Prof. Mark Ragan

Prof. Ragan is the director of the Visible Cell™ project. He joined IMB after 28 years with the National Research Council Canada, where he co-founded and developed programs in bioactive compounds, molecular biology, genomics and bioinformatics, including the Canadian Bioinformatics Resource.

Associate Prof. Ben Hankamer

A/Prof. Ben Hankamer moved to the IMB from Imperial College London to lead the single particle analysis and electron crystallography initiatives at the IMB. A powerful semi-automated SPA pipeline has been designed, built and employed to solve the structures of membrane protein complexes and soluble macromolecular assemblies. In parallel, new template-assisted electron crystallography technologies are in development for streamlined 2D crystal production.

Dr Brad Marsh

Dr Marsh is internationally recognised in the diabetes, membrane traffic and 3D EM research communities for his cutting-edge application of large volume EM tomography to visualise mammalian cell structure in 3D at high resolution. His striking images of subcellular architecture in the insulin-secreting pancreatic beta cell have been featured on the covers of high-impact journals.

Mr Oliver Cairncross

Oliver serves as the project manager for the systems development work performed by the ACB. He came to the IMB as a database administrator and application developer with extensive experience in the commercial sector.

Miss Mhairi Marshall

Mhairi spent 5 years working at the Sanger Institute, Cambridge UK as a web and database administrator for the Pfam, Rfam and miRNA registry websites. She has implemented the Storage Resource Broker and Cell Centered Database that are used for the storage and distribution of data in the Visible Cell™ project.

Dr Tim McComb

Tim joined the Visible Cell™ project as a software engineer at the beginning of 2007. His background is in the field of high-integrity software engineering, particularly methods for the specification and design of object-oriented software.

Dr M. Shoaib Segal

Shoaib has research interests in Machine Learning and Complex Systems. He is working on inferring high coverage Protein-Protein interaction networks to validate various biological hypothesis using actual cell data from the Visible Cell™ environment.

Mr Tim Sullivan

Tim has joined the project as a mathematician with a strong focus on computational maths, supercomputing and visualisation. He recently completed his honours thesis, titled An Investigation into Parallel Preconditioners for use in Finite Volume Codes.

Mr David Wood

David joined the project as a data integration specialist and bioinformatician. He has a genetics and software engineering background with experience in commercial bioinformatics service delivery.

Prof. Kevin Burrage

Prof. Burrage is the founding CEO of the Queensland Parallel Supercomputer Foundation (QPSF), the Advanced Computational Modelling Centre (ACMC) at UQ, and the ViSAC visualisation laboratory. He was awarded the prestigious Federation Fellowship by the Australian Research Council in 2003 and has co-authord over 150 papers in the fields of computational science, computational biology, mathematical modelling and complex systems.

Dr Nicholas Hamilton

Dr Hamilton has a background in pure mathematics and information technology. His current interests include automated classification of subcellular images, geometric modelling of real time video microscopy, image processing, algorithms for lateral gene transfer, protein structure prediction and visualisation of scientific data.

Dr Rohan Teasdale

Dr Teasdale heads a multidisciplinary research group using both cellular and computational techniques to investigate how subcellular compartments are generated.

Assistant Prof. Niels Volkmann

Niels Volkmann earned his Ph.D. in Biophysics from the University of Hamburg, Germany in 1993, where he also trained as a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Research Unit for Ribosome Structure. He received additional postdoctoral training at Brandeis University at the Rosenstiel Basic Medical Science Research Center and The Keck Center for Cellular Visualization prior to joining The Burnham Institute in 1999. Dr. Volkmann was promoted to the faculty as Assistant Professor in 2001.

Mr Andrew Noske

Andrew is a PhD student with Brad Marsh and has a background in computer science from James Cook University. He is currently working on reconstruction of entire mammalian cells at EM resolution and developing software to make segmentation faster.

Mr Peter van der Heide

Peter is currently a PhD student with Brad Marsh and has a background in Information Technology. Peter is currently working on developing automatic segmentation methods to extract 3D models form an unprecedented volume of tomographic data at 5 nm resolution.