Biography of Professor Tony Papenfuss, PhD
Tony is a computational biologist and bioinformatics researcher. He has a PhD in Mathematics. He has been a lab head in the Bioinformatics Division at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI) since 2010. He is the Theme Leader for Computational Biology at WEHI. He held the Lorenzo and Pamela Galli Melanoma Research Fellow at the Peter Mac where he established the Computational Cancer Biology Program.
His research is focused on:
- development of bioinformatics methods to help make sense of cancer omics data, and
- molecular changes in cancer associated with progression
A major emphasis has been tools to detect genomic rearrangements in cancer genomes, especially complex genomic rearrangements.
He has previously contributed to a broad range of biology projects, including discovering the origins of neochromosomes in cancer, identifying the tissue of origin of the Tasmanian Devil Facial Tumour, jointly leading the Tammar Wallaby Genome Project, and he continues to lead the scabies mite genome project.
He was founding President of the Australian Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Society (2014-2018) and Past President (2019-2020).