Emma Whitelaw

Professor Emma Whitelaw is a molecular biologist and geneticist working at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research, and is currently Head of the Division of Genetics and Population Health. After completing her undergraduate degree at the Australian National University, she obtained a D.Phil at the University of Oxford and remained working in London and Oxford for the next fifteen years, moving back to Australia in 1991. She took up a Senior Lectureship at the University of Sydney and carried out both teaching and research. Her research has focused on eukaryotic transcription using the mouse as a model organism. Her most notable achievements are in the area of epigenetics, in particular, her studies on the transgenerational inheritance of epigenetic marks have stimulated a great deal of interest from the wider scientific community. More recently she has extended her studies to include the interaction between the environment and the epigenome. Professor Whitelaw has championed the non-genetic or "epigenetic" contribution to phenotype in development and disease. Her work has challenged the way we think about inheritance and her landmark paper, published in Nature Genetics in 1999 was reviewed in New Scientist, Nature Genetics, Science, Trends in Genetics, the Australian, the Independent, the Bulletin and many other media outlets. Her subsequent work, including a highly productive ENU screen in mice to detect modifiers of epigenetic processes, has also led to a series of high impact papers. She received the Julian Wells Medal in 2008 for outstanding contributions to genetics, and in 2008 was awarded an NHMRC Australia Fellowship, the most prestigious fellowship in medical research in Australia.