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Originally from the UK, Gabriel now lives in Melbourne, Australia. He has a BSc. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Imperial College, London and a Maitrise (equivalent to MSc.) in Pure Mathematics from UPMC in Paris, France. He got into bioinformatics by chance five years ago and has been enjoying it ever since!

Gabriel leads the bioinformatics activities for the Australia-China Centre for Wheat Improvement, a group based at Murdoch University and co-directed by Rudi Appels and Wujun Ma. This has included leading the bioinformatics component of the wheat chromosome 7A assembly effort, as part of the IWGSC.

Gabriel’s supervisor, Rudi Appels, nominated him to the IWGSC Early career Award for his work on the chromosome 7A assembly. This has involved interfacing with national and international collaborators on every aspect of the assembly, from the physical map to gene annotation. “It is always an honor to have the work you do recognized and appreciated. I hope that winning this Early Career Award establishes me as an important contributor to the overall IWGSC effort and, importantly, marks only the beginning of a continued engagement with the wheat community.”

Gabriel and his team expect to have the first draft of the assembly completed by the end of the year. In addition, they are just starting a national effort to manually annotate the gene space on chromosome 7A, which will bring in colleagues from around the country at Murdoch University, ACPFG in Adelaide, CSIRO and Melbourne University.

Gabriel priority in the short-term is to finish up the work on 7A. Beyond that, he has no concrete plans other than to keep working on things that interest and stimulate him. “The world is changing at such a pace, there are always opportunities if you know where to look.”