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- StudentInstitute for Molecular Bioscience
- PhD studentInstitute for Molecular Bioscience
- Our research addresses an issue of critical importance targeting the understanding of the consequence of circadian disruption on health and disease
- Name: Dr Mark Howes
IMB: PhD pre-2010
Now: Co-Founder, CEO, and Fermentologist of Newstead Brewing Co.
Co-Founder, Working Title Brew Co. - Part of the answer lies in our genes
UQ Genome Innovation Hub
Director
Professor Grant Montgomery
Director, UQ Genome Innovation HubEmeritus Professor & Centre Director of Institute for Molecular BioscienceInstitute for Molecular BioscienceResearcher profile is public:0Supervisor:Body:Highlights
Professor Grant Montgomery uses genetic approaches to discover critical genes and pathways increasing risk for reproductive disorders. He applies state of the art genomic techniques to identify risk factors and understand how these genetic differences regulate gene expression and epigenetics to alter disease risk. The goal is to understand disease biology and help develop better methods for diagnosis and treatment.
A major focus is women’s health and the pathogenesis of endometriosis. Together with colleagues in Brisbane, he led a recent large international study on genetic risk factors for endometriosis which confirmed 14 regions of the genome are associated with the disease, including 5 novel regions. His research is now moving to functional studies to identify the target genes in each region and determine how changes in the regulation of these genes contribute to disease. Professor Montgomery has published the first examples of likely target genes for two regions.
He is also using genomic approaches to help understand environmental risk factors for this disease. Environmental risk factors may leave epigenetic signals on DNA that are associated with disease and he is part of an international study on global methylation analysis in endometriosis.
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Deputy Director
Dr Carol Wicking
Honorary Associate ProfessorInstitute for Molecular BioscienceResearcher profile is public:0Supervisor:Professor Naomi Wray
Director, Centre for Population and Disease GenomicsJoint AppointmentQueensland Brain InstituteProfessorial Research FellowInstitute for Molecular BioscienceResearcher profile is public:1Supervisor:Researcher biography:Naomi Wray is the Michael Davys Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford. She holds an appointment at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB) within the University of Queensland. She joined UQ Queensland Brain Institute in 2011 moving to the IMB in 2015. She was Head of the Centre for Population & Disease Genomics within IMB 2018-2023. Her Oxford appointment started in 2023.
Her research focuses on development and application of quantitative genetics and genomics methodologies across complex diseases, disorders and traits, but particularly psychiatric-related traits.
She is a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Leadership Fellow, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Science. In 2020 she was awarded the NHMRC Elizabeth Blackburn Award for Leadership in Basic Science and the 2021 International Society of Psychiatric Genetics Ming Tsuang Lifetime Achievement Award. She is a Clarivate Highly Cited researcher.
She was Director of the Program in Complex Trait Genomics (PCTG) funded as an NHMRC Program Grant 2017-2022. She plays a key role in the International Psychiatric Genomics Consortium and established the sporadic ALS Australia systems genomics consortium (SALSA) funded by the MND Research Australia IceBucket Challenge and FightMND. She is a co-investigator on the Australian Genetics of Depression Study (AGDS) and is currently launching the AGDS-Cello project focussed on establishing a cell line resource from participants with a detailed history of anti-depressant use and response measures. She is part of an NHMRC Synergy (2023-2027) "Rhythms and blues: Personalising care for body clock dysfunction in mood disorders".
She is secretary of the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics, and is on the editorial advisory boards of JAMA Psychiatry, Neuron, Royal Society Open and Research Directions: Depression.
Chief Investigators
Dr Lachlan Coin
Honorary Associate ProfessorInstitute for Molecular BioscienceResearcher profile is public:0Supervisor:Body:Highlights
Professor Lachlan Coin is a mathematician with a research focus on developing genomics and bioinformatics tools in infectious disease and cancer. He was originally drawn by the rigour and intellectual challenge of pure mathematics but now uses his maths background as a toolkit for solving complex problems in analysing high throughput biological data.
Professor Coin is best known for using approaches borrowed from machine learning, statistics and probability theory to interrogate genomic data.
In particular, Professor Coin has focussed on using these approaches to uncover genomic deletions and amplifications and has identified changes that are associated with increased risk of obesity and diabetes.
He has also developed approaches for finding minimal biomarker signatures associated with disease, and has applied these approaches to find biomarkers that distinguish bacterial from viral infection, and for the presence of active tuberculosis infection. He is also applying his methodology to develop a diagnostic tool for cancer from cell free DNA
Ultimately, Professor Coin is motivated by making discoveries that are routinely used in clinical practice and to inform public policy to improve health outcomes.
Professor Coin holds an Honorary Professor appointment with UQ, and is a Professor at the Doherty Institute at the University of Melbourne.
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Professor Peter Visscher
Researcher profile is public:1Supervisor:Researcher biography:Visscher joined the University of Queensland in 2011, where he is Professor of Quantitative Genetics. He is a Laureate Fellow of the Australian Research Council. Visscher was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 2010, a Fellow of the Royal Society (London) in 2018 and a Foreign Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018.
Visscher's research is about genetic variation for complex traits (including quantitative traits and disease) in populations, with the broad aim to understand and quantify the causes and consequences of human trait variation.
