Vijini Mallawaarachchi

Vijini is a Research Fellow in Bioinformatics at the Flinders Accelerator for Microbiome Exploration, where she works at the intersection of computer science and microbial genomics. Her research spans data science, algorithms, artificial intelligence, machine learning, software engineering, genomics, metagenomics and bacteriophages, with a focus on developing innovative computational approaches to tackle some of the most challenging problems in microbial omics.

Vijini completed her PhD in Computer Science at the Australian National University in 2022, where her thesis focused on developing models and algorithms for improved binning of complex environmental sequencing (metagenomic) data. She is experienced in algorithm design, graph theory, graph machine learning, representation learning, combinatorial optimisation, large-scale data analysis and software development. She has developed several metagenomic analysis tools that leverage sequence assembly graphs to recover and characterise microbial genomes from metagenomes.

Currently, her research focuses on developing algorithmic and machine/deep learning methods to recover and characterise viral genomes from metagenomes which can facilitate the discovery of novel bacteriophages.