Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research recognises pioneer in ‘omics and computational statistics

Dr Kim-Anh Lê Cao has been awarded the 2019 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research (mid-career) in recognition of her outstanding achievements in research.

Dr Lê Cao is a senior Lecturer in Statistical Genomics, in the school of Mathematics and Statistics. She is also a member of the Centre for Stem Cell Systems. Her research lab at Melbourne Integrative Genomics embraces a modern and multidisciplinary approach at the interface between statistics, bioinformatics and biology, focussing on statistical modelling of diverse and large biological datasets to gain new insights into the molecular mechanisms regulating biological processes.

Dr Lê Cao is a pioneer in developing methods and tools for statistical and computational data integration arising from novel biological data called ‘omics – transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, metagenomics etc; the study of biological features such as genes, proteins, metabolites, or microorganisms. Large data sets are generated and need to be computationally and statistically analysed in a holistic manner to generate new knowledge.

The era of ‘omics studies present formidable opportunities for analysis that has yet to be fully established.

“I am tremendously honoured to receive this award as it represents the recognition of the importance of multi-disciplinary research conducted at the University. The work I presented for this award would not have been made possible without the input from computational statisticians and software developers, bioinformaticians, clinicians and molecular biologists at the University of Melbourne, University of Western Australia, France and Canada. As a team we strive to provide methods that are easy to apply and are publicly available for the scientific community to broadly enable scientific progress well beyond statistical development itself.” Said Dr Kim-Anh Lê Cao

Dr Lê Cao was recently awarded the 2019 Moran Medal for her research in developing statistical and computational methods for high-throughput biological data arising from frontier technologies and the Georgina Sweet Award to promote and support female scientists who demonstrate excellence in the area of Quantitative Biomedical Science.

Dr Kim-Anh Lê Cao was also selected to be part of the Homeward Bound global leadership initiative for women in STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine) and is about to embark to her journey culminating to Antarctica to participate in a  3-week intense program.