Adam Alexander T Smith

Initially trained as a "French Engineer" at a French "Grande Ecole" in Biology, Agronomy and Agricultural Sciences with a specialisation in Applied Statistics, I did a bioinformatics PhD at the French National Sequencing Centre. There, I developed a comparative genomics method for integrating genomic and metabolic gene annotation information to propose novel gene candidates for sequence-orphan enzymes in Prokaryotes, and also worked on investigating the relationship between sequence and reaction promiscuity in a protein family of previously unknown function. I then moved to New Zealand where I worked for one year as a biostatistician/data manager at the Sleep/Wake Research Centre. I was then recruited as a bioinformatics/biostatistics post-doctoral research fellow to build up the infrastructure and human resources for a small bioinformatics team at the Malaghan Institute of Medical Research, to support the institute's first mouse dendritic cell bulk transcriptomics project. I then moved to Switzerland, where I worked at the Universite de Lausanne as a bioinformatics post-doctoral researcher on the computational investigation of the roles of long non-coding RNAs in the Mouse embryonic stem cell cycle. I then moved to Melbourne in Australia, where I built a QC pipeline for lipidomics data, and then analysed it for the Baker Heart & Diabetes Institute. I then returned to Switzerland, finding a bioinformatics Research Associate position at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research, where I process RNA-seq and ChIP-seq datasets to investigate the biological clocks working behind C. elegans development. During all my research positions, I have enjoyed multiple teaching experiences with diverse formats (seminars, workshops, summer school courses, teaching assistant, and student projects), and hope to continue this trend!