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Teaching

My institutional context (a research-focused appointment based at CMRI) offers limited opportunity for conventional coursework teaching, so my education contribution is centred on research training: HDR co-supervision, postdoctoral mentoring, thesis examination, and informal mentorship of clinician-researchers and computational early-career researchers. Below is a summary of my current teaching and supervision activities.

Doctoral students

Ms Fatemeh Mehdikhani

2025 – present
PhD candidate (co-supervisor) · University of Sydney

Project: Non-invasive diagnosis and classification of nevi and early-stage melanoma combining machine learning with imaging and proteomic data

Computational methodology, model development, data analysis, interpretation. First formal HDR supervision role at the University of Sydney, undertaken after completing the USyd Higher Degree Research Student Supervisor Training Course (2024).

Postdoctoral researchers

Postdoctoral researcher

2026 – 2028
Primary supervisor · Children's Medical Research Institute

Project: Generative proteomic foundation models with federated learning for multi-hospital cancer research (CINSW Early Career Fellowship)

Research direction, generative AI and multi-omics skills development, mentorship for scientific writing and independent career development. A substantive emerging leadership role in researcher development, building on prior collaborative mentorship.

External examination

Ms Rita Brito Gama

2024
External thesis examiner — Master of Philosophy · University of Lisbon

Project: GAIN-DANN: A Domain-Adversarial Generative Model for Missing Data Imputation in Proteomics

Critical assessment of the written thesis and participation in the oral defence (20-minute presentation followed by 40 minutes of discussion). Invited to this role based on expertise in machine learning for proteomics; the candidate successfully defended her thesis.

Mentorship at CMRI

Beyond formal roles, a significant part of my education contribution is through mentoring colleagues and emerging researchers at CMRI. I regularly advise clinician-researchers and junior team members on bioinformatic analysis, machine learning approaches, and project design. These mentoring interactions help researchers from clinical and biological backgrounds engage confidently with computational methods outside their original training, contributing to broader capability building in cancer data science.

Co-authored Cancer Discovery publication

Mentorship of Dr Emma Boys at CMRI contributed directly to a co-authored publication in Cancer Discovery (2025).

CMRI PhD candidates

Active mentorship of two CMRI-based PhD candidates in machine learning, bioinformatics, and proteomic data analysis.

Cross-team computational guidance

Regular informal computational guidance to colleagues across the ProCan Cancer Data Science, Software Engineering, and Oncology teams.

Supervision training