Marina Alexander
Research Scientist at CSIRO
Australian living in Victoria, Australia
To support Marina’s Homeward Bound journey, click here!
Based at the Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness (ACDP) in Geelong, Marina Alexander is a bioinformatician – a scientist who de-codes large and complex biological datasets – but she wasn’t always. She completed her PhD in 2011 at the University of Melbourne in molecular virology and published impactful findings in mRNA biology. She then completed a postdoc assisting the HIV vaccine development mission at Weill Cornell Medical College, New York.
After a career break to raise a family, she combined her childhood passion for Australian Wildlife and genomics to work on sequencing the genomes of decades old museum specimens at the CSIRO. Her move to ACDP in 2018 has brought her back to virology where she is developing diagnostics and therapies for highly pathogenic RNA viruses affecting both livestock and humans.
Outside of work Marina enjoys music and dancing with her children, time in nature, growing veggies and beekeeping. She hopes to share her learned strategies for balancing work and family with the HB7 cohort while developing her ability to create and foster networks to solve impactful problems like health crises and biodiversity loss.
