Associate Professor Graham Neely

I currently run the John and Anne Chong lab for functional genomics at the Charles Perkins Centre, and I work within SOLES in the Faculty of Science, University of Sydney. My own research program involves using genomic and functional genomics approaches to identify disease genes and pathways, and define the underlying molecular etiologic of major human diseases.

Overall I have published multiple high-profile papers (including 6x Cell with 2 covers, 1 Science, 1 Nature Genetics, 2x Cell metabolism, 5x Nature Comm, Science Advances, Genome Biology, PLoS Biology, 3x Cell Reports, Pain, etc) with >7300 career citations and >3800 citations in the last 5 years. My primary impact has been providing new knowledge of fundamental processes and revealing new biology. My research program informs all biomedical fields; in some instances, this knowledge is directly translatable.

A primary outcome of my research program has been developing a functional genomic pipeline to establish causality in population genomics data (e.g. Cell 2010a, Cell 2010b, PLoS Genetics 2012, Nat Comm 2019, Cell 2020 etc). This work was at the time a paradigm shift, and now our work (and others) is part of a standard approach used across all biomedical fields. My functional annotation of the genome provided the first in vivo phenotypic data for 50% of the genome with a focus on the cardiovascular and nervous systems. Before this, there was no knowledge of the physiological function for >50% of the genome. Now biologists from all fields can search any gene and find if there are tissue-specific phenotypes, accelerating basic research globally, and this data is integrated with an open database that is accessed by ~42000 unique monthly users.

In the last 10 years I have been first/last/corresponding author on ~50% of my publications. Overall, our work has had a significant knowledge impact beyond the research community, as our research has attracted extensive media coverage globally (e.g. Nature, Science, CNN, BBC, Guardian, CBS, ABC, Scientific American, The Sun, etc) reaching a total estimated audience of >50 million people. Specialties: CRISPR gene editing, CRISPR screening, Neuroscience, Immunology, Systems Biology, Bioinformatics, molecular Biology, Drug discovery.