Susanna Grigson is from the College of Science and Engineering and is one of the recipients for the 2025 Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Doctoral Thesis Excellence and was supervised by Professor Robert Edwards and Professor Jim Mitchell
Susanna’s thesis was titled “Advancing Microbial Protein Function Prediction”
We invited Susanna to share insights into her research, what it means to win this ward, the hardest and highlights of the PhD journey.
What is your research about?
My research is in bioinformatics, a combination of biology and computer science. My thesis focused on developing computational, AI-driven methods to predict the functions of unknown proteins in bacteria and viruses
What does winning this award mean?
The Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Doctoral Thesis Excellence means a lot to me, it reflects years of discipline, late nights and early mornings coding and writing, and working through complicated problems. Pursuing a PhD is not a conventional path; it asks you to make real sacrifices, and I’m proud that I kept going through the uncertainty. I also view this award as a tribute to my support system; I couldn’t have reached this point without my mentors, supervisors, friends and family
What was the topic of your PhD and why is it important to you?
My PhD focused on predicting the functions of unknown proteins in bacteria and viruses using computational and AI-driven methods. What drew me to this problem is that the microbial world is vast, there are enormous numbers of proteins out there, and for a huge proportion of them, we simply don’t know what they do. That scale of unknowns is both humbling and exciting. A mentor introduced me to this problem before I started my PhD, and I was immediately hooked by how much was still unknown and how much there was left to discover.
What has been one of the hardest parts of the journey?
One of the hardest parts was figuring out what to actually work on. Coming up with research projects and structuring them into coherent thesis chapters/papers required a lot of thinking. Learning to trust the process was a a challenge in itself.
What’s a highlight of your student life at Flinders?
A real highlight was my undergraduate years at Flinders. There was something special about learning everything for the first time, discovering how research works and asking lots of questions. I think that foundation sparked my curiosity and ultimately set me on the path to a PhD
Where are you now?
I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Joint Genome Institute, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the Environmental Viromics Group!