Stemformatics Atlas Team awarded 2025 ASSCR Catalyst Prize
Congratulations to Prof Christine Wells (DAP) and her team recognised for their outstanding contributions to the stem cell community.
Image: ASSCR 2025 Catalyst Prize Stemformatics Atlas Team (published by ASSCR)
The Australasian Society for Stem Cell Research (ASSCR) Catalyst Prize recognises the team’s exceptional innovation, collaboration and transformative impact over the last five years.
Led by Professor Christine Wells, the Stemformatics Atlas team, includes:
- Dr Jarny Choi (bioinformatician): Jarny is a computational researcher who redesigned the Stemformatics website to support the atlas projects
- Dr Suzanne Butcher (early career researcher): Suzy is a cornerstone of dataset processing, student training, and data curation for Stemformatics and is now the lead curator on the Australian Stem Cell Registry
- Dr Nadia Rajab (early career researcher) and Dr Zahra Elahi (early career researcher): came to the lab as PhD students with a deep interest in specialist white blood cells who manually curated hundreds of papers to identify the experimental variables that impacted on blood cell development in a dish
- Dr Paul Angel (early career researcher): Paul came to the lab from astrophysics, understanding big noisy data and how to filter to find relevant signals. He invented the method underpinning the team’s current atlases
Image: Stemformatics Atlas team members, Paul Angel & Jarny Choi
Together they've developed ways to combine hundreds of datasets into atlases, producing easy-to-use resources to help researchers compare their lab-grown immune cells - iPSC-derived macrophage or dendritic cells - with those found in actual human tissue. These resources are freely available on Stemformatics, a data-sharing platform the team launched in 2011 with the support of the ARC SRI Stem Cells Australia.
Image: Stemformatics Atlas team members, Nadia Rajab and Zahra Elahi
Now, the team's innovative work is poised to make a lasting impact and is an important step change in the way stem cell research is conducted.
The award recognises not just the value of the Stemformatics Platform to the Australian Stem Cell community…in helping users to view patterns across many experiment…but also the value of mentoring early career researchers in interdisciplinary projects - combining stem cell biology with computational approaches to get a deeper understanding about how the cells of our body grow and act.
Prof Christine Wells
About the Stemformatics Platform
Stemformatics was created in 2011 with support of the ARC SRI Stem Cells Australia. The goal? To build trust and collaboration between stem cell researchers and bioinformaticians. Stemformatics provided a simple and intuitive platform to researchers to visualise data generated from their own laboratories, and a dictionary of gene behaviour across different stem cell phenotypes.