Sara Ballouz

Dr. Sara Ballouz is a Senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), affiliated with the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and the Garvan-Weizmann Centre for Cellular Genomics. Her research integrates computational and experimental approaches to understand the genetic architecture of disease, with a focus on X-linked disorders, sex differences in disease, and personalized medicine.

• 2013 - PhD, Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute and UNSW
• 2008 - BE Bioinformatics (First Class Honours), UNSW
• 2008 - BSc Genetics, UNSW

Her work addresses challenges in analyzing multi-omics data (genomes, transcriptomes, epigenomes, proteomes) to develop robust tools for personalized medicine. Key contributions include improving RNA-seq accuracy through pan-human consensus genomes and creating computational methods like AuPairWise and CoCoCoNet for co-expression analysis. She explores developmental stochasticity and its transcriptional legacy, alongside cross-tissue X-chromosome inactivation patterns.

Recent publications emphasize single-cell transcriptomics applications in autoimmune diseases (e.g., X-linked chronic granulomatous disease), long COVID immune dysregulation, and cardiometabolic disease treatment. Her group at Garvan-Weizmann Centre leverages computational genomics and meta-analysis to address reproducibility in biomedical research.

Dr. Ballouz supervises students including Lachlan Gray, who investigates X chromosome roles in female autoimmune disease. She collaborates with institutions like Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute.

Email: s.ballouz@unsw.edu.au