Research Community Engagement
Skills:
Molecular techniques
Tiff joined QCIF in early 2019 in Community Engagement for Australian BioCommons. In this role, Tiff will consult with Australia’s biomolecular researchers to identify services and infrastructure the BioCommons could facilitate creating in the future.
Tiff’s past work and experience has involved ecology and biology, specifically on microbial organisms with applications on their detection for conservation tools, wildlife health, ecology and infectious disease.
She completed a PhD in Microbial Ecology at the University of New South Wales in 2012. Her thesis on the gut microbiome of seals involved fieldwork in the Antarctic. She then worked for two years as a postdoctoral researcher with the Australian Institute of Marine Science, pairing molecular techniques with a study on the soil micro-fauna of tropical floodplains to understand climate change in the Northern Territory’s Kakadu National Park. Following this, she worked at Montana State University in the U.S. for 18 months on a project that identified impacts on human microbiome in relation to health and particularly women’s reproductive health.
Prior to joining QCIF, she spent 14 months at Deakin University working on whole virus communities and assembling a novel parechovirus genome isolated from an outbreak of sick infants in Geelong, Victoria.
Research Interests
- Infectious diseases
- Wildlife health
- Ecology
Qualifications
- PhD, Microbial Ecology, University of New South Wales, 2012
- BSc, Marine Biology with Honours, 2004
- Dip. App. Sci., Biological Techniques, 2000