On Friday afternoon I attended a seminar by Professor John Christodoulou titled “Genomic Medicine: What is its place in the Australian healthcare system?”. One of the interesting points he brought up was how genomics had changed the ability to diagnose many genetic diseases. In the past, diagnoses would often require a three step process: Clinical …

As I’ve been writing my thesis I came across a paper with such an excellent conclusion I wanted to share it. I think there are two lessons we can take from it: Use a title no-one can disagree with Quote Star Trek – I particularly like seeing Paramount in the location that you would normally …

Whilst writing my thesis, I came across an interesting paper discussing how you can get fruit flies hooked on alcohol, whilst honeybees will consistently turn their noses up to a tipple unless you literally give them nothing else to drink. Drosophila [fruit flies] develop a preference for alcohol that increases with repeated alcohol consumption, and …

On Friday afternoon I presented my exit seminar to the biology department. Things went really well, and I rather enjoyed the questions session that came after – there was a lot of great discussion about honeybee behaviour and machine learning techniques. My focus for October is to finish writing my thesis, and once that is …

Recently, I was reading through a thesis titled “On Honey Bee Colony Dynamics and Disease Transmission” and on page vi I came across a page of quotes. Nothing too out of the ordinary. Then I read the second quote on the page. Fantastic. Sorely tempted to do something similar with my own thesis.

This article relates to where bees prefer to build their hives. Back in the 1970s, there was a bunch of research conducted at Cornell surveying where bees build hives in the wild, and all the evidence seemed to indicate that honeybees preferred to build their hives relatively close to the ground. This finding seemed rather …

​Sometimes missing data can tell you its own story, while other times missing data can lead you in completely the wrong direction. As I’ve been working on a PhD studying honeybee behaviour, I thought I’d share a couple of articles about bees and how important missing data can be. This first article is the story …

I originally wrote this article about how I’ve used machine learning as part of my research for the Data Skeptic blog. If you’re interested in machine learning, I can’t recommend their podcast enough. A couple of years ago I started my PhD at the Australian National University working to quantify honeybee behaviour. We wanted to …

Recently, I helped establish BioSky – a website dedicated to making medical and health research accessible to people without a scientific background. As we’ve been adding content to the site, I’ve been posting the links to multiple social networks including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Reddit. If I had to pick only one platform to use, it would …

BioSky is a website I’ve been setting up with Rina Soetanto recently. We are both doing PhDs in the biological sciences and have a keen interest in research and the treatments being developed in the biotech and health industry.