Associate ProfessorTanya Golubchik

Tanya Golubchik is a computational microbiologist interested in applying modern genomics technologies to study how pathogens interact, evolve and affect their human hosts, and how we can use this knowledge to improve healthcare. Her group studies viral and bacterial genetic diversity at multiple levels, from the variants that exist within an individual infection, through to complex multi-species systems. She has a particular interest in using novel targeted metagenomics to co-capture and sequence multiple pathogens, and in designing software tools to facilitate such multi-pathogen analyses.

Tanya started her career at the University of Sydney, majoring in biology and computer science. After obtaining her PhD in molecular biology, she took up a postdoctoral research position at the Department of Statistics at the University of Oxford, where she used genotyping techniques to identify and track the spread of pneumococcal vaccine escape variants; and later at the Nuffield Department of Medicine, where she carried out research on within-host diversity, evolution, and transmission of bacterial pathogens such as Staphylococcus aureus, using next-generation sequence data. Alongside her research in healthcare-associated infections, she designed and deployed one of the earliest systems for microbial genomic epidemiology with the Modernising Medical Microbiology consortium. Between 2016 and 2021 she was based at the Big Data Institute in Oxford, where she worked with the team of Prof Christophe Fraser and collaborators in the PANGEA-HIV consortium on HIV genomics, developing a novel machine learning model for subtype-agnostic estimates of time since HIV infection, and was a member of the Oxford Viromics initiative.

With Oxford Viromics, she spent several years developing new targeted metagenomics methods for deep sequencing and transcriptional profiling of pathogens directly from clinical samples, and used this method to demonstrate the impact of viral diversity and bacterial co-infection on severity of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) infection in infants, in collaboration with the Oxford Vaccine Group. During the pandemic, she set up and led computational analysis of SARS-CoV-2 sequencing in Oxford as part of the COVID-19 Genomics (COG) UK Consortium. She returned to Sydney in 2022 to join Sydney Infectious Diseases Institute (Sydney ID) and the School of Medical Sciences.

Ongoing work in her team includes development of diagnostic metagenomics for bloodborne pathogens (funded by NIHR UK), the EMPOWER study of infections threatening reproductive health of women and girls (funded by the Gates Foundation), and the COSMOS project for comprehensive sequencing of mosquito-borne pathogens (NHRMC). Her team's computational projects include development of tools for multi-pathogen genomics, including Castanet and DAMPA. She holds an NHRMC Investigator award.