Dr Denis Bauer

https://people.csiro.au/B/D/Denis-Bauer

Biography

Dr Denis Bauer is an internationally recognised expert in bioinformatics and artificial intelligence, who is passionate about improving human health research by understanding the secrets in our genome using cloud-computing technology. She is an adjunct associate professor at Macquarie University and AWS Data Hero. She was awarded Brilliant Women in Digital Health (2021) and Women in AI Innovation Award (2022).

Her achievements include developing an open-source, artificial intelligence-based cloud-service that accelerates disease research and contributing to national and international initiatives for genomic medicine funded with over $500M. In 2020 she won the CSIRO Collaboration Medal for her work analyzing COVID-19 genome for vaccine development and molecular contact tracing.

As CSIRO’s transformational bioinformatics leader, Denis is frequently invited as a keynote speaker at international medical and IT conferences including Amazon Web Services global Healthcare & Life Science Day '21, International Research Software Engineering Conference '20, Enactus World Cup 2020, International conference on Frontotemporal Dementia ‘18. Her revolutionary achievements have been featured in the press such as The Australian, The Australian Financial Review, Sydney Morning Herald, The Mandarin, Australian Institute of Company Directors Magazine, GenomeWeb, ZDNet, Computer World, CIO Magazine, the AWS Jeff Barr blog, and was in ComputerWeekly’s Top 10 IT stories of 2017.

Denis holds a BSc from Germany and PhD in Bioinformatics from the University of Queensland, and has completed postdoctoral research in both biological machine learning and high-throughput genetics. She has 50 peer-reviewed publications (28 as first or senior author), with over 2900 citations and an H-index 25.

Denis advocates for gender equality in IT, and is active on CSIRO’s Inclusion and Diversity committee.

Current Roles

Group leader
Transformational Bioinformatics Group
Researcher
An integrative approach to next-generation 'omics
Project Leader
Cloud-based genomic services

Academic Qualifications

2004

BSc, Bioinformatics
Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
2005

BSc Hons, Computational Biology
School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, The University of Queensland, Australia
2010

PhD, Bioinformatics
Institute for Molecular Bioscience, University of Queensland, Australia
2018

Certificate in Executive Management and Development
UNSW

Professional Experiences

2009-2010

Research Officer
Institute for Molecular Bioscience, University of Queensland, Australia
2010-2012

Postdoctoral research fellow (Centre for Brain Genomics)
Queensland Brain Institute, University of Queensland, Australia
2012-present

Research Scientist
CSIRO
2012-2012

Visiting Scholar
UW Genome Sciences
11/03/2019 -present

Associate Professor
Faculty of Medicine and Health Science, Macquarie University
25/08/2020-present

Associate Professor
Faculty of Science and Engineering, Macquarie University

Achievements and Awards

2008-2008

Outstanding Individual Award
IMBcom
2008-2008

Best student paper award
IAPR Pattern Recognition in Bioinformatics
2013-2013

Early Career Researcher Award
Translational Cancer Research Conference
2016-2020

Julius Career Award $105,000
CSIRO
2017-2017

iAward (Big Data/ML Innovation of the Year & Industrial & Prim. Industries)
aiia
2020-2020

The CSIRO Collaboration Medal (COVID-19 Vaccine Development Team, 2020)
CSIRO
2020-2020

Professional Bioinformatician Award
Australian Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Society
2020-2020

Data Hero
Amazon Web Services
2020-2020

iAwards, Government Services, merit
aiia
2021-2021

Brilliant Women in Digital Health
Telstra
2022-2022

Women in AI (Innovation and first runner up of overall award)
Women in AI
2023-2023

Science and Engineering Excellence awards
CSIRO H&B

Other highlights

2009

The FANTOM Consortium et al., “The transcriptional network that controls growth arrest and differentiation in a human myeloid leukemia cell line.”, Nat Genet. 2009. IF 36.4 Cited: 146
2019-2019

International conference on Bioinformatics/ECCB
2020-2020

Enactus World Cup 2020 and COVID-19 Unmasked panel (1000 attendees)
2020-2020

Research Software Engineering conference NZ (Keynote)
2021-2021

AWS global Healthcare & Life Science Day (1000 attendees)
2023-2024

Statewide Clinical Genomics Network Steering Committee Member
2013

Bio-IT World asia - Singapore (invited speaker)
2017

Strata Data (O’Reilly and Cloudera) invited speaker
2017

Keynote YOW! Conference
2018

Keynote AgileIndia (1500 attendees)
2018

Keynote AI Dev Days (300 attendees)
2018-2018

Keynote at AWS Summit Canberra 1000+ attendees
2018-2018

Keynote at Open Data Science Conference, India, 300 attendees
2018-2018

Keynote at International conference on Frontotemporal Dementia
2018-2018

Plenary panel Alibaba Infinity Singapore
2019-2019

Keynote at AWS Summit Innovation Day Mumbai

Grants

2013-2015

NSW Cancer Institute “Link between Obesity and Cancer”
2014-2015

OCE Cutting Edge Science Symposium "Precise genomic engineering"
2015-2020

AI NHMRC TCR into Genomics "Preparing Australia for Genomic Medicine" $25M
2015-2020

AI NHMRC Dementia Research Team Grant "Developing insight into the molecular origins of frontotemporal dementia and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis" $6.4M
2019-2019

CI MRFF Frontiers Grant Antimicrobial Resistance $1M
2021-2021

NHMRC Partnership grand ($3.4M)
2021-2024

2020 Genomics Health Futures Mission, PI, Prof Zornitza Stark, 2008820, A national large scale automated reanalysis program to increase rare disease diagnosis
2022-2026

ARC Training Centre for Next-Gen Technologies in Biomedical Analysis ($4M) Prof Killugudi Swaminatha Iyer, Western Australia University

Community and Corporate Citizenship

2012-2013

AMATA conference committee
2013-present

Member of Melbourne Genomics Alliance Advisory Committee
2018-present

Inclusion and Diversity committee
2012-present

59 reviews for 9 journals (Nature Methods, Bioinformatics, Nucleic Acid Research, Trends in molecular medicine, Briefings in Bioinformatics)
2017-present

Editor of The CRISPR Journal
2015-present

Organizer of the Biannual Australian Genome Engineering Symposium
2014-present

Australian Genomic Health Alliances
2018-present

NSW Genomics IMT