Alistair Forrest BSc(Hons), MIT, PhD

Professor Forrest was born in Western Australia and obtained his BSc (Hons) in Biotechnology at Murdoch University in 1993. He then moved to Brisbane and while working as a research assistant at the QIMR completed a Masters in Information Technology at the Queensland University of Technology. Shortly afterward, he completed his Ph.D. in Bioinformatics at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience at the University of Queensland. During his time in Brisbane, he was involved in both ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ science, generating and analyzing some of the first microarrays used in Australia and invented a strand-specific RNA-seq protocol that heralded the start of the RNA-seq revolution. In 2007 he moved to RIKEN Yokohama Japan on a CJ Martin Fellowship. Over the past seven years, he has progressively been promoted at RIKEN taking on more senior roles and is currently scientific coordinator of the FANTOM5 (Functional Annotation of the mammalian genome) project consisting of a consortium of over 250 scientists in 20 countries. This has used single-molecule sequencing to generate a map of promoters and enhancers across a large collection of human and mouse primary cells, cancer cell lines and tissues. The work has recently published in the prestigious journal Nature along with a collection of 18 additional satellite papers in specialized journals such as Nature Biotechnology, Genome Research, and Blood.