Robert Turnbull

Senior Research Data Specialist
Melbourne Data Analytics Platform
The University of Melbourne

Bio

Robert Turnbull previously worked for Monash Cluster Computing where he was responsible for developing the Geodynamics modelling program Underworld. In 2020, he completed his PhD using Bayesian phylogenetics to study the transmission history of Arabic manuscript texts from the Middle Ages. He is now a Senior Research Data Specialist at the Melbourne Data Analytics Platform where he collaborates with researchers across the University of Melbourne in data intensive research projects. During this time Robert has developed Deep Learning models which have won international academic competitions in reading Greek papyri and interpreting medical imaging.
Rob visiting St Catherine's Monastery.

Book

In October, 2024, Robert's book Codex Sinaiticus Arabicus and Its Family: A Bayesian Approach was published by Brill.

Arabic versions of the New Testament have been overlooked for too long. The Sinai New Finds of 1975 unearthed Codex Sinaiticus Arabicus which preserves an Arabic translation of the Gospels differing markedly from the Majority Text. Here Robert Turnbull undertakes a wide-ranging study of this version, discovering many lectionary manuscripts with the same text. Several open-access datasets are made available. Bayesian phylogenetics and other computational techniques are used to draw insights into the transmission history of this version and its place in the wider New Testament textual tradition. This Arabic version will be indispensable in future textual scholarship on the Gospels.See Less

Turnbull, Robert. Codex Sinaiticus Arabicus and Its Family: A Bayesian Approach. Vol. 66. New Testament Tools, Studies and Documents. Published: October 24, 2024. Brill, 2025. ISBN: 978-90-04-68580-2. DOI: 10.1163/9789004704619. URL: https://brill.com/display/title/69300.

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Projects

Early Modern Women Translators in Europe (15th–18th c.)

2020
CI: Prof Véronique Duché

Living with COVID

2020
CI: Rachel Fensham

Unlocking published metagenomes as a source of information for microbial eukaryotes

2020
CI: A/Prof Heroen Verbruggen

Plain Of Jars Archaeological Project

2020
CI: Louise Shewan

Visualising networks and mobilities in the architecture profession

2021
CI: Professor Julie Willis

Accelerating large dimensional stochastic simulation models

2021
CI: Dr Aaron Dodd

Associate: Encoding manuscripts as primary research objects

2021
CI: A/Prof Nick Thieberger

Longitudinal Mapping of Residential Building Projects in Victoria

2021
CI: Dr Vidal Paton-Cole, Prof Robert Crawford

Artificial intelligence-based image enhancement and segmentation

2022
CI: Wenbin Fei, School of Electrical, Mechanical and Infrastructure Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology

Unlocking diverse herbarium specimen associated data to accelerate biodiversity and evolutionary research

2022
CI: Wenbin Fei, School of Electrical, Mechanical and Infrastructure Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology

Screening whole genome sequencing datasets for the Eukaryome of globally distributed kelp species

2022
CI: Trevor Bringloe, School of Biosciences, Faculty of Science

Infectious disease genomics: from database to phylodynamics

2022
CI: Sebastian Duchene, Melbourne School of Biomedical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry & Health Sciences

Increasing comparative genomic resources for amphibians

2023
CI: Dr Tiffany Kosch, Faculty of Science, Veterinary Biosciences

Infrastructure and methods for forensic audio transcription experiments

2023
CI: Professor Helen Fraser, Faculty of Arts, School of Languages and Linguistics

Forecasting risks to savanna ecosystems in northern Australia under global change

