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Contact Details

Phone
+64 3 479 7831
Email
mik.black@otago.ac.nz
Position
Professor
Department
Department of Biochemistry
Qualifications
BSc(Hons) MS PhD
Research summary
Bioinformatics, cancer genomics, data science, statistics
Teaching
BIOC352, GENE315, GENE360, GENE412, STAT435, QGEN401, BIOC461

Research

Professor Black is a member of the Centre for Translational Cancer Research, and his research focuses on the development of methods for the analysis of genomic data, with a strong emphasis on cancer and other human diseases. A common theme is the use of techniques that allow high-dimensional and often very disparate data sets to be combined in ways that provide new insights into disease development and progression:
Centre for Translational Cancer Research

This research is highly collaborative, and Mik works closely with a number of Otago research groups, as well as with long-standing national and international collaborators at the University of Auckland, the Institute of Environmental Science and Research, Wake Forest University Medical School, and Moffitt Cancer Center.

In addition to his own work, Mik has been heavily involved in establishing national research infrastructure in high performance computing through the NZ eScience Infrastructure, and in genomics and bioinformatics through Genomics Aotearoa, where he is the Chair of the Bioinformatics Leadership Team:
NZ eScience Infrastructure
Genomics Aotearoa

Publications

Te Aika, B., Liggins, L., Rye, C., Perkins, E. O., Huh, J., Brauning, R., Godfery, T., & Black, M. A. (2025). Aotearoa genomic data repository: An āhuru mōwai for taonga species sequencing data. Molecular Ecology Resources, 25, e13866. doi: 10.1111/1755-0998.13866 Journal - Research Article

Yang, Z., Guarracino, A., Biggs, P. J., Black, M. A., Ismail, N., Wold, J. R., Merriman, T. R., … de Ligt, J. (2024). Pangenome graphs in infectious disease: A comprehensive genetic variation analysis of Neisseria meningitidis leveraging Oxford Nanopore long reads. In P. J. Dias, S. Tulasi & D. Verma (Eds.), Microbial comparative genomics and pangenomics: New tools, approaches and insights into gene and genome evolution. Lausanne, Switzerland: Frontiers Media. doi: 10.3389/978-2-8325-5650-4 Chapter in Book - Other

Redpath, K. J., Bougen-Zhukov, N., Vaessen, C., Decourtye-Espiard, L., Schulpen, E., Godwin, T., McElroy, K., Black, M. A., & Guilford, P. (2024). Single-cell RNA-seq reveals candidate synergistic treatments for the chemoprevention of hereditary diffuse gastric cancer. Proceedings of the 17th GeneMappers Conference. Retrieved from https://www.genemappersconference.org Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Abstract

Champion, D. J., Chen, T.-H., Thomson, S., Black, M., & Gardner, P. P. (2024). Flawed machine learning and protein coding sequence annotation. Proceedings of the 17th GeneMappers Conference. Retrieved from https://www.genemappersconference.org Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Abstract

Schiavinato, D., Rojas Lopez, K. E., Cooper, H., Black, M., & Gardner, P. (2024). Predicting functional genomic features. Proceedings of the 17th GeneMappers Conference. Retrieved from https://www.genemappersconference.org Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Abstract

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