18/12/2020
QCIF farewells bioinformatician and software developer Thom Cuddihy who has taken up a position at The University of Queensland’s Centre for Clinical Research as the lead Bioinformatics Developer in its Infectious Diseases group.
Thom joined UQCCR at the Herston campus at the end of last month. Dr Brian Forde, a fellow in microbial bioinformatics, will be Thom’s new supervisor, with Professor David Paterson leading UQCCR as its Director.
At UQCCR, Thom will develop pipelines in order to aid analysis of clinical genomics data, provide full stack software development in multiple areas of bioinformatics, and manage the high-performance computing hardware used at the Centre.
Thom will remain in contact with QCIF to collaborate with its bioinformatics and computing teams. He also plans to remain as one of Hacky Hour UQ’s bioinformatics experts.
“It’s always a pleasure to get to help somebody, and the atmosphere [at Hacky Hour UQ], especially when we’re back to holding it in person on campus, is so friendly and welcoming,” said Thom.
Having joined QCIF in 2017, seconded from UQ’s Research Computing Centre, Thom spent much of his time working on bioinformatics-related projects, including Galaxy Australia, a bioinformatics analysis platform.
“I really loved the variety of work that was provided during my time at QCIF,” said Thom.
As well as working on Galaxy Australia and helping to deliver bioinformatics training, Thom was also heavily involved in helping UQ’s Beatson Lab combine its existing high-performance computing hardware with QRIScloud-provided resources into a single, seamless HPC system, dubbed ‘Cloud9’.
QCIF Bioinformatics Director Dr Dominique Gorse said it had been a pleasure to have Thom’s knowledge and enthusiasm in QCIF for the past four years.
“He will be missed. Thom’s can-do attitude is exceptional, as is his ability to deploy solutions. He’s made significant contributions to many QCIF Members’ research projects. Together with our colleagues in RCC we wish him well,” said Dom.
In his new UQCCR role, Thom is looking forward to working with clinical infectious diseases teams in Queensland hospitals.
“We hope to utilise their existing clinical reporting systems for Big Data Discovery in areas like outbreak monitoring and prediction, optimal patient transfer planning, and adverse event minimisation,” he said.
Thom has a 14-year history with UQ, having worked there for almost 10 years, as well as completing both a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science (Hons), and a Masters of Bioinformatics at the University.
QCIF thanks Thom for all his hard work on our behalf and wishes him all the best in his new UQ role.