A/Prof Regina Berretta is Deputy Head of School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and one of the founding academics of the Priority Research Centre for Bioinformatics, Biomarker Discovery and Information Based Medicine, The University of Newcastle, Australia. She is also a member of the Information Based Medicine Program at Hunter Medical Research Institute. A/Prof Berretta holds degrees in Computational and Applied Mathematics, a Master and PhD in the area of metaheuristic methods for solving combinatorial optimisation problems arisen in production planning at University of Campinas, Brazil. Her main research interest is in the development of mathematical models and computational methods to analyse biological data. She has a substantial expertise in the development of heuristics and metaheuristics for tackle complex combinatorial optimisation problems in several areas (production planning, education timetable, functional genomics, etc). She has published more than 60 papers and was awarded more than 20 competitive grants.