Lê Cao Lab develops statistical methods for integrating and interpreting multi-omics data — latent component approaches and dimension reduction, for data where the variables far outnumber the samples and the signal sits across several molecular (‘omics) layers rather than in any one of them.
I was trained as a mathematical engineer at the National Institute of Applied Sciences (INSA) in Toulouse, France, and graduated with a PhD in statistics from University of Paul Sabatier and the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment. I started the Lê Cao Lab at the University of Queensland in 2008 and in 2017we moved to Melbourne, where we are based at Melbourne Integrative Genomics (MIG), hosted by the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Melbourne.
Most methods stop at the paper. In the lab, we pride ourselves on going beyond that. We endeavour for our methods to work in someone else's hands, on data we have never seen. mixOmics has been in continuous development since 2009 and is used by tens of thousands of researchers a year. mixOmics sets a standard we have to keep meeting: however elegant and rigorous the mathematics, we believe that a method that is hard to explain or awkward to use is not useful for the research community.
Developing new analytical methods for omics keeps our problems varied. Our methods have been applied to monitoring the Great Barrier Reef, to productivity in the dairy industry, and to biomarker discovery in Alzheimer's disease, cancer and diabetes. Approaches general enough to cross ecology, agriculture, health and nutrition, not tuned to any single dataset.
We look for people who want their work used, not only published.
Our software is relied on by over 50,000 researchers annually. That is a responsibility before it is an opportunity, and it shapes how we work: a result has to be reproducible by someone who has never met you, and an idea has to be explainable outside your own field. It is slower than writing for reviewers alone.
It also comes with a commitment. If your method becomes part of the mixOmics ecosystem, we expect you to stay involved in maintaining it after you leave the lab. The thing you built remains yours to look after. If you want your work used, that is the deal.
What I look for is a strong quantitative background and an interest in being useful beyond your own field. In return we put more into our people than most groups can. Our alumni have gone on to research positions internationally and senior roles in industry.
We also look after each other. The lab runs regular internal seminars, we meet on retreat each year, and people here help each other without being asked — something I take as seriously as I take the science.
View our current people and alumni →
Public repositories here are released methods, teaching or workshop material, and code accompanying our publications. Student and project repositories are private during candidature and reviewed before anything is released.
All our members use GitHub and strive for reproducible research.
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| Lê Cao Lab Our lab |
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| mixOmics The open-source R package |
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| Melbourne Integrative Genomics Where we are based |
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Parkville, Victoria, Australia
