Dr Matthew Faria

A holy grail of medicine is precision targeting – treatments that interact only with a specific cell in the body and do not affect other cells. For example, chemotherapy that kills cancer while ignoring normal cells; or vaccines that only interact with specific immune cells. Fields as diverse as nanoengineering and synthetic biology, are attempting to develop precision targeted therapies. Unfortunately, many of the experimental techniques and theory we use to evaluate new drugs are less relevant when applied to precision targeted therapies.

Dr Matt Faria wants to accelerate development of this new generation of medicine by developing new techniques to measure their performance. His research is truly multi-disciplinary, combining biological experiments, mathematical models, and computational implementation. If he could answer 1 question, it would be “how can we predict what a drug will do without putting it in a body?”

Matt is an independent researcher at the University of Melbourne, where he is the inaugural recipient of the Rejane Langlois Fellowship and earned a PhD (2018). He holds a BS in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon (2004). Prior to academia, Matt worked for more than 5years as a software engineer in Boston, Barcelona, and Sydney – skills that still influence his work today.

Matt is also passionate about communicating science to the public – he has hosted and participated in multiple public outreach events and has appeared on TV, print, radio, and podcasts.

Electorate: Gorton
MP: Brendan O'Connor