Dr Vijini Mallawaarachchi
Research Associate
College of Science and Engineering
Vijini is a Research Associate in Bioinformatics at the Flinders Accelerator for Microbiome Exploration (FAME). Her research interests include metagenomics, algorithms, data science and machine learning.
Vijini completed her PhD in Computer Science at the Australian National University in 2022, and her thesis is focused on developing models and algorithms for improved binning of metagenomic data. She has developed several metagenomic analysis tools which have leveraged assembly graphs to recover bacterial genomes from metagenomes. Currently, her research at FAME focuses on developing methods to recover viral genomes from metagenomes which can facilitate the discovery of novel bacteriophages.
Doctor of Philosophy
The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
2018 - 2022
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Engineering (Honours)
University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka
2014 - 2018
Grants
National Computational Merit Allocation Scheme 2024 Supercomputing Grant, Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre, Australia "Large-scale mining and characterisation of phage genomes from metagenomes" Amount: 3,085,000 service units (worth A$123,400); Role: Co-CI; Duration: Jan - Dec 2024.
NCI Adapter Allocation Scheme Q3 2023 Grant, National Computational Infrastructure, Australia "Large Graph Models and Variation Analysis in Viral Metagenomes" Amount: 250,000 service units (worth A$10,000); Role: Lead CI; Duration: Jul - Sep 2023.
CZI Essential Open Source Software for Science (Cycle 5) Grant, The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, United States "cogent3 Python APIs for IQ-TREE and GraphBin via a Plug-In Architecture" Amount: US$325,000 (A$550,000); Role: Co-PI; Duration: 2023 - 2024.
Awards
2024 - Outstanding PhD Thesis Award, Australian Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Society (ABACBS)
2023 - President's Award for Scientific Research 2023, awarded by The National Research Council of Sri Lanka.
2023 - The Australian Society for Microbiology SA/NT Branch Early Career Researcher Award.
2022 - Oracle for Research Cloud Starter Award, Oracle Corporation, United States.
2022 - Best Lightning Talk, Australian Bioinformatics And Computational Biology Society Conference (ABACBS 2022), Australia.
2022 - Outstanding Science Prize to a scientific poster at Genomes of Microbiomes 2022, Birmingham, UK.
2018 - ANU PhD Scholarship (International) and HDR Merit Scholarship, The Australian National University, Australia.
2018 - Excellent Oral Presentation Award, Computer Science and Information Communication session at the 7th ACM International Conference on Software and Computer Applications (ICSCA 2018), Kuantan, Malaysia.
2018 - ACM-W Scholarship 2018, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
2015 - University Award, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka.
2015 - Best Innovation award, Google I/O Hackathon, Sri Lanka.
Undertake bioinformatics research, develop bioinformatics software and analyse novel ‘omics data aligned with the funded research projects.
Research student supervision (HDR and Honours students).
International Society for Computational Biology (ISMB)
International Society for Viruses of Microorganisms (ISVM)
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Australian Bioinformatics And Computational Biology Society (ABACBS)
Australian Society for Microbiology (ASM)
Research Software Engineering Association of Australia and New Zealand (RSE AU/NZ)
Institute of Engineers Sri Lanka (IESL)
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