RCC farewells bioinformatician and software developer Thom Cuddihy as he moves to his new job at UQ’s Centre for Clinical Research as the lead Bioinformatics Developer in its Infectious Diseases group.
Thom will join UQCCR at the Herston campus from Monday, 30 November. 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. The latter task, in particular, will see Thom continue to work with RCC. 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 RCC in 2017, Thom spent much of his time seconded to QCIF to work 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’.
RCC Director Prof. David Abramson said: "It has been a pleasure to have Thom’s knowledge and enthusiasm in RCC for the past four years, and he will be missed. He has made an enormous contribution to the University. Together with our colleagues in QCIF we wish him well."
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.
RCC thanks Thom for all his hard work on our behalf and wishes him all the best in his new UQ role.