2023
CI: Dr Rebecca Runting, Science, School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences

Geometric deep learning methods for bacterial taxonomic classification

2024
CI: Dr Wytamma Wirth, The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity

AI-based denoising of phase-contrast CT for breast cancer imaging

2024
CI: Associate Professor Timur Gureyev, School of Physics

Using deep neural network models to aid in the decipherment of Linear A

2024
CI: Dr Brent Davis, Historical and Philosophical Studies, Arts

Determining sources for Nicholas Trevet's commentary on Livy

2024
CI: Dr Andrew Turner, Historical and Philisophical Studies

Publications

  • Turnbull, Robert. Codex Sinaiticus Arabicus and Its Family: A Bayesian Approach. Vol. 66. New Testament Tools, Studies and Documents. Brill, 2025. DOI: 10.1163/9789004704619. Show More
  • Turnbull, Robert, and Simon Mutch. “Separating Lungs in CT Scans for Improved COVID19 Detection.” In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 5216–22, 2024. Show More
  • Turnbull, Robert, and Evelyn Mannix. “Detecting and Recognizing Characters in Greek Papyri with YOLOv8, DeiT and SimCLR.” International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR), November 2024. DOI: 10.1007/s10032-024-00504-8. Show More
  • Wirth, Wytamma, Simon Mutch, and Robert Turnbull. “Snk: A Snakemake CLI and Workflow Management System.” Journal of Open Source Software 9, no. 103 (2024): 7410. DOI: 10.21105/joss.07410. Show More
  • Shaban, Babak, Maria Mar del Quiroga, Robert Turnbull, Edoardo Tescari, Kim-Anh Lê Cao, and Heroen Verbruggen. “MetaGenePipe: An Automated, Portable Pipeline for Contig-Based Functional and Taxonomic Analysis.” Journal of Open Source Software 8, no. 82 (2023): 4851. DOI: 10.21105/joss.04851. Show More
  • Turnbull, Robert. “Using a 3D ResNet for Detecting the Presence and Severity of COVID-19 from CT Scans.” In Computer Vision – ECCV 2022 Workshops, edited by Leonid Karlinsky, Tomer Michaeli, and Ko Nishino, 663–76. Cham: Springer Nature, 2023. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-25082-8_45. Show More
  • Salazar, Vinícius W, Babak Shaban, Maria del Mar Quiroga, Robert Turnbull, Edoardo Tescari, Vanessa Rossetto Marcelino, Heroen Verbruggen, and Kim-Anh Lê Cao. “Metaphor—A Workflow for Streamlined Assembly and Binning of Metagenomes.” GigaScience 12 (July 2023): giad055. DOI: 10.1093/gigascience/giad055. Show More
  • McCollum, Joey, and Robert Turnbull. “Using Bayesian Phylogenetics to Infer Manuscript Transmission History.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, December 2023, fqad089. DOI: 10.1093/llc/fqad089. Show More
  • Thompson, Karen M., Robert Turnbull, Emily Fitzgerald, and Joanne L. Birch. “Identification of Herbarium Specimen Sheet Components from High-Resolution Images Using Deep Learning.” Ecology and Evolution 13, no. 8 (2023): e10395. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.10395. Show More
  • Montoro, Peter, and Robert Turnbull. “Two Way Traffic on the Transmissional Highway? Considering Chrysostom’s Exegesis as an Explanation for the Reading of GA 104 in Romans 2:26.” In Pen, Print, and Pixels: Advances in Textual Criticism in the Digital Era. Hendrickson, 2023. Show More
  • Turnbull, Robert. “Lung Segmentation Enhances COVID-19 Detection.” In 2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing Workshops (ICASSPW), 1–5, 2023. DOI: 10.1109/ICASSPW59220.2023.10193492. Show More
  • Turnbull, Robert, and Jonathan Garber. “Ausdex: A Python Package for Adjusting Australian Dollars for Inflation.” Journal of Open Source Software 7, no. 75 (2022): 4212. DOI: 10.21105/joss.04212. Show More
