Machine learning in medical diagnostic and drug discovery

Dr Minh Duc Cao is a principal machine learning scientist at Gritstone Oncology Inc where he leads a team developing deep learning models for designing personalized cancer therapy. He previously was a senior bioinformatics scientist at 4Catalyzer, a startup founded by technology pioneer Professor Jonathon Rothberg that aims to transform medicine with devices, deep learning and the cloud computing. Dr. Cao completed his PhD in Bioinformatics at Monash University where he applied advanced statistics and information theory into modelling genomics data. During this time, he developed state‐of‐the‐arts genomic analysis methods, including data compression, sequence alignment and phylogenetics analysis. He then carried out his postdoctoral research and worked as a research scientist at the University of Queensland, applying machine learning and sequencing technologies to investigate genomics variation that underlies human diseases. He has been contributing to the development of third generation sequencing technology by developing novel methodologies to improve the quality of sequencing data and to translate sequencing technologies into practice. Dr. Cao has also consulted on deployment of high performance computing facilities for genomics research.