About Rhys

Hi!

My name is Rhys, and I am a recently submitted PhD candidate at the Centre for Microbiome Research, QUT, Australia. Currently, I’m waiting for the examination of my thesis to be completed. In the meantime, I’m acting as a software developer and data scientist at CMR focused on the development of improved metagenomic bioinformatic workflows, machine learning applications in microbiology, and diversity analysis algorithms using read assembly techniques. I’ve developed an affinity for a number of programming languages including Rust, Python, and R.

I completed his Bachelor of Science (Hons I) at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. My undergraduate majors were genetics and ecology. It was during my undergraduate that I was first exposed to the application of computer science techniques to biological data, A.K.A bioinformatics. Assoc. Prof. Mikael Boden, Dr. Alex Essebier, and the rest of the Boden lab took me under their wings and taught me the basics of programming during a summer research scholarship which changed the trajectory of my undergraduate completely. From then on, I was determined to become a data scientist and programmer. It was to this end that I completed my Honours in the Boden lab where we managed create and publish my first bioinformatics tool ChIP-R under the supervision of Dr. Alex Essebier and Assoc. Prof. Mikael Boden.

Wanting to combine his passion for ecology with my new found love for programming, I then applied for a PhD under Dr. Ben Woodcroft and Prof. Gene Tyson with Assoc. Prof Mikael Boden as a secondary supervisor. It was during this PhD that I fully immersed myself in the creation of complex and useful software for my fellow biologists. The primary tools that I managed to develop during this time include: Lorikeet, Rosella, and Aviary