Dr Sarah Beecroft recognised with national award for research enablement

Australian BioCommons is proud to announce that Dr Sarah Beecroft has been awarded the 2026 Early Career eResearch Excellence Prize by AeRO. The prize recognises Sarah’s excellence in research enablement, technical innovation, collaboration, and community leadership.

After many years of productive collaboration with Sarah, BioCommons now invests directly into Sarah’s role as Lifescience Applications Specialist at the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre. BioCommons co-funds this role with Pawsey in recognition that her work to support bioinformatics users through workflow development and optimisation, training, and advocacy is so integral to the success of life science research in Australia.

Sarah’s participation has been key to the delivery of many significant research outcomes, including the recent extraordinary addition of 17 million protein predictions to an international open access database by an Australian researcher, made possible by Sarah’s porting of workflows to enable usage of Setonix's AMD GPUs at Pawsey. 

It is wonderful to see that Sarah’s outstanding contributions to the eResearch community have been recognised with one of the AeRO awards. Congratulations Sarah, and keep up the good work! 

Sarah regularly shares her expertise via BioCommons training events. You can catch up on the recording of her recent Using Containers in Nextflow session.