Priyanka is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, developing a computational model to represent the influence of behavioural dynamics on the spread of sexually transmitted infections. Previously, she led health data projects at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity and the Melbourne Data Analytics Platform, and chaired committees advancing computational sciences in infectious disease. A 2021 STA Superstar of STEM, Priyanka is committed to impactful, data-driven health research and science communication.

In February 2024, Priyanka began her PhD in computational modelling of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) at the University of Melbourne. Her doctoral research focusses on understanding how the inclusion partnership dynamics and behavioural attributes influences computational models depicting the temporal spread of STIs in a population. Her emerging profile in her doctoral research has been recognised by the Graeme Clark Institute for Biomedical Engineering Graduate Women in STEM award (second prize) and her nomination for the Australian Stellar South Asian awards in the STEM category (finalist).

Between 2018 and 2023, Priyanka worked as a health informatics specialist at The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, where she developed data-sharing systems and processes for public health, clinical, and laboratory research projects. Since 2019, Priyanka also worked at the Melbourne Data Analytics Platform (MDAP), collaborating on various data-intensive projects with multidisciplinary teams across humanities and biomedical sciences. Priyanka was awarded the Public Health Laboratory Network (PHLN) Early Career Researcher Observership in 2019 and 2020 and her science communication efforts include contributions to podcasts such as ABC Ockham’s Razor, article in The Conversation, and public speaking events like Arts House Melbourne. In 2020 and 2021, Priyanka was an invited panellist and speaker at eight international conferences, where she discussed the importance of infectious disease data management for pandemic preparedness and response. In 2022 and 2023, Priyanka has actively shaped the Doherty Institute’s Computational Sciences Initiative by chairing the Clinical and Health Systems Node and its steering committee to build capacity to connect computational scientists with infection and immunity specialists to analyse datasets.

Additionally, Priyanka played a pivotal role as a co-chair of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) COVID-19 working group in 2020, helping develop recommendations and guidelines on data sharing for global pandemic response. RDA has allocated facilitation support for Priyanka to lead the formation of a new international working group titled "Computational Modelling of Health Data" in 2025, continuing her efforts to make health research data and methods findable and reusable.

Priyanka Nair-Turkich is a Superstar of STEM.