Robert Spencer
PhD Candidate - The University of Queensland
"I want to build something digital solutions that stakeholders are actually willing and able to adopt – so we have better data for AMR risk assessment and industry AMU decision-making.”
Robert Spencer is a SAAFE PhD Scholar at The University of Queensland whose research focuses on developing privacy-preserving Digital Twins for antimicrobial resistance (AMR) data. His work explores how federated learning and synthetic data methodologies can make distributed AMR and antimicrobial use (AMU) data useful for modelling and decision support without requiring organisations to centralise or share commercially sensitive raw data.
Robert’s background spans health, data analytics and artificial intelligence. He completed an undergraduate degree double majoring in Community Health and Human Performance Science, followed by a Master’s in Data Analytics with a health specialisation in epidemiology and biostatistics, and is also completing a Master’s in Computer Science specialising in AI. His research experience includes a first-author paper in a Q1 journal on transfer learning for building energy forecasting. Alongside his PhD, Robert works as an AI engineer.
At SAAFE CRC, Robert’s typical day is a cycle of reading papers, writing code and reading some more. His research aims to help mitigate AMR risks across the interconnected agribusiness, food and environmental sectors, and he values the SAAFE community and the opportunity to collaborate with researchers working across the AMR space.
Robert has always been driven by a desire to improve health outcomes. His interest in AMR sharpened when he came across this PhD project and began to appreciate the scale and implications of resistance – and realised the problem brought together his interests in health, data and AI. He is candid about the stakes: a world without effective antimicrobials is not one we want to find ourselves in.
Outside of research, Robert enjoys exploring Australia – he recently visited Uluru, with Perth and Adelaide next on the list. He loves nothing more than getting in the car for a long drive, keeps a close eye on the latest advances in AI, and is a big Drum and Bass fan who has been to plenty of gigs.
Robert’s long-term goal is to develop a practical, validated methodology that allows organisations to collaborate using AMR and AMU data while preserving data privacy and ownership – and, most importantly, something stakeholders are genuinely willing and able to adopt, improving the data available for AMR risk assessment and decision-making.
