CSIRO Data School Projects

Andreas Duenser

Comparison of Adzuna and IVI Job Ads Data

I’m Senior Research Scientist with Data61 in Hobart with a background in psychology / Human-Factors. I’m interested in the convergence of human behaviour & cognition, and emerging interactive technology. Combining these areas enables innovative Human-Machine Interaction (HMI) research. My research focuses on:

Caroline Sutton

Oragne Roughy Eastern Zone Survey Data

I’m a biologist with CSIRO’s Marine Resources and Industries working in the Acoustics & Pelagic Ecosystems Team. I manage the biological data and specimen collections within the group. This includes collecting, collating, standardising and analysing historical and new data. I learned to code at Data School. Prior to Data School I managed my data and conducted statistical analyses using Excel, Access and Systat.

Chloe Plet

NSW Groundwater hydrogeochemistry

With a background on biominerals, palaeoenvironemental reconstruction and organic geochemistry, I am now a postdoctoral researcher at CSIRO. Although I learned some matlab during my undergrad, I had never really understood it or used it. I was mostly using excel, which often made me very frustrated. I really enjoyed the data school FOCUS particularly learning to “speak to computers” and basic coding skills. Learning R basics has definitely changed my perspective on how to record data and given me a new view on time management when receiving large and complex excel datasheets.

Dong Chen

Overheat risks in Australia's new housing stock

I am a researcher with years of programming experiences in FORTRAN, a computational programming language. Programming, computate simulations, research and communicating with various stakeholders and research partners in residential building energy efficiency are my daily activities.

Douglas Bearham, Daniel Gorman and Mat Vanderklift

Gamma irradiation does not affect the stable isotope signals of fish, crustaceans, submerged vegetation or soils.

I work for CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric research in the benthic ecology team. I’m a former pearl diver and researcher with Paspaley Pearls in Broome WA. My main research interests to use stable isotopes in food web analysis. I’ve never needed much coding before Data School other than loading other peoples scripts and running them to generate figures. I have been off work for the last two years recovering from a heart attack. I’m glad to be alive and back at work!

Felix Weihs

Development and application of Bioluminescence Resonance Energy Transfer-based sensors

In my postdoctoral fellowship, I am constructing sensors made of proteins that are based on a biophysical phenomenon called Bioluminescence Resonance Energy Transfer (BRET). A light-generating luciferase coupled to an energy acceptor such as a fluorescent protein emit light with different wavelength maxima. The available options are endless, but based on certain properties, I am designing and constructing new and superior BRET system which in turn are applied as biosensors in human blood.

Franziska Althaus

Benthic habitats and VME fauna on the Tasmanian Seamounts

I work in CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere on deep-sea observational data from the outer continental shelf and the continental slope.

Gilbert Permalloo

Investigating the use of portable X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy for rapid quantification of Phosphorus in wheat straw and grains

My name is Gilbert Permalloo. I am a Research Project Officer and I am presently working on roots architecture and rhizosphere of wheat. I worked in sugarcane agronomy for about 24 years and I was doing a little bit of basic programming in Fortran 77 and GWBasic about 30 years ago. Most of my data manipulation and visualisation are done in Excel. I could not write any code in R before I joined Data School and I was spending lots of time working with data in spreadsheets. On the otherhand, I am amazed to witness every day the marvel that R can do with data manipulation and visualisation.

Jasjeet Kaur

Carbon Fibre Precursor Development

I am a Research Scientist in Carbon Fibre Precursor development. I did not know how to code prior to Data School Focus but was always curious to learn. My daily routine included designing and performing experiments followed by processing data and its analysis using Origin and Microsoft Excel. I work on a pilot scale wet spinning line which turns novel polymers into fibres and involves many predictor variables for optimisation. Large amount of data is generated from testing the fibres which makes analysis a tedious and time consuming task and a lag in feeding complete learnings of one experiment to the next.

Jennifer Giles

Comparison of Microbial Populations within Human Faecal Collection Methods

Before Data School I was focused within the Molecular/Micro Laboratory space where our team is involved in looking at the effects of different diets on the gut microbiome. Spending the majority of my time developing and optimising molecular assays I have no prior background in either R or coding.

Lauren Williamson

Automated Control for the Coke Reactivity Test

I am a Senior Research Scientist in the Coke Making Team at QCAT in QLD. My team operates two pilot scale coke ovens and characterises the coke that we produce to support metallurgical coal producers with their marketing efforts. My team deals with quite a large amount of data in excel to facilitate the reporting of process data and coke test results to our clients. Prior to data school I had no experience in coding in R.

