Associate Professor Emily Wong

________

A/Prof Emily Wong received her Masters and PhD from the University of Sydney in Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics. She was an EMBO postdoctoral fellow at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory–European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) at the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Cambridge, UK. There, she studied the regulatory evolution of mammalian tissues. In 2016, She returned to Australia as an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Fellow to the University of Queensland where she worked on genomic control during development.

In 2019, A/Prof Wong joined the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute. Her research seeks to tie together genetic and molecular understanding to decipher the rules controlling cell and trait diversity. She uses new cross-disciplinary approaches integrating big data with in vivo experiments. Her work leverages the power of comparative genomics to understand how traits are encoded in our genomes and how systems are disrupted in disease.

A/Prof Wong has discovered that enhancers can be deeply conserved despite a lack of sequence conservation. In 2020 this research was published in the prestigious journal Science and is critical to understanding how the human genome functions and the underlying genetic basis of disease. Read the press release here.

Awards

• 2019 Lorne Genome Millennium Award
• 2018 Genetics Society of Australasia Alan Wilton Early Career Award
• 2022 Awarded an $8 million Snow Medical Research Foundation Fellowship to investigate the dark genome
• 2023 Awarded Fenner Medal from Australian Academy of Science