Vijini Mallawaarachchi

Vijini Mallawaarachchi is a Research Fellow in Bioinformatics at Flinders University's Flinders Accelerator for Microbiome Exploration (FAME). His research focuses on developing computational methods for metagenomic analysis, particularly viral genome recovery from metagenomes. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Australian National University (2022) and a BSc in Computer Science and Engineering (Honours) from the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka (2018).

Education:

• Doctor of Philosophy (Computer Science), Australian National University, 2018–2022
• Bachelor of Science (Computer Science & Engineering, Honours), University of Moratuwa, 2014–2018

Research Interests: Metagenomics, algorithms for genome recovery, bacteriophage discovery, machine learning applications in bioinformatics, and software engineering for computational biology. His work emphasizes leveraging assembly graphs and computational models to analyze microbial communities and viral genomes.

Grants & Awards:

• 2025: National Computational Merit Allocation Scheme Grant (Co-CI) - A$412,000
• 2025: ARC Discovery Projects Grant (Co-CI) - A$685,781
• 2024: Outstanding PhD Thesis Award (ABACBS)
• 2023: Australian Society for Microbiology Early Career Award

Professional Engagement: Active member of ISMB, ISVM, ACM, IEEE, ABACBS, ASM, and RSE AU/NZ. Supervises HDR and Honours students in bioinformatics and computational biology.

Labs & Tools: Leads projects at FAME, developed tools like GraphBin, Phables, and ConDiGA for metagenomic analysis. Collaborates on open-source initiatives like the cogent3 Python APIs.