Contributors

Contributor Biography

Dr. Laura M. Boykin (TED Senior Fellow (2017) and Gifted Citizen (2017)) is a computational biologist who uses genomics and supercomputing to help smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa control whiteflies, which have caused devastation of local cassava crops. Her lab at The University of Western Australia uses genetic data to understand the virus and whitefly’s evolution. Boykin completed her PhD in Biology at the University of New Mexico while working at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the Theoretical Biology and Biophysics group and is currently a Senior Research Fellow at University of Western Australia. She was invited to present her lab’s research on whiteflies at the United Nations Solution Summit in New York City for the signing of the Sustainable Development Goals to end extreme poverty by 2030. The team’s latest work to bring portable DNA sequencing to east African farmers has been featured on CNN, BBC World News, BBC Swahili, BBC Technology News, and the TED Fellows Ideas Blog. Mr Anders Savill, Computer Support Officer, is a HPC Research specialist and web developer based at The University of Western Australia. He recently finished work on the Whiteflybase Project which aimed to curate the largest reference dataset of Bemisia tabaci species complex globally, The database currently holds over 5000 individual records and over 1000 unique sequences. Anders also works on Computing and HPC related problems within the University, wider research community, project partners and locally with the Pawsey Center focusing in Bioinformatics applications.