Rate My Professor Priyanka Rana

Dr. Priyanka Rana is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centre for Health Informatics at the Australian Institute of Health Innovation, Macquarie University, within the Faculty of Medicine, Health and Human Sciences. She earned her PhD in Computer Science from the University of New South Wales Sydney in March 2023, with a thesis entitled "Analysis of Cellular and Subcellular Morphology using Machine Learning in Microscopy Images." She previously obtained a Master's degree in Information Technology from James Cook University Singapore and a Bachelor of Engineering from Manipal Institute of Technology, MAHE, Karnataka, India. Dr. Rana specializes in AI-based deep learning techniques for biomedical image analysis, operating at both cellular and whole-slide levels. Her current research centers on multiplex immunofluorescence imaging and multimodal datasets to predict immunotherapy responses in melanoma patients. She develops generative models for data augmentation and stain imputation, analyzes multi-channel images, and designs algorithms to address class imbalance, improve model generalization, and enhance AI transportability across datasets. Previously, she served as a Lecturer at James Cook University Singapore from October 2015 to June 2018, teaching courses including computer vision, design thinking, human-computer interaction, data mining, algorithms, and Android development.

Dr. Rana has secured several prestigious awards and grants, including the Researcher of the Year Award from the Centre for Health Informatics, Australian Institute of Health Innovation (2025); Early Career Scientist Grant from the Australian Melanoma Research Foundation (2025); MacquarieMinds and Intelligence Initiative Early Career Researcher Grant (2025); Macquarie Research Acceleration Scheme Grant (2024); Early Career Researcher Enabling Scheme, Macquarie University (2023); and first prize in the Early Career Researcher Showcase Competition (2023). As Primary Chief Investigator, she leads projects such as developing a multimodal AI model for predicting immunotherapy response (2025-2026) and Generative Artificial Intelligence for Synthetic Medical Imaging (2024-2027). Her key publications include "Imbalanced classification for protein subcellular localization with multilabel oversampling" (Bioinformatics, 2023), "Data augmentation with improved regularisation and sampling for imbalanced blood cell image classification" (Scientific Reports, 2022), "Imbalanced cell-cycle classification using WGAN-div and mixup" (IEEE ISBI, 2022), and "Estimation of three-dimensional chromatin morphology for nuclear classification and characterisation" (Scientific Reports, 2021). With a Scopus h-index of 5 and 90 citations, Dr. Rana actively supervises PhD and MRes students and delivers invited talks such as "Decoding the Melanoma Tumour Microenvironment with Multiplex Immunofluorescence and Deep Learning" (November 2025).