After completing his PhD at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, Marcel was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship to study the roles of noncoding RNA in the laboratory of John Mattick at the University of Queensland. Last year, Marcel started his own lab at the Diamantina Institute at UQ. In October, he was recruited to the Garvan as Head of Genome Informatics.

"Challenges and Opportunities in Clinical Genomics"

With the cost of sequencing a complete human genome falling to the point of other specialist tests, such as an MRI, we are now rapidly approaching a time where whole genome analysis of patients can be undertaken routinely. Whole genome sequencing has tremendous potential especially in providing rapid and accurate diagnosis and also presents an opportunity to tailor treatments to patients, ushering in a future of true individualised medicine. In this talk, I will discuss the challenges we face in realising this potential and how we might overcome them.

Warren Kaplan PhD Bioinformatics Specialist

Warren completed a PhD at Wits University in South Africa and then joined a crystallography group at the University of Sydney. He spent 2 years with Entigen, a bioinformatics startup company before moving to Garvan in 2002.

"Where the Garvan is Now on its Road to Discoveries"

The first Human Genome was completed in 2001at a cost of almost $3 Billion. The project had taken 10 years and it was around the same time that our bioinformatics group was established at the Garvan. During my talk I plan to speak of our work using genome-wide technologies from early microarrays, or gene-chips through to high-throughput genome sequencing. I will also talk about software tools and resources we have developed to empower researchers to do their own genome-wide analyses and the infrastructure underpinning these resources.