Dr Denis Bauer is an internationally recognised expert in bioinformatics and artificial intelligence, who is passionate about improving human health research by understanding the secrets in our genome using cloud-computing technology. She is an adjunct associate professor at Macquarie University and AWS Data Hero. She was awarded Brilliant Women in Digital Health (2021) and Women in AI Innovation Award (2022).

Her achievements include developing an open-source, artificial intelligence-based cloud-service that accelerates disease research and contributing to national and international initiatives for genomic medicine funded with over $500M. In 2020 she won the CSIRO Collaboration Medal for her work analyzing COVID-19 genome for vaccine development and molecular contact tracing.

As CSIRO’s transformational bioinformatics leader, Denis is frequently invited as a keynote speaker at international medical and IT conferences including Amazon Web Services global Healthcare & Life Science Day '21, International Research Software Engineering Conference '20, Enactus World Cup 2020, International conference on Frontotemporal Dementia ‘18. Her revolutionary achievements have been featured in the press such as The Australian, The Australian Financial Review, Sydney Morning Herald, The Mandarin, Australian Institute of Company Directors Magazine, GenomeWeb, ZDNet, Computer World, CIO Magazine, the AWS Jeff Barr blog, and was in ComputerWeekly’s Top 10 IT stories of 2017.

Denis holds a BSc from Germany and PhD in Bioinformatics from the University of Queensland, and has completed postdoctoral research in both biological machine learning and high-throughput genetics. She has 50 peer-reviewed publications (28 as first or senior author), with over 2900 citations and an H-index 25.

Denis advocates for gender equality in IT, and is active on CSIRO’s Inclusion and Diversity committee.