  • Wirth, Wytamma, Simon Mutch, Robert Turnbull, and Sebastian Duchene. “Phytest: Quality Control for Phylogenetic Analyses.” Bioinformatics 38, no. 22 (October 2022): 5124–25. DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btac664. Show More
  • McCollum, Joey, and Robert Turnbull. “Teiphy: A Python Package for Converting TEI XML Collations to NEXUS and Other Formats.” Journal of Open Source Software 7, no. 80 (2022): 4879. DOI: 10.21105/joss.04879. Show More
  • Crawford, R H, V Paton-Cole, R. Turnbull, E Fitzgerald, A Michalewicz, and J Garber. “Trends in Residential Sustainability Measures in the State of Victoria.” IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science 1101, no. 2 (November 2022): 022018. DOI: 10.1088/1755-1315/1101/2/022018. Show More
  • Paton-Cole, V, R H Crawford, R. Turnbull, E Fitzgerald, A Michalewicz, and J Garber. “Trends in Residential Building Materials in the State of Victoria.” IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science 1101, no. 4 (November 2022): 042022. DOI: 10.1088/1755-1315/1101/4/042022. Show More
  • Montoro, Peter, and Robert Turnbull. “Revising the Repetitions: The Relative Textual Stability of Repeated Patristic Citations as a Window into the Transmission History of Patristic Exegesis — Chrysostom’s Homilies on Romans as an Initial Test Case.” Sacris Erudiri LX (2021): 69–99. DOI: 10.1484/J.SE.5.128776. Show More
  • Alhagh, Leila, Merav Carmeli, G. Geltner, John Henry, Stephen J. Joyce, Janice Pinder, and Robert Turnbull. “Inventorying ‘Pre-Modern’ Manuscripts in Victorian Public and Private Collections: Expanding the Cultural Archive.” Script & Print 45, no. 3 (2021): 148–65. Show More
  • Farrington, Rebecca, Louis Moresi, Steve Quenette, Robert Turnbull, and Patrick Sunter. “Geodynamic Benchmarking Tests in HPC.” In Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing Conference, 2005. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3885977. Show More
  • Stegman, D.R., L. Moresi, R. Turnbull, J. Giordani, P. Sunter, A. Lo, and S Quenette. “GLucifer: Next Generation Visualization Framework for High-Performance Computational Geodynamics.” Visual Geosciences 13, no. 1 (2008): 71–84. DOI: 10.1007/s10069-008-0010-2. Show More
  • Turnbull, Robert. “Arabic Gospel Lectionaries at Sinai.” Collectanea Christiana Orientalia 16 (2019): 131–66. DOI: 10.21071/cco.v16i.14609. Show More
  • Turnbull, Robert. “Can Manuscript Headings Prove That There Were Arabic Gospels before the Qurʾān?” In Scribal Habits in Near Eastern Manuscript Traditions, edited by George Kiraz and Sabine Schmidtke, 291–308. Gorgias, 2021. DOI: 10.31826/9781463241964-016. Show More
  • Turnbull, Robert. “The Textual Character of Codex Sinaiticus Arabicus and Its Family.” In At One Remove: The Text of the New Testament in Early Translations and Quotations. Papers from the Eleventh Birmingham Colloquium on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament, edited by Hugh A.G. Houghton and Peter Montoro, 87–106. Gorgias, 2020. DOI: 10.31826/9781463241100-007. Show More
  • Turnbull, Robert. “Verse Metrics: Analysing Manuscript Families Using a String Alignment Algorithm with a Test Case in the Arabic Gospels.” In New Approaches to Textual and Image Analysis in Early Jewish and Christian Studies, edited by Garrick V. Allen, Paul Dilley, Sara Schulthess, and Peter Philips, 146–69. Digital Biblical Studies. Brill, 2022. DOI: 10.1163/9789004515116_009. Show More
  • Quenette, Steve, Louis Moresi, Patrick Sunter, L. Hodkinson, R. Hassan, A. Lo, B Appelbe, and Robert Turnbull. “Supporting Community Based Computational Code Development.” In Proceedings of the APAC Conference and Exhibition on Advanced Computing, Grid Applications and EResearch, 2005. Show More
  • Preprints

