Rate My Professor Bernie Pope

Professor Bernie Pope is a computer scientist and bioinformatician at the University of Melbourne, holding the position of Professor in the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences and serving as Bioinformatics Lead at Melbourne Bioinformatics. He also acts as Associate Director (Human Genome Informatics) at Australian BioCommons. Pope earned his PhD in Computer Science, specializing in programming languages, from the University of Melbourne in 2007, receiving the Australasian Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation Award from the Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia. During his undergraduate studies in Computer Science and Software Engineering at the same institution from 1993 to 1996, he was awarded the Dean's Prize in 1994 and the Department Certificate of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence and Operating Systems in 1996. Early career experiences include an internship at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in 1995-1996 and at Microsoft Research Cambridge in 2007. Following his PhD, he returned to lecturing at the University of Melbourne and in 2010 joined the Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative (VLSCI, now Melbourne Bioinformatics), leading a team of bioinformaticians in cancer and clinical genomics. He holds adjunct positions such as Adjunct Associate Professor (Research) in the Department of Medicine at Monash University and Honorary Clinical Senior Fellow in the Department of Surgery at the Royal Melbourne Hospital.

Pope's research focuses on applying scalable and robust computational methodologies to challenges in human health, particularly genomics and cancer. Notable publications include SRST2: rapid genomic surveillance for public health and hospital microbiology labs (Genome Medicine, 2014), Bpipe: a tool for running and managing bioinformatics pipelines (Bioinformatics, 2012), and Ultrasensitive Detection of Circulating Tumour DNA enriches for Patients with a Greater Risk of Recurrence of Clinically Localised Prostate Cancer (European Urology, 2024). With over 3,900 citations on Google Scholar, his work has significant impact in bioinformatics and cancer genomics. Pope co-leads the Global Alliance for Genomics & Health Cancer Community, co-chairs the Technical Working Group of the Pan Prostate Cancer Group, and serves on its Steering Committee. Awards include the Victorian Health and Medical Research Fellowship (2017), Excellence in Teaching Award (2008), Excellence in Tutoring Award (2005), and gold medal as coach at the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals (2000).