EMBL Australia moves into South Australia

07 Mar 2014
EMBL Australia moves into South Australia

EMBL Australia is expanding into South Australia this month, and we’re welcoming two new group leaders to the EMBL Australia family.

Medical bioinformaticians Ville-Petteri Mäkinen and David Lynn will be the first additions to the South Australian node of EMBL Australia, hosted at SAHMRI.

Ville and David will be bringing a “big data” approach to SAHMRI’s heart, cancer and immunity themes, helping SAHMRI achieve their aim of transforming research into practical health outcomes.

A computational engineer by training, Ville-Petteri Mäkinen has always been drawn to the boundary between biology and engineering. At EMBL Australia, he’ll be analysing huge datasets of human clinical and genomic data, looking for new links between our genes and heart disease.

It’s a project, he says, that is well-suited to the longer timeframe offered by the EMBL Australia funding model, which offers group leaders up to nine years of secure funding, rather than the three to five year funding cycle typically offered to young scientists.“Having the security of an EMBL Australia position at SAHMRI will allow me to really do the groundwork thoroughly,” Ville says.

David Lynn has joined the infection and immunity group of researchers at SAHMRI, although he will also concentrate some of his efforts on cancer.

“My research will investigate the regulation of innate immunity from a global or systems perspective, trying to untangle the complex, multi-layered web of interactions and pathways that control it,” says David. 

"Additionally, we will also be investigating how protein interaction networks are re-wired in cancer".The EMBL Australia Group Leaders will be some of the first researchers to move into SAHMRI, which is a collaboration between Flinders University, Adelaide University and the University of South Australia and the South Australian Government.

"We are planning to advertise a third position at SAHMRI later in 2014, together with other new positions around Australia."