Prof Peter Visscher, Prof Naomi Wray and Prof Jian Yang together comprise the Executive Team of the Program in Complex Trait Genomics (PCTG). PCTG comprises a critical mass of more than 30 post-doctoral researchers plus research assistants and students, all supported by external grant funding. Their skills lie in the ability to develop and apply statistical methods within the framework of quantitative, population and statistical genetics and to use theory to understand and predict results from data analyses. They play leading roles in the international research consortia. The focus of current research activities is in the detection and fine-mapping of loci underlying complex traits (including common disease), based upon theoretical studies and applications of methods to large datasets, in population genetics studies using theoretical approaches and high-density genetic marker data, and in systems genomics studies.
Professor Brandon Wainwright
Group Leader, Genomics of Development and Disease DivisionAffiliate Professor of Institute for Molecular BioscienceInstitute for Molecular BioscienceResearcher profile is public:1Supervisor:Researcher biography:Professor Brandon Wainwright AM is Co-Director of the Children's Brain Cancer Centre and leads a laboratory within the UQ Diamantina Institute focused on understanding the genetic pathways behind medulloblastoma, a type of brain tumour that occurs predominantly in children. He is Chair of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) Australia, Chair of the Advisory Board of the Robinson Research Institute and Chair of the Board of the South Australian Immunogenomics Cancer Institute (SAIGENCI), and serves on the boards the Australian Genome Research Facility as well as several national and international scientific review committees, including the MRFF Brain Tumour Roadmap Committee.
Professor Wainwright completed his undergraduate and postgraduate studies at The University of Adelaide, after which he secured a postdoctoral fellowship with St Mary's Hospital at Imperial College London. During his six years at Imperial he worked on the first human genome project and also became a Medical Research Council Senior Research Fellow. He returned to Australia in 1990 to join UQ's Centre for Molecular and Cellular Biology (now IMB) and led the Institute for Molecular Biology until 2019.
Professor Wainwright is a geneticist, renowned for discovering the genetic pathway that causes most human cancer. He is skilled in molecular genetics, where he is using genetic approaches to dig through DNA and find the genes that cause disease. He commenced using these skills to locate the cystic fibrosis gene, but it was when isolating a gene responsible for a rare form of brain cancer called Medulloblastoma, that he discovered the role of the 'Hedgehog Pathway' in common human cancer.
Body:Highlights
Professor Brandon Wainwright AM is a geneticist, renowned for discovering the genetic pathway that causes most human cancer. He is skilled in molecular genetics, where he is using genetic approaches to dig through DNA and find the genes that cause disease.
He commenced using these skills to locate the cystic fibrosis gene, but it was when isolating a gene responsible for a rare form of brain cancer called Medulloblastoma, that he discovered the ‘Hedgehog Pathway.'
He discovered not only the first brain cancer-causing gene but also a pathway involved in most cancers of all types.
The primary focus of his current research is brain cancer because it is the most common cause of death in children and the most common cause of cancer-related death in people under 40. He is also applying his expertise to common cancer generally (particularly skin cancer), and neurodegenerative disease.
Success for Professor Wainwright will be seeing a child cured of brain cancer that would otherwise have died. And he is confident that he can help make it happen.
He is formerly Director of UQ's Institute for Molecular Bioscience, where he proudly leads a team of talented discovery scientists translating their findings to life-changing applications.
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Emeritus Professor Peter Koopman
Emeritus ProfessorInstitute for Molecular BioscienceResearcher profile is public:0Supervisor:Body:Highlights
Professor Koopman earned his PhD from the University of Melbourne in 1986 for research on stem cell differentiation. He moved to London soon afterwards for a postdoctoral appointment in the Mammalian Development Unit at the Medical Research Council, where he conducted medical analyses of mouse embryo development. During a second postdoc, with the National Institute for Medical Research, he was part of the team who isolated the mouse Y-chromosome gene (now known as SRY) and demonstrated its role in sex determination by reversing the sex of XX-chromosome mice. The discovery is widely regarded as one of the major achievements in molecular genetics of the 20th century.
In 1992 he took a role at The University of Queensland, and now heads a research team whose work focuses on genes that regulate embryonic development, with special emphasis on the molecular genetics of sex development, fertility, gonadal cancers and intersex conditions. He’s also extensively involved in research training, having co-founded the Australian Developmental Biology Workshop in 2001. The workshop is a training-ground for the next generation of developmental biologists in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region.
Between 2007 and 2012 he was a Federation Fellow of the ARC, and in 2008 was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science.
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Emeritus Professor Mark Ragan
Emeritus ProfessorInstitute for Molecular BioscienceResearcher profile is public:0Supervisor:Body:Highlights
Mark Ragan is an Emeritus Professor at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, The University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.
He was founding Head of IMB's former Division of Genomics & Computational Biology (2000-2014), founding Director of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence in Bioinformatics (2003-2015), and co-founder of QFAB Bioinformatics.
Mark is a graduate of the University of Chicago (Biochemistry) and Dalhousie University (Biology). His 200+ peer-reviewed research publications in biochemistry, molecular biology, evolutionary biology, genomics, algorithmics, bioinformatics and computational biology have attracted more than 13500 citations.
Core technologies in his research group (integration of large bioscience data, scalable algorithms on trees and networks, bioinformatic workflows, high-performance and data-centric computing) were applied to problems of genome sequencing and de novo assembly, comparative evolutionary genomics, and inference of biomolecular networks particularly in the coral reef symbiont Symbiodinium, and in targeting therapies against DNA damage repair networks in familial breast cancer.
Mark was also involved in national and international infrastructure initiatives in genomics, computing, data and bioinformatics services.
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The Edge: Genetics
People have known for thousands of years that parents pass traits to their children, but it is only relatively recently that our technology has caught up to our curiosity, enabling us to delve into the mystery of how this inheritance occurs, and the implications for predicting, preventing and treating disease.
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