Dr Thomas Iosifidis is a postdoctoral researcher at The Kids Wal-yan Respiratory Research Centre with a strong focus in early life respiratory disease prevention and treatment, such as wheezing illnesses and asthma. Dr Iosifidis leads an epithelial repair program, combining expertise in patient-derived cell culture and preclinical models, clinical cohorts and bioinformatics approaches, to develop new therapies that enhance mucosal healing. Dr Iosifidis’ research led to significant innovations, including the development of a novel therapeutic pipeline addressing the ‘vulnerable epithelial’ trait in asthma associated with increased asthma morbidity and presentations to hospital in young children.

Hao Chen is a final year PhD student at the University of Technology Sydney, under the supervision of Prof. Phil Hansbro and Dr. Alen Faiz. His research expertise lies in the application of cutting-edge spatial transcriptomics technology to study respiratory conditions, particularly focusing on the effects of cigarette smoking and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Hao's work has been instrumental in advancing the understanding of how spatial transcriptomics can be used to unravel the complexities of respiratory diseases at the molecular level. At the Thoracic Society of Australia and New Zealand Education Hub 2024, Hao will be sharing his knowledge and experience with mid-career researchers, providing insights into the application of spatial transcriptomics in respiratory diseases. He is passionate about advancing research methodologies and improving respiratory health outcomes through cutting-edge technologies.

Dr Arutha Kulasinghe is a Senior Research Fellow and leads the Clinical-oMx Lab at the University of Queensland. Dr Kulasinghe has pioneered spatial transcriptomics using digital spatial profiling approaches in the Asia-Pacific region, contributing to world-first studies for lung cancer, head and neck cancer, and COVID-19. His research aims to understand the underlying pathobiology by using an integrative multi-omics approach.

Dr Alen Faiz is a molecular biologist and geneticist who is leader of the Respiratory Bioinformatics and Molecular Biology (RBMB) Lab at UTS. The labs primary focus is to understanding the biology of respiratory systems at the genetic and epigenetic levels, including under conditions of exposure to cigarette smoke and viral infection. Dr Faiz’s research program has made significant contributions to the understanding of the molecular pathways that underpin the development and progression of COPD and asthma through the development of bioinformatics pipelines and advanced cell culture and genetic editing techniques.

Dr. Sean Humphrey has contributed to the fields of proteomics and signal transduction by developing scalable and efficient methods for studying global protein phosphorylation (‘phosphoproteomics’) and applying these to diverse biological fields. In 2014 he received an EMBO postdoctoral fellowship and undertook post-doctoral training with Professor Matthias Mann at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry (Martinsried, Germany). He has co-authored several landmark studies in phosphoproteomics, including the first time-resolved analyses of insulin signalling, and circadian rhythms in vivo. He received the 2023 Peter Doherty Award and the 2024 Commonwealth Health Minister’s Award for the top-ranked NHMRC Investigator Grant, and leads the Functional Phosphoproteomics Laboratory at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute where his research focuses on applying mass spectrometry technologies to identify new treatments for a variety of childhood diseases.

Dr Christine Keenan is a Laboratory Head at the Bio21 Institute of Molecular Sciences and Biotechnology and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Biochemistry and Pharmacology, University of Melbourne. Her lab investigates epigenetic mechanisms that cause or contribute to immune-mediated diseases. The ultimate goal of this research program is to therapeutically harness the epigenome to treat immune diseases, without compromising a healthy state of immune protection.

Dr. Patricia Agudelo-Romero is a senior computational biologist leading the bioinformatics arm at the Wal-yan Respiratory Research Centre within the The Kids Institute (Perth, Western Australia). Her research focuses on host-microbe interactions in chronic respiratory diseases. She is currently investigating the prenatal methylation landscape associated with asthma risk factors and exploring the complexity of the human respiratory virome. Dr. Agudelo-Romero has developed bioinformatics pipelines for multi-omics integration, including recent contributions such as Nextflow pipelines for viral discovery (agudeloromero/everest_nf) and high-throughput targeted methylation sequencing (wal-yan/target-methylseq-qc).

Dr Alen Faiz is a molecular biologist and geneticist who is leader of the Respiratory Bioinformatics and Molecular Biology (RBMB) Lab at UTS. The labs primary focus is to understanding the biology of respiratory systems at the genetic and epigenetic levels, including under conditions of exposure to cigarette smoke and viral infection. Dr Faiz’s research program has made significant contributions to the understanding of the molecular pathways that underpin the development and progression of COPD and asthma through the development of bioinformatics pipelines and advanced cell culture and genetic editing techniques.

Dr Rhiannon Werder is a Team Leader at Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, spearheading research utilising stem cell models of the lung to transform the discovery of new therapies for respiratory disease. Dr Werder leads a multidisciplinary team at MCRI, combining expertise in stem cell biology and immunology, to develop new therapies for lung diseases. Her research focuses on investigating respiratory viral infections and chronic lung diseases using induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived models of the lung. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr Werder’s research led to significant findings, including the first discovery of how the lung epithelium responds to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. She has also pioneered new gene-editing techniques in iPSC-derived epithelial cells to understand chronic lung disease inception. In addition, Dr Werder is Deputy Convenor of the Thoracic Society of Australia and New Zealand Cell, Immunology & Molecular Biology of the Lung Special Interest Group.