RNA Expert - Dr. Martin Smith
Posted on March 21, 2016
We are very pleased to introduce Dr. Martin Smith as a member of our NGS Expert Network.
Dr. Martin Smith is a computational biologist with a strong background in biology. As a child he grew up in Canada and he always dreamt of becoming a biologist. He majored as an undergraduate in microbiology and immunology at the University of Montreal, but he quickly realised this wasn’t his field. Switching to the emerging field of bioinformatics was an enthusiastic yet challenging decision for him, as it required rewiring his brain around abstract informatics concepts and discrete mathematics.
To this day, he is very passionate about bioinformatics and would recommend a cross-disciplinary career path to anyone. He has worked in 5 different cities across 3 different continents, namely Montreal (University of Montreal); Quebec City (Infectious Disease Research Centre—CHUL); Brisbane (Institute for Molecular Bioscience); Leipzig (Interdisciplinary Center for Bioinformatics); and Sydney (Garvan). He received his doctorate in Genomics and Computational Biology from the University of Queensland in 2012. His doctor's thesis was supervised by Prof. Dr. John Mattick and Prof. Dr. Peter F. Stadler.
His research revolves around characterising the “regulome”, i.e. the biological mechanisms that control how genes are activated and repressed. He is particularly interested in how non-protein coding regions of the genome can regulate gene expression at the level of RNA.