Professor Lachlan Coin

Professor Lachlan Coin is a pioneering mathematician, bioinformatician, and group lead at the Collaborative Centre for Genomic Cancer Medicine and the Doherty Institute.

He is a mathematician with a research focus on developing genomics and bioinformatics tools in infectious disease and cancer. He was originally drawn by the rigour and intellectual challenge of pure mathematics but now uses his maths background as a toolkit for solving complex problems in analysing high throughput biological data.

Professor Coin is best known for using approaches borrowed from machine learning, statistics and probability theory to interrogate genomic data. Professor Coin has focussed on using these approaches to uncover genomic deletions and amplifications and has identified changes that are associated with increased risk of obesity and diabetes.

Lachlan's research has been supported by prestigious fellowships, including an ARC Future Fellowship in 2012 and an NHMRC Career Development Fellowship (Level 2) in 2017, as well as project grants from the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council. He serves on the editorial board of Gigascience and holds an Honorary Professor appointment with the University of Queensland.

Driven by a passion for translating discoveries into clinical practice and informing public policy to improve health outcomes, Professor Lachlan Coin continues to push the boundaries of bioinformatics and genomics, leveraging his mathematical expertise to solve complex problems in analysing high-throughput biological data.