Dr David Kainer

Senior Research Fellow

School of Agriculture and Food Sustainability
Faculty of Science

Overview

I am a computational biologist with a centre-wide role in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Plant Success in Nature and Agriculture, based here at UQ. I spend my time researching new computational techniques for predicting complex quantitative traits by integrating multiple layers of 'omics data (amongst dozens of other things!).

Areas of interest:

  • Machine Learning, AI and high performance computing to functional connectivity in biological data
  • Gene Expressions networks
  • Multiplex networks and information propagation

My goal is to aid crop and forestry breeders in selecting parental lines more accurately, which gives us a pathway to improving certain plant species. I also spend time developing new data analysis techniques that are being applied to human disease and conditions such as Autism and substance addiction.

David completed his PhD at Australian National University in 2017, focusing on the genome-wide basis of foliar terpene variation in Eucalyptus. He then undertook a postdoc at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a US Dept of Energy lab with a focus on big data. After a stint as a staff scientist at Oak Ridge, David arrived at the Centre of Excellence in 2023 in the role of a Senior Research Fellow.

Research Interests

  • network biology
    construction and machine-learning analysis of multi-omic biological networks
  • Gene Regulatory Networks
  • Network perturbation and phenotype prediction

Qualifications

  • Member, Australian Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Society, Australian Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Society
  • Doctoral (Research) of Population, Ecological and Evolutionary Genetics, Australian National University

Publications

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Publications

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