  • Turnbull, Robert, Damien Mannion, Jessie Wells, Kabir Manandhar Shrestha, Attila Balogh, and Rebecca Runting. “Themeda: Predicting Land Cover Change Using Deep Learning.” SSRN, 2024. DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.4681094. Show More
  • Turnbull, Robert, Emily Fitzgerald, Karen Thompson, and Joanne L. Birch. “Hespi: A Pipeline for Automatically Detecting Information from Herbarium Specimen Sheets.” ArXiv, 2024. DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2410.08740. Show More
  • Turnbull, Robert, Jacob L. Steenwyk, Simon J. Mutch, Pelle Scholten, Vinícius W. Salazar, Joanne L. Birch, and Heroen Verbruggen. “Orthoflow: Phylogenomic Analysis and Diagnostics with One Command.” Research Square, 2023. DOI: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-3699210/v2. Show More
  • Acknowledgements

  • Carlson, Stephen C., ed. Papias of Hierapolis Exposition of Dominical Oracles: The Fragments, Testimonia, and Reception of a Second-Century Commentator. Oxford University Press, 2021. Show More
  • Moresi, L., S.M. Quenette, V. Lemiale, C. Mériaux, B. Appelbe, and H.-B. Mühlhaus. “Computational Approaches to Studying Non-Linear Dynamics of the Crust and Mantle.” Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors 163, no. 1–4 (2007): 69–82. DOI: 10.1016/j.pepi.2007.06.009. Show More
  • Quenette, S.M., L. Moresi, P. Sunter, and B. Appelbe. “Explaining StGermain: An Aspect Oriented Environment for Building Extensible Computational Mechanics Modeling Software,” 2007. DOI: 10.1109/IPDPS.2007.370400. Show More
  • Quenette, S.M., B Appelbe, M. Gurnis, L. Hodkinson, L. Moresi, and P. Sunter. “An Investigation into Design for Code Maintainability in HPC.” ANZIAM Journal 46, no. E (2004): C1001–C1016. DOI: 10.21914/anziamj.v46i0.1003. Show More
  • Shewan, Louise, Richard Armstrong, Dougald O’Reilly, Siân Halcrow, Nancy Beavan, and Tep Sokha. “Isotopic Insights into the Jar-and-Coffin Mortuary Ritual of the Cardamom Mountains, Cambodia.” Antiquity 94, no. 378 (2020): 1575–91. DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2020.201. Show More
  • Stegman, D. R., J. Freeman, W. P. Schellart, L. Moresi, and D. May. “Influence of Trench Width on Subduction Hinge Retreat Rates in 3-D Models of Slab Rollback.” Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems 7, no. 3 (2006). Show More
  • Aetius. Placita. Edited by Jaap Mansfeld and David Runia. Loeb Classical Library. Harvard University Press, 2023. Show More
  • Muir, Bernard J. The Cædmon Manuscript: The Beginnings of English Religious Poetry, I. Anthem, 2023. Show More
  • Competitions

    Achievements in academic competitions.

    2nd COV19D Competition

    European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2022

    AI-enabled Medical Image Analysis – Digital Pathology & Radiology/COVID19

    COVID-19 Presence Detection: Runner-up

    3rd COV19D Competition

    IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2023

    AI-enabled Medical Image Analysis Workshop and Covid-19 Diagnosis Competition (AI-MIA-COV19D)

    COVID-19 Severity Prediction: First Place
    COVID-19 Presence Detection: Second Place

    Detection and Recognition of Greek Letters on Papyri

    ICDAR2023

    Competition on Detection and Recognition of Greek Letters on Papyri

    Character Classification: First Place
    Character Detection: Second Place

    4th COV19D Competition

    IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2024

    Domain adaptation, Explainability, Fairness in AI for Medical Image Analysis (DEF-AI-MIA) workshop

    COVID-19 Detection: First Place
    Domain Adaptation: Second Place

    Software

    Robert has developed his own business in designing software for iOS and Android and has several apps available for download in four program suites: Bible Vocab, Vocab Pro, Mesha, and Film Note. These apps have been downloaded more than 140,000 times. Bible Vocab is widely regarded as one of the premier biblical language apps available.

    Professor Robert Plummer (Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) has said: ‘Who could imagine that a Greek New Testament vocabulary app with this much power and flexibility even existed? I’m amazed at the intuitive design and ability to customize vocabulary acquisition to particular sections of text. I’m confident that this vocabulary app will help thousands of pastors and students read the Greek New Testament with greater fluency, confidence, and understanding. I enthusiastically endorse it.’

    He is currently developing other applications for learning the vocabulary from the Quran, the Peshitta, and the Van Dyck Arabic Bible.

    Bible Vocab Logo

    Students

    Joey McCollum
    PhD Student
    Read more →
    Emily Tour
    PhD Student
    Read more →
    Yuhao (Andy) Tong
    PhD Student
    Read more →

    Storytelling

    In a previous life, Rob worked as a Biblical Storytellermemorizing Bible passages and performing them theatrically. This has included performing in English, Arabic, and Eastern Arabic Sign Language. He has performed extensively in Australia, including in the Melbourne Fringe Festival and at Parliament House. He produced extended single-person shows of John’s Gospel, Luke’s Gospel and The Book of Revelation as well as many shorter ones such as: Esther, Jonah, Ruth, Paul’s Third Missionary Journey, Samuel, Pentecost and 2 Timothy. Over the years he has memorized and performed almost 12% of the Bible, including about a third of the New Testament.
    Rob performing.

    Here is a playlist of some of his storytellings in Engligh and Arabic: