Dr Paul Jackway

Dr Paul Jackway: what bug is that?

Dr Paul Jackway’s research in image analysis and automated microscopy is finding new ways to rapidly recognise insects with minimal human intervention.

• 23 June 2010 | Updated 14 October 2011

Overview

• Current activities
• Background
• Academic qualifications
• Achievements

Current activities

Dr Paul Jackway is part of the Biotech Imaging team at CSIRO Mathematics, Informatics and Statistics which researches ways to extract information from complex digital images in biology and medicine.

Dr Jackway is currently working on a project to automatically take pictures of insects and to extract information from these images which will be used to recognise existing species and to help taxonomists find new unknown species.

This research is being undertaken within the Transformational Biology Capability Platform.

Background

Dr Jackway has worked at CSIRO since 2002.

After achieving Dux of his high school in country Victoria, Australia, he undertook a traineeship in electronics with the State Electricity Commission before starting university at RMIT where he studied electronics engineering followed by applied statistics.

During this time he was employed by Telstra (formerly Telecom Australia) first as a product engineer and later in business planning and support performing data analysis.

In 1991 he moved to Queensland, Australia, to undertake doctoral studies in image analysis.

Following his doctoral submission, Dr Jackway obtained a Research Fellowship in the Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) for Sensor Signal and Information Processing (CSSIP) based at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.

At CSSIP he lead a research group working on automated cell analysis (cytometry) focusing on the automation of pap smear analysis for cervical cancer screening.

After eight years in this position, Dr Jackway accepted a research scientist position within Biotech Imaging of CSIRO Mathematics, Informatics and Statistics.

Dr Jackway recently oversaw the planning, design and establishment of a fully automated microscopy system which was used in CSIRO to capture image data in brightfield and fluorescence from a wide range of biological samples.

This microscopy system is part of research within the Preventative Health National Research Flagship on quantifying bacterial populations in the human gut to improve colorectal cancer diagnosis and prevention.

Academic qualifications

Dr Jackway has been awarded a:

• Certificate of Technology, Electronics, from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 1980
• Bachelor of Engineering, Electronics Engineering, also from RMIT, 1985
• Graduate Diploma, Applied Statistics, also from RMIT, 1987
• Master of Applied Science in Mathematical Modelling and Data Analysis, also from RMIT, 1990
• Doctor of Philosophy in Image Analysis, from the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia, 1995.

Achievements

Dr Jackway has published 20 refereed journals papers, four refereed collections and 29 refereed conference papers.

His work has been cited over 235 times in the academic literature.

Dr Jackway's achievements include that he is:

• co-inventor on three image analysis patent families
• winner ‘Best overall paper’ prize at 2005 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology.

He is a member of the:

• IEA (Institution of Engineers Australia).

Read about CSIRO’s Microscope solution for counting bacteria.