Quality and Accreditation Fireside Chats - Part Two
The second of a three-part online series on quality and accreditation hosted by the CDGN Teaching, Training and Curriculum Working Group.
VALIDATING PROCESSES
Are you a clinical scientist, medical microbiologist, infectious diseases physician or registrar trainee wanting to ask questions about how to calidate processes within your laboratory, or not sure where to start?
At these online three-part fireside chats, hosted by the Communicable Diseases Genomics Network (CDGN), you will get the chance to ask leading experts about their experience, challenges and expertise in the realm of Quality and Accreditation for whole genome sequencing.
Your panellists are:
Dr Susan Ballard is the Strategy and Operations Manager of the Microbiological Diagnostic Unit, Public Health Laboratory (MDU PHL), Doherty Institute. In this role Susan provides support to the Director in meeting MDU’s scientific, operational and strategic objectives in the diagnosis and surveillance of communicable diseases. A key component of the role has been to oversee the implementation of genomics as the main platform for service delivery within MDU PHL and a key achievement was obtaining accreditation for pathogen genomics in 2017; the first laboratory in Australia to do so.
Dr Jake Lacey is a Bioinformatics Section Leader at MDU PHL, Doherty Institute. His work focuses on applying genomics and bioinformatics to infectious disease surveillance, outbreak investigation, and public health microbiology. He leads the development of accredited genomic analysis pipelines and national surveillance initiatives across a range of bacterial and fungal pathogens. His research interests include pathogen evolution, genomic epidemiology, antimicrobial resistance, and translating emerging sequencing technologies into routine public health practice.
Prof Sebastiaan van Hal is a Senior Staff Specialist in Infectious Diseases and Microbiology at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital (RPAH) and a Clinical Professor at the University of Sydney. In 2014 he spent time at the Oxford Genomics Centre acquiring the skills required for translation of microbial genomics. Following his return to Australia, Prof. van Hal was instrumental in setting up a NATA accredited pathogen genomics service at RPAH. He is the current supervising pathologist and is the current chair of the Microbiology Clinical Streams NSW Health Pathology (NSWHP).
Dr Kristy Horan is the lead bioinformatician for the AusTrakka platform. Kristy's work focuses on translating high quality pathogen genomics into practical and actionable bioinformatics tools for use in clinical and public health. She has also played key role in the development, implementation and accreditation to ISO standards of key open-source pathogen genomics bioinformatics tools.