Professor Heng Chooi
University of Western Australia
Talk Title
Panning for Gold in Mould Downunder: Mining the genomes of Australian fungi for novel metabolites and bioactive molecules in fungal-host interactions
Biography
Dr. Yit (Heng) Chooi is an Associate Professor at the School of Molecular Sciences, University of Western Australia (UWA) in Perth, Australia. He earned his PhD from RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, in 2009. Following his doctorate, he conducted postdoctoral research at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) from 2009 to 2013. He moved back to Australia to take up an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA) Fellowship at The Australian National University. In 2015, Dr. Chooi established his own laboratory at UWA, and in 2016, he was honoured with a prestigious ARC Future Fellowship. His research focuses on the biosynthesis of specialized metabolites in fungi, the roles of secondary metabolites in plant and human fungal disease development, and enzyme and drug discovery through genome mining. To date, he has published over 90 papers in these areas. Dr. Chooi’s work has garnered increasing collaboration with industry partners. Recently, he was awarded an ARC Mid-Career Industry Fellowship to translate his research and technologies for industrial applications.