I am currently pursuing my PhD studies at the School of Computing, at the Australian National University. My research is focused on algorithms and computational models related to metagenomics binning. Metagenomics involves the study of various genetic material obtained from the genomes found in microbial communities. A microbial community such as lake water or forest soil can contain a large number of organisms. It is necessary to identify the species present in order to investigate the taxonomic structure of a given metagenomic sample. Firstly, reads are assembled into longer contigs which are then binned into groups of contigs that belong to different taxonomic groups present in the metagenomic sample. Various reference-free contig-binning methods have been proposed previously that make use of composition and covergae information of the contigs. However, the majority of these tools fail to recover short contigs. Moreover, these tools fail to accurately bin contigs from species with high internal variance in composition, coverage and species of the same genus.

As metagenomic contigs are derived from assembling the reads, they are output from the underlying assembly graph which holds valuable connectivity information between contigs that can be used for binning. My research work aims to develop improved contig-binning tools that can recover short contigs and bin contigs accurately with the help of assembly graphs.

My supervisors are Dr. Yu Lin, Prof. Gavin Huttley and Prof. Weifa Liang.