Dr Chin Wee Tan

Senior Research Officer, Division of Bioinformatics, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research

Dr Chin Wee Tan is a leading computational biologist at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI). He completed his PhD in Biomedical Engineering (Computational Systems Biology) from the University of Melbourne in 2011. He then led a systems biology group utilizing state-of-the-art imaging technologies to spearhead computational approaches for interrogating biological systems. Since 2019, he has been focusing on computational bioinformatics, specifically the development of computational tools for the analyses of spatial multi-modal datasets. Dr Tan co-led development of bioinformatics pipelines and tools for spatial transcriptomics analyses in COVID-19 autopsy and cancer related studies. These include the Bioconductor package standR for analysis of data generated from Nanostring’s GeoMx DSP and workflows for CosMx data. Dr Tan has published widely in high impact journals such as European Respiratory Journal, Nucleic Acids Research, Genome Biology, eBioMedicine and Gut. Dr Tan was awarded the 2021 Australian Academy of Science and DISER’s Regional Collaborations Programme COVID-19 Digital Grant and more recently, as part of the team awarded with a Medical Research Future Fund worth ~$AUD 1M to study lung cancer using spatial technologies and analyses (led by Dr Kulasinghe at the University of Queensland).