About
Dr Mainá Bitar is a Senior Research Officer at the Functional Genetics Laboratory at QIMR Berghofer.
Dr Bitar is an early career bioinformatician with expertise in (sc)RNAseq, CRISPR screening and noncoding RNAs. She has a BSc in Biophysics by UFRJ-Brazil and a PhD in Bioinformatics by UFMG-Brazil. She was a visiting scientist at TUM-Germany and at the Garvan Institute-Australia (working with Prof. John Mattick) before being awarded her PhD. She moved to QIMRB in 2017 to work at the Neurogenomics group. In 2019 she joined the Functional Genetics group where she is a senior research officer.
Research Skills
She has experience in studying noncoding RNAs, bulk and single-cell transcriptomics, CRISPR screens, protein structure and comparative modelling, molecular docking and dynamics and biological sequence analysis. I have published 25 articles on different subjects of my areas of interest and participated in over 50 scientific meetings and courses (including >10 invited oral presentations). During my PhD and postdoctoral positions, I co-supervised BSc and Masters students and organized and taught classes to different levels and disciplines (e.g. scientific programming, protein modelling, RNAseq analyses).
Area of Interest
Her main research interest is in Bioinformatics and functional genomics.