Miss Ashley Weir

Ms Ashley L. Weir is a Research Associate in the School of Clinical Medicine at UNSW Sydney, where she investigates the molecular determinants of ovarian cancer progression and therapeutic response. She completed her PhD at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI) in the Bioinformatics Division, focusing on the functional consequences of genomic damage in high-grade serous ovarian carcinoma. From this investigation, Ashley developed the open-access software tool IdentifiHR, the only gene-expression based predictive model of homologous recombination status in high-grade serous ovarian carcinoma. With approximately seven years of research experience spanning cancer biology, inflammation, and computational genomics, her work integrates experimental and computational approaches to understand tumour evolution and therapeutic vulnerability.

Ashley has led and contributed to large-scale international studies through the Ovarian Tumor Tissue Analysis Consortium, integrating gene expression, genomic, and clinicopathological data to identify prognostic biomarkers and predictors of homologous recombination deficiency. She has authored 13 peer-reviewed publications, including five first-author papers in leading journals such as British Journal of Cancer, Immunity, and EMBO Journal, with an H-index of 10 and over 450 citations.

Her research has been supported by competitive national and international funding, including recognition from the American Association for Cancer Research. In addition to her research, Ashley is an active educator and mentor, contributing to bioinformatics training at the University of Melbourne and supervising undergraduate and graduate students. She is passionate about interdisciplinary science, AI-driven biomedical research, and translating genomic insights into improved outcomes for patients with ovarian cancer.