Challenging the Dogma: A New View of the Genomic Programming of Complex Organisms

Speaker(s):
Dr. John S. Mattick is the Director of The Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, Australia.After completing his undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the University of Sydney and Monash University in 1977, he undertook postdoctoral training at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. In 1982 he returned to Australia to work at the CSIRO Division of Molecular Biology in Sydney, and in 1988 moved to the University of Queensland in Brisbane, where he was the Foundation Professor of Molecular Biology, and Foundation Director, ARC Federation Fellow and then NHMRC Australia Fellow at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience.
Professor Mattick has served on councils, advisory boards and committees of a number of research and funding organisations, including Genome Canada, the Wellcome Trust, the Human Frontier Science Program, the National Health & Medical Research Council, and the Human Genome Organisation.
Over the past 20 years he has pioneered a new view of the genetic programming of humans and other complex organisms, by showing that the majority of the genome, previously considered ‘junk’, actually specifies a dynamic network of regulatory RNAs that guide differentiation and development. He has published over 250 research articles and his work has received coverage in Nature, Science, Scientific American, New Scientist and the New York Times, among others.