A/Prof Beben Benyamin is co-leader of genetics and genomics theme at the Australian Centre for Precision Health, School of Public Health, Adelaide University. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute. He uses statistics applied to large-scale ‘omics’ data to dissect the genetic mechanisms underlying human complex traits and diseases.
He graduated from Bogor Agricultural University (IPB) Indonesia (BSc, 2000), University of Sydney, Australia (M.Agr, 2002) and University of Edinburgh, UK (PhD, 2007). He did his postdoctoral training at the Genetic Epidemiology Group, QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute (2007-2011). Prior to joining University of South Australia, he worked as Research Fellow at the Program in Complex Trait Genomics, the University of Queensland (2012-2017). He was an NHMRC Peter Doherty Training Fellow (2009-2012) and an NHMRC R.D. Wright Career Development Fellow (2015-2018). Some of his research has been published in Nature, Nature Genetics and Nature Communications.
His current interests are in the application of statistical genomic methods to neurodegenerative and psychiatric diseases, such as motor neuron disease and schizophrenia. He is also interested in trans-ethnic genomic analyses to dissect the transferability of genomic findings in European samples on other populations, such as Asians.
He also teaches biostatistics, epidemiology, public health, and research methods.
A/Prof Benyamin has supervised and mentored research students and is currently available to supervise new research students to study in the exciting areas of applied statistical genomics, genetic epidemiology, big health data and genomics of complex diseases.