Dr Marina Alexander

Marina is a mid career scientist with expertise in RNA biology, virology, drug discovery, biomarkers of infectious disease and museum genomics using molecular tools and bioinformatics. She studies small things at scale to solve big problems, providing front-line responders; clinicians, vets, farmers, public health and biosecurity officials, with tools to rapidly contain disease outbreaks. Her doctorate training was at the Peter Doherty Institute studying HIV and post doctorate studies at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York where she assisted the HIV vaccine development mission. After a career break she combined her childhood passion for Australian wildlife and genomics to work on protocol development for sequencing formalin fixed museum specimens at National Collections, CSIRO. This was followed by a postdoc at the Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness developing pan-viral therapeutics for Henipaviruses. She was recently appointed as a Research Scientist to work on host biomarkers of emergency animal diseases such as Lumpy Skin Disease and leads a collaboration with National Collections and the Department of Agriculture Forestry and Fisheries to perform host-specific temporal viral surveillance using museum bats and rodents in The Australian National Wildlife Collection.