
Dr Rokny joined UNSW on a highly prestigious and competitive UNSW Scientia Program (UNSW Scientia Program aims to attract the best and brightest scientists with outstanding research records in October 2019. Dr Rokny is currently running UNSW BioMedical Machine Learning Laboratory (BML) at the UNSW Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering (GSBmE), where he is leading a team of 1 post-doc, 2 research assistants, 5 PhDs, 3 Masters, 2 Hons as well as 8 researchers in overseas universities as co-supervisor/mentor. He is also Heath Data Analytics Program Leader of AI-enabled Processes (AIP) Research Centre. Dr Rokny received his master degree in Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (Ranked 1st) and his Ph.D in Systems Biology and Machine Learning from UNSW Australia, Dec 2017.
His research focuses on using cutting-edge Systems Biology and Advanced Health Data Analytics techniques in conjunction with genome-wide data to understand the impact of genomic variants on genetic diseases and disorders. Dr Rokny is currently leading multiple international projects (jointly with UWA, Uni Adelaide, SUT, and Texas Biomed) investigating the impacts of non-coding regulatory variants in genetic diseases (in particular neurodevelopmental disorders and breast cancer) through integration of Hi-C, ChIP-seq, RNA-seq, and genomic variants. He is keen to see accurate diagnostic genomic tools implemented into the clinic to improve the health care and genomic-based treatments in the Australian health system.
As a young and early career scientist, Dr Rokny has published 65 publications, including 10 as first & 35 as senior author. He has also been able to secure several national and international grants/fellowships. Throughput his career, he has received 28 prizes, honours, awards and also was able to secure multiple national and international awards and grants (totally $13.2M as Chief Investigator (CI) including highly competitive tenure-track UNSW Scientia Program Fellowship, CSIRO Next-Generation Graduate Program (leading CI), Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) IDEAS grant, Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA 2022), two NHMRC MERIT awards, two international awards for his work on Autism from the International Quebec Autism Research Training (QART) program and the International Fellowship Fonds de recherche du Québec - Santé (FRQS), two awards from UNSW Cellular Genomics Futures Institute, four external and one internal travel grants to present my research at national and international conferences and workshops. He has also received the best presentation prize in prestigious international conference Human Genome Meeting (HUGO) 2019. Dr Rokny also awarded highly competitive international PhD scholarship from UNSW. Additionally, He has been invited to serve as Keynote Speaker and program committee members of national and international conferences including prestigious International HUGO 2020 (HUGO ECR symposium organization team), Pasteur Institute (invited talk), Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research.
Dr Rokny received extensive research funding support relative to career stage (total of $2.6M as sole/leading Chief Investigator (CI) and $10.6M as co-CI), demonstrating an impressive upward research career trajectory. These include:
As a very young early career researcher, Dr Rokny has an exceptional track record in securing a range of national and international awards and prizes, despite my early career status. These include:
Dr Rokny’s research focuses on using cutting-edge systems biology and advanced health data analytics techniques in conjunction with genome-wide data to understand the impact of genomic variants on genetic diseases and disorders. He is also interested to develop novel machine learning techniques, in particular, deep convolutional neural network, clustering, clustering, classification, feature selection, and evolutionary algorithms.
Dr Rokny has extensive experience in the analysis of next generation sequencing (NGS) data from different platforms (Roche, SOLiD, Illumina, and Helicos) and protocols (Hi-C, Structural variants, Single point mutations, GWAS, RNA-seq, CAGE, small RNA, ChIP-seq, and Single-cell). The move to UNSW Biomedical Engineering school has allowed him to translate his engineering and medical research on mammalian systems onto clinically relevant questions such as identification of novel biomarkers, drug targets.
Dr. Rokny is currently looking for Research Associate/Assistant, Ph.D/Master/Honours students to join his BML Lab. The research projects will mainly focus on using cutting-edge Medical Artificial Intelligence, Systems Biology and Advanced Health Data Analytics techniques in conjunction with genome-wide data to understand biological and medical related problems.
There are several scholarships available for both international and domestic students. Please see the following links for more information:
My Research Supervision
Research Assistants:
PhD Students:
Master by Research Students:
Master Students:
Previous supervision and mentoring:
My Teaching
Biomedical Informatics (BIOM9540)
Biomedical Engineering (BIOM4951, BIOM4952, BIOM4953)