Martha Cooper

Dr Martha Cooper is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Australian Institute of Tropical Health and Medicine, the Theme Leader for Health and Disease in the Tropical for the Centre for Tropical Bioinformatics and Molecular Biology and a member of the Centre for Molecular Therapeutics. Her research interests are focussed on computational systems immunology, where she applies computational methods to high dimensional data sets (genomic, transcriptomic and proteomic) to understand mechanisms of immunity to infectious and non-communicable disease in humans. Her current projects center on identifying mechanisms of protective immunity to malaria that can be used to inform the rational development of effective vaccines to this complex parasitic disease.

Dr Cooper completed her PhD in Medical and Molecular Sciences at the Australian Institute of Tropical Health and Medicine in 2020, during which she received training in Systems Immunology and Bioinformatics. During her PhD, Dr Cooper utilised experimental challenge models in humans to define immune molecules, cells and pathways associated with protective immune responses to malaria and hookworm parasites. She has developed and contributed to multiple open source statistical software packages, including packages for the analysis of NanoString (NanoStringClustR, available on GitHub) and RNA sequencing data (ConsensusDE, available on Bioconductor). Prior to her PhD, Dr Cooper gained experience in immunoparasitology as a Research Assistant in the Rowe Malaria Laboratory at the University of Edinburgh (2014-2015). In 2014, she received a Biological Sciences degree with First Class Honours in Immunology from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and Uppsala University, Sweden.

Dr Cooper is a passionate R-Educator and has made substantial contributions to the development of a bioinformatics/statistics community at JCU, Cairns. She is a co-founder and co-organiser of tRopical R, a JCU Cairns based community that is building bioinformatics and statistics capacity in the JCU scientific community through education. You can find her on Twitter @mrthmaria, and her open source education and scientific projects on GitHub @MarthaCooper.