Mandy Yialeloglou

HSE Hazard Reporting

I joined CSIRO in 1989 as a laboartory technician. I have been fortunate to have had many oportunities in both technical and support roles in my 30 years. I moved into the HSE team in 2005 and in my current role as “HSE Specialist - Systems and Analytics” in 2018. I manage our HSE reporting systems and forms, I have a really great working relationship with my IM&T colleagues. I am perfecty happy in the system administration space but I had very few current anaytical skills. I rely heavily on IM&T support for my ‘data wrangling’ and wanted to upskill.

Marina Alexander

Mining the transcriptome for biomarkers of infection

I’m Marina and I work on viruses. Before data school I would typically enter my data into Excel or Prism to make bar graphs with errors bars, then communicate these in publications and powerpoint slides. Using R, I can now reproducibly wrangle data imported from Excel, plot with ggplot2 to make really flexible and informative visualizations of the raw data. This has helped me to understand the sources of variation in my data, apply appropriate statistics and make novel visualizations.

Meiling Dai

MicroRNA profile of mock and hendra virus infected field horses

Introduce Myself. I am a virologist, and I am a postdoc in Australian Animal Health Laboratory (AAHL), CSIRO. My research projectS in AAHL are focusing on the identification of potential targets for anti-influenza drugs and therapeutics. By doing so, we will use CRISPR/Cas9 gene screening to find candidates that will inhibit virus replication. Therefore, I need to deal with big datasets when the screening results come back from next generation sequencing, which drives me to sign up for the data school training, and I believe this training will enable me to better analyse and visualise big datasets.

Melania Figueroa

Hunting for fungal rust effectors

My name is Melania Figueroa and I am currently Leader of the Next Generation Crop Protection Group, Ag & Food Traits Program. I am very interested in understanding the evolution of rust fungi and delivering genetic disease resistance to cereals. I did not have any previous experience using R language before Data School.

Ming Wang

Computational modelling of estimating the long-distance dispersal threat of pathogens from the neighbouring land masses to Australia

My name is Ming Wang. I am a postdoctoral researcher at CSIRO in Canberra, and working on wind pests dispersal modelling. I have graduated from the University of Queensland with a PhD in computational modelling. I was constructing 3D mechanistic simulation models for my PhD. Currently, my daily work pattern involves in conducting computer simulations.

Nathalie Colgrave

Analytics & Decision Sciences Program

My name is Nathalie Colgrave. I work in Finance supporting CSIRO Data61. Data School was my introduction to coding. Prior to Data School, monthly reports were compiled via manipulation in excel through cell referencing as well as usuage of functions such as vlookup.

Natalia Malinowski

Presence and abundance of 'Brain Eating Amoebae' in West Australian drinking water storage tanks

My name is Natalia Malinowski and I am a PhD student at CSIRO in conjunction with the University of Western Australia. Prior to starting my PhD journey, I had achieved a Bachlor of Biomedical Science and a Master of Infectious Disease. I coach Synchronised Swimming and do Polish Folkloric Dance in my spare time on top of holding down a couple of part time jobs. Data School has taught me so many skills that I have been able to carry across to my PhD work. I am now able to code, and finally understand some statistics!

Omar Mendoza Porras

Catering for prawns, in pursuit of sustainability in the aquaculture industry

I am an oceanographer with experience in biotechnology, mass spectrometry and aquaculture. Before Data School I did not code at all and my data processing consisted of using vendor specific software (expensive licenses) to visualise and process data. I also did lots of clicking and data sorting in Excel. It was not enjoyable.

Steve Henderson

Abiotic stress tolerance in grapevines

I am located in Agriculture and Food at the Waite Campus, Adelaide. I have a relatively broad background in various fields such as fungal genetics, human biochemistry, and proteomics. In the last ten years, I was primarily involved in the use of plant molecular genetics to isolate the causal loci for apomixis (the process of asexual reproduction through seed). I am currently transitioning into grapevine research for viticulture and am involved in a project investigating genetic and mechanistic aspects of abiotic stress in grapevines. Data School has been a steep learning curve for me as I had no prior coding experience, and previous bioinformatic tasks I had directly undertaken typically involved GUI based software such as Geneious and Excel.

Theresa Stoll

Analysis of solutions for the governance and prevention of marine debris

As a PhD student affiliated with CSIRO’s Oceans and Atmosphere Business Unit, I conduct research on marine debris, more specifically on solutions that can be utilised to prevent marine debris and improve the governance of this problem. Having just recently started my PhD candidature and having never coded before, the participation in the Data School FOCUS is an incredible opportunity for me. The skillsets taught during the Data School FOCUS are directly relevant for my PhD project.

Yuzi Wang

Modelling the degradability of wheat starch

Hi, I’m Yuzi, a phD student in the cereal quality group of Agriculture & food. Without any programming experience before, the data school is sort of a whole new world for me, and it turned out to be very intereting and I’m keen to learn more.