Professor Alistair Forrest is Associate Director (Scientific Strategy) and head of the Systems Biology and Genomics Lab at the Harry Perkins Institiute of Medical Research, University of Western Australia. He is an expert in transcriptomics and an early adopter of single-cell and spatial profiling in Australia. While at RIKEN Yokohama he coordinated an international consortium of over 250 researchers from 20 countries as scientific coordinator of the FANTOM5 project. This led to publications in Nature, Science, and Nature Biotechnology providing maps of promoters, genes, enhancers, lncRNAs and miRNAs in human and mouse (https://fantom.gsc.riken.jp/5/).Returning to Australia in 2015, he led the formation of the Western Australian Cancer Single Cell Consortium (consisting of 100 member surgeons, oncologists, pathologists, cell biologists, molecular biologists and bioinformaticians, https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=lBfBvywAAAAJ). He is currently focusing on single-cell, single-nucleus and spatial transcriptomic analysis of the tumour microenvironment and clonal heterogeneity in poor prognosis cancers including ovarian cancer (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-47271-y) and mesothelioma. Specialties: Bridging computational biology and wet bench experimentsNext generation sequencing applicationsSystems Biology, Transcriptomics, single cell, spatial transcriptomics