Dr Vijini Mallawaarachchi

Research Associate

College of Science and Engineering

vijini.mallawaarachchi@flinders.edu.au

Bedford Park

GPO Box 2100, Adelaide 5001, South Australia

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.

Qualifications

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

Honours, awards and grants

2023 - National Computational Merit Allocation Scheme 2024 Supercomputing Grant (Co-CI), Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre, Australia.

2023 - President's Award for Scientific Research 2023, awarded by The National Research Council of Sri Lanka.

2023 - NCI Adapter Allocation Scheme Q3 2023 Grant (Lead CI), National Computational Infrastructure, Australia.

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.

2022 - CZI Essential Open Source Software for Science Grant (Co-PI), The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, United States.

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.

Topic lecturer

ENGR1721 Engineering Programming

ENGR8800 Engineering Programming GE

Supervisory interests

Bioinformatics

Data science

Programming, Algorithms and Problem Solving

Higher degree by research supervision

Current