Public Lecture

Preparing for the age of genomic medicine

Professor Daniel MacArthur, Centre for Population Genomics

Date Tuesday 3 December 2024
Time Light refreshments from 5.00pm
6.00-7.15pm AEDT
3.00-4.15pm AWST
5.00-6.15pm AEST
5.30-6.45pm ACDT
Venue Ian Potter Auditorium (G52), Kenneth Myer Building (building 144, Royal Parade)
The University of Melbourne, Parkville
Cost Free and open to the public (Registration required)
Virtual attendance Zoom link sent to registrants 24 hours prior to the lecture

Join us for an engaging public lecture by Professor Daniel MacArthur, a leader in the field of genomic medicine, as part of the AMSI BioInfoSummer 2024 program. Suitable for a general audience, this talk is accessible to Year 10 students and above. Light refreshments will be served from 5pm.

Whether you’re a researcher, student, or simply interested in the latest scientific advancements, this hybrid event is not to be missed!

We are currently living through an unprecedented transformation of medicine, driven by rapid technological change across multiple fields. Three fields have been particularly impactful:

  1. genomics, which allows us to understand the human at unprecedented resolution;
  2. data science, which uses tools including AI to make sense of the vast amounts of data emerging from genomics and other measurements, and to make predictions about current and future disease risk; and
  3. therapeutics, which allows us to make precise molecular changes to cure or prevent disease.

The intersection of these three fields, genomic medicine, has already profoundly changed the diagnosis of genetic diseases and the treatment of cancer, and over the next decade will reshape many aspects of healthcare.

Professor Daniel MacArthur will give an accessible summary of what the new field of genomic medicine will mean for the future of health, and what Australia needs to do to ensure that all of our citizens can benefit from these powerful new technologies.

WATCH THE TALK RECORDING

Professor Daniel MacArthur

Director, Centre for Population Genomics
A joint initiative of Garvan Institute of Medical Research and Murdoch Children’s Research Institute

Professor Daniel MacArthur is the Director of the Centre for Population Genomics, established to solve the critical scientific, regulatory, and technical problems currently limiting the development of genomic medicine in Australia, and execute large-scale projects that will establish Australia’s leadership in this field.

Daniel previously served as Co-Director of the Medical and Population Genetics Program at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and headed up a team jointly based at the Broad Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Harvard Medical School. He co-directed the Broad Institute’s Centre for Mendelian Genomics, which has sequenced and analysed genomic data from over 10,000 individuals from rare disease families and contributed to the discovery of more than 100 new rare disease genes.

He also led the development of the Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD), the largest and most widely-used data set of human exome and genome sequence data, which has collated data from over 140,000 sequenced individuals.