Biography

Jana is an Australian Research Council (ARC) DECRA (Discovery Early Career Researcher Award) fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. She is a bioinformatician who uses computational techniques to drive knowledge discovery in plant sciences. She is particularly interested in the interactions between plants and their pathogens and has released several widely-used software tools for fungal effector prediction using machine learning.

Jana completed an MSc in Computer Science with a focus on Bioinformatics at the University of Freiburg, Germany. In 2008, she commenced a PhD at the University of Western Australia (Crawley, WA, Australia) in which she developed novel methods for the computational prediction of noncoding RNA structure. In 2012, she joined the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) as a Postdoctoral Fellow to work on plant–pathogen interactions and genomics. In 2018, she joined the Australian National University as an ARC DECRA fellow to uncover how rust fungi cause devastating plant diseases. Her current research interests include plant–pathogen interactions, the application of machine learning to protein function prediction and genomics for elucidating biological function. Jana is an accredited Software Carpentry instructor and is passionate about collaborative, reproducible and inclusive science.