- Posted on 11 Jul 2025
- 4 minutes read
Distinguished Professor Jie Lu AO is pioneering artificial intelligence that unlocks the power of genetic code to target improved women’s health.
Backed by a prestigious Australian Research Council Industry Laureate Fellowship worth approximately $4 million, Professor Jie Lu is developing next-generation machine learning tools for genomic analysis and early risk prediction.
These will deliver on the promise of personalised health for women’s quality of life.
She will be working with biomedical start-up 23Strands, healthcare consultancy Axis Health Co, and the Australian Women’s Health Alliance to deliver the five-year research program.
“The human genome is huge, with more than 3 billion base pairs of DNA and millions of potential mutations. Less than one percent of this vast amount of genomic data has been harnessed so far,” said Professor Lu.
Using advanced machine learning to fill in large gaps in data is one of Professor Lu’s specialities.
She’s a world-leading pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence particularly fuzzy machine learning and transfer learning techniques that deal with uncertainty and personalisation, and fills in the blanks in large data sets.
As technology continues to advance, artificial intelligence has the potential to revolutionise healthcare through earlier detection and personalised health analytics.
“Women’s healthy living and ageing is one area where it can play a crucial role filling in some of the gaps in our knowledge,” said Professor Lu
“If we can deliver more precise genetic factor analyses, it will pave the way for personalised health-smart strategies for women that are informed by their own personal genetics.”
Her research program will enable a shift from the relatively simple genetic association analysis commonly employed to more sophisticated and precise personalised machine learning predictive analyses.
The work builds on a long-standing partnership between Professor Lu’s team and 23Strands, which has already delivered artificial intelligence-driven advances in personalised health and their research applied in 23Strands’ service reports with high impact.
“Our transformative artificial intelligence methodologies will tackle varied and complex data sources," she said.
"We will ultimately translate them into tools that are used to make women’s healthcare interventions more accurate and cost effective in the future.”
Awarded annually by the Australian Research Council, the Industry Laureate Fellowships support academic researchers to build connections with industry to address industry-identified challenges and opportunities. Eight were awarded in 2026.
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