Dr. Sonika Tyagi
Details
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College: School of Computing Technologies
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Department: School of Computing Technologies
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Campus: City Campus Australia
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sonika.tyagi@rmit.edu.au
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ORCID: 0000-0003-0181-6258
Open to
- Masters Research or PhD student supervision
- Collaborative projects
- Media enquiries
- Career advice
- Join a web conference as a panellist or speaker
- Industry Projects
- Mentoring (short-term)
About
Associate Professor Sonika Tyagi leads a Digital Health and Bioinformatics research lab at the School of Computing Technologies, RMIT University Australia. She is also an affiliate Machine Learning scientist at Monash University Australia. Her expertise is in developing new machine learning (ML) tools and pipelines, and applying these methods to solve biological and clinical research questions. Her current research focuses on integrative approaches to digital health and genomics.
Sonika's outstanding contributions to the field have garnered recognition in the form of prestigious awards and funding. Sonika was a finalist for Women in AI (WAI) awards – Australia-NewZealand 2022 in the “AI in Health” category. Sonika was named as a Brilliant Women in Digital Health 2023. Sonika is an elected member of the Victorian branch leadership (2023-) of the Australasian Institute of Digital health and sits on the medical advisory to Australian Research Council.
Research:
Sonika is a NHMRC chief investigator to computationally study human birth (2017-2021) and for Targeted Delivery of Nucleic Acid Therapeutics for Preventing Preterm Birth (2022-25). In 2020 she was also awarded an AISRF Early Mid Career Research (EMCR) fellowship by the Australian Academy of Science to develop AI models for the diagnosis of preterm birth. She has received industry funding (2018-22), and University grants (2019-20) for developing equitable AI resources to study genetic diseases. Sonika is also a co-investigator in the SuperbugAI flagship project (2022-2025) and the national Antibiotic Pathogen Resistance consortium (2017-2021).
Education:
Sonika has been developing and delivery teaching on Data Science, AI and Computational Biology algorithms for over a decade. Sonika has been a member and contributor of ISCB Education COSI and chair/member of the GOBLET standards, EMBL-ABR and ABACBS education & training committees. She is currently a steering committee member of the Life Science Trainers group and both Galaxy Australia and Galaxy-India.
Research fields
- 460501 Data engineering and data science
- 4602 Artificial intelligence
- 310509 Genomics
- 420302 Digital health
UN sustainable development goals
- 15 Life on Land
- 13 Climate Action
- 10 Reduced Inequalities
Academic positions
- Associate Professor
- RMIT University
- Melbourne, Australia
- Feb 2023 – Present
- Teaching and Research Academic
- Monash University
- Melbourne, Australia
- Jul 2018 – Dec 2022
- Bioinformatics Core Lead
- Monash University
- Melbourne, Australia
- Jul 2017 – Jul 2018
- Research Fellow (level B)
- Queensland University of Technology
- Brisbane, Australia
- Jun 2010 – Jun 2011
- Research Fellow (level A)
- QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute
- Brisbane, Australia
- Jul 2008 – Jun 2010
- Postdoctoral researcher
- University of Queensland
- Brisbane, Australia
- Dec 2007 – May 2008
Non-academic positions
- EMBL-ABR Node Head
- Bioplatforms Australia
- Melbourne, Australia
- 1 Jan 2016 – 15 Jul 2017
- Bioinformatics Supervisor
- Australian Genome Research Facility
- Brisbane, Australia
- 1 Jun 2011 – 15 Jul 2017
Supervisor projects
- AI Powered RNA Folding and Function Prediction
- 20 Dec 2023
- Multimodal Learning for Personalised Medicine
- 30 Nov 2023
Teaching interests
Teaching:
Course coordinator and lecturer for Foundations of AI for STEM (COSC2960), RMIT University [2023-current]
Selected conference talks, panels or workshops:
- Guest lecture on generative AI for healthcare, Professional Review Serivices, Commonwealth Govt of Aus 2024
- Panel speaker Digital Health Festival Australia 2024.
- Guest lecture Department of Health, Victoria Australia 2024
- Workshop presenter at Knowledge Capture Conference 2023 Florida USA
- Workshop presenter at AI.Care Conference 2023 Australia
- Invited Panelist at AWSN event: "Safely Harnessing the Power of ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence'
- National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) TechTake Speaker September 2022 on "ML Applications and Challenges in Computational Biology and Healthcare" May 2023.
- Invited Speaker at Digital Health Festival May 2022 Australia
- Invited VIP delegate at "Advancing AI" conference Melbourne 2022 (organized by Data Futurology)
- Invited Panelist for Research Software Sustainability discussion organized by ARDC and AusBiocommons 2022
- Invited Career Panelist COMBINE 2021
- Organizing member, program chair, and presenter at the virtual Australian Bioinformatics Society conference ABACBS2020.
- Selected talk at Deep Learning Symposium in Medical Biology (DLiMB) 2020, WEHI Melbourne Australia
- The scientific committee member and presenter at the virtual Bioinformatics Community Conference & Galaxy Community Conference #bcc2020.
- Invited delegate at the virtual Education Summit 2020 organized by EMBL-EBI and ELIXIR (May 2020.)
- Invited talk at InBix'20, an International Bioinformatics Conference December 2020 India.
- Keynote talk at APBionet Symposium on Bioinformatics, Dec 2019.
- Invited talk on "Integrative Approaches to Computational Epigenomics" at the Children Medical Research Institute Sydney 2019.
- The program committee member of the joint ABACBS/GIW2019 Sydney Australia.
- Invited Computational Biology session chair at Lorne Genome 2019 Australia.
- Invited talk on "Exploring epigenome using ChIPseq and ATACseq" at the Bioinformatics Winter school 2018 at UQ Brisbane.
- Invited Bioinformatics session chair, and presented a poster on "Identification of mature miRNA using feed-forward neural network" Lorne Genome 2018 Australia.
- Organizing of Bioinfosummer 2017 Monash University Melbourne Australia
- ISMB-ECCB 2017, Prague: Tyagi S, Schneider MV, Morgan SL, et al. GOBLET Standards Committee presentation
- GAMe 2017: Scientific Committee chair, session chair, and workshop lead at the first Galaxy Australasia Meeting, Australia.
- Festival of Bioinformatics 2016. Presentations
- Invited talk on "Minion brings the power of genomics to the palm of your hand" at the 'Back to future Computational Biology Conference' JNU New Delhi Dec 2015.
- Invited talk on "NGS Data Analysis Toolkit" at LaTrobe University Bioinformatics User Group Meeting Australia. 2015.
- Invited talk on "Best practices in RNAseq data analysis" at the annual BioinfoSummer 2014, Monash University.
- Invited talk on "Are we in the era of personalized medicine ?" at an international conference on 'Future Challenges of Computational and Integrated Sciences' Nov 2014.
- Invited AGRF Special User Group Talk on "RNA sequencing: Challenges and Opportunities" at ARMI, Monash University 2013
Industry experience:
With strong abilities in teamwork, research and leadership Sonika is actively involved in advisory boards of diagnostic start-ups, and utilising expertise to facilitate the translation of research into practical applications through commercialisation.
Research interests
- Scalable and reproducible biomedical and health data infrastructure
- Multimodal data integration for personalised medicine
- Integrative genomics
- Natural language processing of unstructured data
