistics in the Faculty of Science at the University of Melbourne. She holds a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Melbourne, completed in 2003, after which she transitioned to bioinformatics, applying her computational expertise to medical genomics. Oshlack has over 20 years of experience at the forefront of bioinformatics research, specializing in transcriptional analysis, single-cell RNA sequencing, methylation analysis, and genomic approaches to detect cancer-causing mutations. Her work focuses on innovative statistical and computational methods to analyze high-throughput sequencing data, enabling insights into tumor evolution, cell communication, and personalized cancer treatments. She leads the development of more than a dozen open-source software packages and collaborates on cutting-edge projects investigating disease and development through genome-wide technologies.

Oshlack's career includes positions at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute from 2003 to 2011, Head of Bioinformatics at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in 2011, and progression to Co-Head and then Head of Computational Biology at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre from 2019. She has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers, contributing significantly to the field through methods like those for differential transcript usage and cell type proportion testing in single-cell data. Her impact is recognized by prestigious awards, including the Ruth Stephens Gani Medal for Human Genetics from the Australian Academy of Science in 2011, the Georgina Sweet Award for Women in Quantitative Biomedical Research in 2016, and election as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences. Oshlack mentors junior researchers, supports method development for emerging data types, and shares tools freely with the global research community, advancing biomedical research in cancer and beyond.