Guru Talks @ ResBaz 2017

Here you can read all about the groups who will be doing a Guru Talk at ResBaz 2017.

COMBINE

COMBINE is the national association for Australian students in computational biology, bioinformatics and related fields and acts as the student subcommittee of the Australian Bioinformatics And Computational Biology Society (ABACBS) and the official International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) Regional Student Group (RSG) for Australia. We aim to bring together students from the computational and life sciences for networking, collaboration and professional development. COMBINE organises seminars from experts in the field, workshops in general programming and specific analyses, and social events culminating in the COMBINE Student Symposium to be held in Adelaide in November 2017. Follow us on Twitter (@combine_au) or Facebook (@combine.australia) or subscribe to the news and join the mailing list at combine.org.au.

newCardigan

newCardigan is a social and professional group for people who work in galleries, libraries, archives and museums - and for those who like hanging around with GLAM types.

newCardigan helps GLAM professionals to be more awesome.

The ‘new’ in newCardigan doesn’t mean it’s for new graduates, although they are certainly welcome. newCardigan is about new ways of thinking about GLAM, new opportunities, new connections, and new energy. We’re trying to create something quite different from a traditional professional association. No membership fees, no position papers, and no gold pins - newCardigan is designed to connect GLAM workers and ideas rather than represent a particular profession.

You can find us (and our events/projects) on the web at newcardigan.org and on Twitter and Facebook as newCardigan. You can also join our Discourse discussion forum, register your Australian GLAM blog, listen to our podcast and join the conversation on Twitter or Facebook.

Robogals

Robogals Melbourne is a student-run volunteer initiative with the aim of increasing the amount of females in STEM, especially engineering! We hold free workshops for primary and high school kids focused around Lego NXT Robotics. We hope to inspire more young girls to consider following an engineering-related career to high school and beyond. Founded in 2008 we’re now global with over 32 chapters around the world. robogals.org

7 Tesla Medical Imaging @ The Florey

Giant magnets: giving a new clearer view into the mind

Brain scanners have made great strides in the past 40 years, giving unique insights into the functioning of the brain and improved diagnosis of disease. At the Melbourne Brain Centre Imaging Unit, we run one of the next generation ultra high field, 7 Tesla MRI scanners. This $10m machine (one of only 2 in Australia) can give a much sharper widow into the brain than those less powerful.

We work with many diverse disciplines across the University and will introduce some of our current project areas including:

  • Medicine – improving diagnosis for multiple sclerosis, stroke and glaucoma patients
  • Basic neuroscience – using high resolution functional MRI and diffusion imaging to
  • examine the interconnected networks in the brain
  • Combining engineering and anatomy to create 3D virtual reality models for teaching

In this session, we aim to demystify working with scanner and to inspire your potential projects for the system.

VicNode

VicNode is a joint venture between Monash University and The University of Melbourne on behalf of all Victorian universities aimed at providing storage, sharing and long-term retention of research data for all  researchers.

VicNode is operated for Victorian and Australian researchers and research institutions through operating centres at Monash University and The University of Melbourne. Their mission statement:

‘Researchers can easily store and share research data (collections) through an affordable, secure and sustainable service’

The Conversation

The Conversation is an independent source of news and views, sourced from the academic and research community and delivered direct to the public.

Our team of professional editors work with university, CSIRO and research institute experts to unlock their knowledge for use by the wider public.

Access to independent, high-quality, authenticated, explanatory journalism underpins a functioning democracy. Our aim is to allow for better understanding of current affairs and complex issues. And hopefully allow for a better quality of public discourse and conversations.

Craig Butt - Fairfax Media

I have been teaching a course in data journalism at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Advancing Journalism for four years. The course, which I believe was the first of its kind in Australia, runs across four full days and covers data literacy, maths for journalists, statistics, data cleaning, data analysis, data communication and data visualisation.

WISE

WISE was founded in January, 2010 with the aim of promoting women in Science or Engineering. The vision of WISE is to inspire and to attract more female science and engineering students into their respective industries.

Research Platforms Services

The team behind the Research Bazaar itself! Alongside the training that you’ll get to experience at ResBaz, Research Platforms also provides, builds and maintains ICT infrastructure for researchers, in particular cloud compute infrastructure and data storage infrastructure. Enabling data-driven research and the effective use of IT is at the centre of everything we do. We service more than 3,000 researchers from all disciplines across Parkville, within Victoria, and nationally.We work closely with key research support units including Faculty IT teams, the Melbourne eResearch Group, the Library, and other Infrastructure Services departments.

Find out more by coming to have a chat with us!

BajaBoard

BajaBoard started as a hobby project in 2013 in Melbourne, Australia.

At that time, e-boards were on the rise, and being referred to as “last-mile” commuting devices. With the legality of e-boards on roads being questionable at the best of times, a trio of Melbourne engineers decided to create a machine that would take themselves off the beaten path. The whole thing started, as so many projects do, in the home garage.

Developing the BajaBoard was like trying to fit an off-road car under a snowboard. It wasn’t just a matter of putting fat tires onto a skateboard – everything was designed from the ground up, including riding dynamics. The board handles partly like a snowboard and partly like a motorbike.

Given it was the first to introduce chassis and suspension design, the BajaBoard engineering, prototyping, and testing process was a long one. After numerous iterations, the first BajaBoard was delivered to early adopters in August 2015. Based on feedback from the field, design has been continuously improved on, bringing about the G4 in 2016.

