Congratulations to Feng Yan and Ryan Wick on their PhD completions

L-R: Feng Yan and Ryan Wick completed their PhD theses

Congratulations to Mr Feng Yan (Australian Centre for Blood Diseases) and Mr Ryan Wick (Department of Infectious Diseases) on their PhD completions on 30 March 2022!

Feng Yan was supervised by Professor David Curtis (Australian Centre for Blood Diseases), Associate Professor David Powell (School of Biomedical Sciences) and Dr Nick Wong (Australian Centre for Blood Diseases and Monash Bioinformatics Platform). Feng's thesis is titled, "Deciphering epigenetic alterations in pre-leukemic stem cells during T cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia development." His thesis examines the aberrations in immature and chemo-resistant leukemia cells that cause an aggressive type of leukemia. It identified the earliest targets directly driven by an oncogene, and a scoring system for patient risk stratification.

Ryan Wick was supervised by Professor Kathryn Holt, Dr Kelly Wyres and Professor Anton Peleg, Department of Infectious Diseases. His thesis is titled, "Perfecting bacterial genome assembly". Ryan writes, "DNA sequencers cannot directly provide an organism's complete genome sequence. Rather, they produce fragmented and error-containing pieces of the genome (reads), and the computational task of reconstructing a genome from sequencing reads is known as assembly. In this thesis, I investigate the best practices for assembling bacterial genomes and develop new algorithms which address shortcomings of existing methods. Using these new developments, it is possible to produce bacterial genome sequences with greater accuracy than ever before, often reaching perfection: zero-error genomes."