About

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

Interests
Research
  • Parasitic Infections (Malaria and Hookworm)
  • Data Science & Machine Learning
  • Systems Immunology
  • Bioinformatics
Experience
  • 2018 to 2019 - Research Assistant (Bioinformatics), Paragen Bio (Cairns, Australia)
  • 2014 to 2015 - Research Assitant, Rowe Malaria Laboratory, University of Edinburgh (Scotland, UK)
Research Disciplines
Socio-Economic Objectives
Honours
Awards
  • 2017 - Australian Society of Immunology PhD Presentation Prize
  • 2014 - British Society of Immunology Top Immunology Project Prize (University of Edinburgh)
  • 2016 to 2020 - JCU Postgraduate Research Scholarship
  • 2016 to 2019 - Australian Institute of Tropical Health and Medicine Postgraduate Research Scholarship
Memberships
  • 2019 to 2020 - Australian Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Society (ABACBS)
  • 2016 to 2020 - Australian Society of Immunology (ASI)
  • 2016 to 2020 - Australian Society of Parasitology (ASP)
Publications

These are the most recent publications associated with this author. To see a detailed profile of all publications stored at JCU, visit ResearchOnline@JCU. Hover over Altmetrics badges to see social impact.

Journal Articles
Other research outputs
Collaboration

The map shows research collaborations by institution from the past 7 years.
Note: Map points are indicative of the countries or states that institutions are associated with.

  • 5+ collaborations
  • 4 collaborations
  • 3 collaborations
  • 2 collaborations
  • 1 collaboration
  • Indicates the Tropics (Torrid Zone)

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