Today, BajaBoard consists of a tight knit core team supported by strong partnerships in manufacturing - check us out with our demo boards at ResBaz!

RLadies

This group aims to create a friendly community for women who is interested in R statistical programming language in Melbourne. No matter how you define your gender, you are welcome at events if you support the same aims!

We are part of Global R-Ladies group. Website: http://www.r-ladies.com/

You can access our presentations, R scripts and more (soon) on our Github account and follow us on twitter to stay up to date about R-Ladies news!  

AARNet

Australia’s Academic and Research Network (AARNet) is a national resource – a National Research and Education Network (NREN).

AARNet is widely regarded as the founder of the Internet in Australia and renowned as the architect, builder and operator of world-class high speed low latency network infrastructure for research and education.

We connect over one million users—researchers, faculty, staff and students—at institutions across Australia, supporting education across the life-long learning spectrum and research across a diverse range disciplines in the sciences and humanities, including high energy physics, climate science, genomics, radio astronomy and the arts.

Nationally, AARNet interconnects Australian universities and Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), and other organisations with a research and education mission, or with whom the education and research sector interacts. These include hospitals, vocational training providers, schools and museums.

Physically, this is achieved by owning and having access to fibre optic links across the country and through major metropolitan cities. As a National Broadband Network (NBN) retail service provider, AARNet also uses NBN services to connect schools in remote locations.

Internationally AARNet interconnects the Australian Research and Education (R & E) community to the world – any university in Australia communicates directly with another university anywhere in the world without touching the commercial Internet.

#HealthHack Science Day at the MCRI

By Louise van der Werff

Last week a tour was conducted through the facilities at the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute (MCRI), and I was happily invited to tag along as a representative of our little team at the Research Bazaar! The tour was organised by Dr Marguerite Evans-Galea (Maggie), a scientist specialising in neurogenetic diseases, for the winning team members of #HealthHack 2014, an initiative connecting medical researchers with software engineers to solve research problems.

The tour was focussed around some of the facilities and people involved in genetic disorder research, genome sequencing and gene therapies, a fascinating and highly complex field. Identifying genes responsible for genetic disorders and developing targeted treatments for those disorders is a mammoth task, but it looks like they have it well in hand.

The first port of call was the Translational Genomics Facility (a facility within the collaborative Melbourne Genomics Alliance), which holds some very impressive next-generation DNA sequencing equipment. The HiSeq 4000, worth a cool $1.8 million dollars, can carry out a full genomic sequence of up to 6 genetic samples in less than 3.5 days using a patterned flow cell technology, and outputs a whopping 4TB of data per run! They must have some hefty data storage capabilities at the MCRI! If not, they can always talk to Data Services here at Research Platforms Services :)

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Image: Dr Stefanie Eggers showing off the HiSeq 4000.

We were then treated to a presentation by George Charalambous from Curve Tomorrow, a six year old innovation company that has a digital health partnership with MCRI. Their mission? To create products that have a positive impact on society. Amongst other things, the team look at harnessing established technologies such as Microsoft Kinect, Google Glass and Oculus Rift for medical applications that involve motion tracking, and for simulation training (such as CPR training). They have also developed a number of iPad apps, including P.E.E.R.S (Pediatric Evaluation of Emotion, Relationships and Socialisation), which can be used by clinicians to diagnose and evaluate autism in young children, by, for example, testing their ability to match a written emotion to a facial expression in a relaxed, gamified way.

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Images: The PEERS iPad app, and a wristband that tracks muscle twitches.

Next up was Dean Phelan, a PhD candidate studying novel genes associated with cardiomyopathy. Dean is looking at methods of identifying causal genes by reprogramming patient skin cells into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) and then differentiating them into specialised heart cells for disease modelling and drug treatment screening. Did you know that differentiated heart cells start beating together spontaneously in a petri dish? I didn’t either! Luckily enough we got to take a look through an optical microscope in the cardiomyopathy lab to see for ourselves.

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Image:  Dean Phelan with his Petri Dish loving differentiated heart cells.

One of Dr Maggie Galea’s PhD candidates, Sze Hwee Ong, gave us a great overview of her research looking into cell and gene therapy treatments for Friedreich ataxia, a neurodegenerative disease that causes progressive damage to the nervous system. 

In the BLC (Bruce Lefroy Centre) Lab, we met Greta Gillies, who showed us her technique for extracting DNA out of blood samples for further analysis. It was surprisingly similar in principle to the strawberry DNA extraction experiment I remember doing as a kid. We also saw some of the freezers used  for the long term storage of tissue and blood samples, and were introduced to the concept of immortalising cell lines.

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Image: Greta Gillies speaking to the tour group in the BLC lab. 

And last but not least we met Kate Pope, a registered nurse and Associate Genetic Counsellor. She has the weighty task of working with kids with genetic disorders and their families, providing them with information and getting their consent for exploratory procedures aimed at identifying the genes responsible for their disorders, such as epilepsy. This may involve taking skin and even brain tissue samples for analysis and genetic sequencing. Dr Maggie Evans-Galea spoke of the powerful moments when Kate is able to make a phone call and break the news that the responsible gene has been identified, allowing for better and more targeted treatments for the patient.

All in all it was a fantastic and eye opening experience, but I feel we only really touched the surface of what goes on at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute.

If you would like to learn more, Dr Marguerite Evans-Galea can be contacted via marguerite.galea@mcri.edu.au and tweeted at @MVEG001

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