Rate My Professor Lachlan Coin

Professor Lachlan Coin holds the position of Professorial Fellow in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Melbourne. He is also a Professor in Microbiology and Immunology and leads the Coin Laboratory focused on genomics and bioinformatics in infectious disease and cancer. Based at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, Coin serves as Laboratory Head and leads the Computational Sciences and Genomics cross-cutting discipline. Additionally, he heads the Cancer Bioinformatics laboratory at the Collaborative Centre for Genomic Cancer Medicine, where his team interrogates genomic and transcriptomic data from cancer patients to identify significant biomarkers that enhance diagnosis and treatment strategies. His research encompasses characterization of complex structural variations in bacterial and human genomes, development of novel therapeutic strategies and predictive biomarkers in pancreatic cancer, and discovery of minimal molecular signatures for point-of-care diagnostics in cancer and infectious diseases. Coin's group utilizes advanced technologies including Oxford Nanopore sequencing, deep learning variant callers, and organoid models to advance precision medicine.

A mathematician by background, Professor Coin previously held a Research Council UK Fellowship in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at Imperial College London, where he also served as Honorary Senior Lecturer. He maintains an Honorary Associate Professor appointment at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, University of Queensland. Throughout his career, Coin has been principal investigator on numerous prestigious grants, including Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowships, Discovery Projects totaling over $878,000 for specific projects, NHMRC collaborative grants such as e-ASIA and EU programs, and Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) awards for tackling drug-resistant tuberculosis and other initiatives. His scholarly output includes 369 research works with over 48,467 citations. Notable publications feature "A census of human cancer genes" (2004, Nature Reviews Cancer), which provided a foundational catalog of cancer genes; "Genome graphs reveal the importance of structural variation in bacterial genomes" (2025, Nature Communications); "A flexible framework for minimal biomarker signature discovery from high-dimensional omics data (FS-PLS)" (2024); and "Benchmarking reveals superiority of deep learning variant callers on bacterial genomes" (2024, eLife). These contributions have significantly influenced bioinformatics, cancer genomics, and infectious disease research.