MELBOURNE, 25 August 2014. Professor Terry Speed FAA, FRS, the 2013 recipient of the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science and one of the world’s leading statisticians, has embarked on a four-month tour to bring the new and critical science of bioinformatics to an Australian audience.
Terry currently heads the bioinformatics division at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute (WEHI) in Melbourne. This Wednesday, 27 August, he will be in Canberra giving a public lecture at The Australian National University.
Terry will go beyond the human genome and explain the next frontier: understanding human epigenomes. Epigenomes are the ‘instructions’ which tell DNA whether to make skin cells, blood cells or other body parts. Epigenetics also aims to explain how cells are re-programmed through interaction with the environment and how this leads to some forms of cancer.
Terry explains: “Consider the impact of diet. For example, if you feed a worker bee royal jelly you convert it into a queen bee. Diet alone changes the way in which the genes are expressed so that although it was originally sterile, it becomes fertile, it’s able to lay eggs – a pretty dramatic change just from eating some jelly.”
Being able to look at an abstract and more perfect world is what drew Terry to study mathematics; it was his interests in evolution and genetics that lead him to bioinformatics.
And he says advances in DNA sequencing over the last five years have allowed large amounts of DNA sequence data to be compiled. “For every single reference human genome, there will be literally hundreds of reference epigenomes, and their analysis could occupy biologists, bioinformaticians and biostatisticians for some time to come,” Terry says.
On the Canberra leg of the tour Terry will be also giving a technical talk at the Australian Bureau of Statistics on Tuesday 26 August.
Professor Geoff Prince, AMSI Director, says: “The AMSI-SSAI Lecture tours bring to Australia public lectures and technical talks from some of the world’s top statisticians. Professor Terry Speed has a heavy schedule because of his inspiring reputation as a researcher and lecturer; I’m sure we won’t be disappointed!”
The Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute (AMSI) partners with the Statistical Society of Australia (SSAI) to sponsor this lecture tour.
The seminar at the ABS is entitled ‘Removing Unwanted Variation from high-throughput omic data.’ Terry will discuss his recently proposed framework for removing unwanted variations in large data sets. And show how this new method supersedes current state-of-the-art methods. Further details here.
### ends ###
Resources for media:
Lecture tour website, including all abstracts: amsi.org.au/speed
Extended interview with Professor Speed: amsi.org.au/speed-interview
[columns] [one_half]For interview:Professor Terry Speed
[/one_half] [one_half]Media contact:
Stéphanie Pradier
M: +61(0)4 24 568 314
E: stephanie@amsi.org.au[/one_half] [/columns]
