Associate Professor Barrero has formal training in molecular biology and developed bioinformatics skills over 15 years working as part of large international collaboration consortia including Human Full-length cDNA Consortium, Rice Genome Annotation Project, International Cattle Tick Genome Sequencing Consortium and the International Barley Genome Consortium.

His work has been published in high impact journals such as Nature, Nucleic Acids Research, Scientific Reports, Genome Research and The Plant Cell.

Most recently, he led a team within the Plant Biosecurity Cooperative Research Centre (PBCRC) to develop a plant diagnostic toolkit that accurately detects all known viruses and viroids in a single test, receiving PBCRC’s Biosecurity Impact Award 2018 in recognition of its impact and benefits to plant industries.