Dr Benjamin Goudey

Benjamin Goudey is a Research Fellow at The University of Melbourne. He was formerly a Research Staff Member at the IBM Research-Australia lab in Melbourne, working within the Biomedical Data Science team with a focus on Genomics.

His work has two main areas of interest. The first is the development of novel machine learning and statistical methods and tools that help uncover the genotype-phenotype relationship from large-scale genomic data. The second is the development of robust and scalable tools for analysing with whole genome sequencing data that can enable the shifting of genomics from a research tool to a solution for applications in industry. This encompasses fundamental tools for quality control and variant calling as well as downstream analysis such has clustering or prediction. Both streams of work span two very different domains of bacterial and human genomics.

Ben received his Ph.D. in 2016 in Computer Science at the University of Melbourne, exploring novel computational and statistical methods for conducting interaction analysis of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to search for combinations of genetic variants which show a strong association with a disease. His research has spanned a number of topics related to machine learning and bioinformatics including gene name detection from biomedical abstracts, prediction of diabetes and heart disease from lipid profiles, and methods to enable the communication of bacterial strain information without reference to a database.