Dr Alex Sneddon is a MACSYS Research Fellow at the Australian National University, working at the intersection of AI and RNA biology. The overarching goal of her work is to leverage and extend deep learning methods for biological discovery and design.

Prior to completing her PhD, Alex was a Software Engineer at Saluda Medical, contributing to the first closed-loop neuromodulation system for the treatment of chronic pain. In her PhD, she combined knowledge of RNA biology with deep learning to decode nanopore direct RNA sequencing signals, leading to a hardware-integrated, AI-driven software for selective sequencing of RNA types (Nature Communications 2024). Alex’s current work aims to harness domain knowledge for biological representation learning and generative modelling in low-data regimes.