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About me
Professor Geoff Faulkner is a Professorial Research Fellow and head of the Genome Plasticity and Disease group. His core research seeks to understand the role of retrotransposons, a type of “mobile DNA”, in causing genetic mosaicism in neurons. This variation may be a fundamental aspect of healthy brain function, and appears to change in neurological diseases, including Alzheimer's disease, Rett syndrome and schizophrenia.
Dr Faulkner began his research career in 2002 as an undergraduate working in Prof. David Hume’s lab at the University of Queensland (UQ). He went on to first complete a BSc with first class honours (2004) and then a computational biology PhD (2009) working with Prof. Sean Grimmond at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, UQ. He was then awarded an NHMRC C.J. Martin Overseas Biomedical Training Fellowship and with this funding established an independent laboratory at the Roslin Institute, University of Edinburgh. He relocated to Australia in 2012, was awarded an NHMRC Career Development Fellowship in 2013, an NHMRC Research Fellowship (SRFB) in 2016 and a CSL Centenary Fellowship in 2017.Over the course of his career, Dr Faulkner has published 61 peer-reviewed articles (>13,000 citations, h-index 34), the majority in top-tier journals, and received grant funding totalling $34M. He published a landmark work in Nature describing somatic retrotransposition in the human brain that was selected by the US National Institute of Mental Health as the “joint No. 1 research advance of 2011” and has more recently followed this work with two additional breakthrough articles in Cell. He is the recipient of the ASMR Queensland Premier’s Award (2009), the FEBS Anniversary Prize (2011), the Lorne Genome Millennium Science Award (2014), the Centenary Institute Lawrence Creative Prize (2014) and the Australian Academy of Science Ruth Stephens Gani Medal (2016).For information regarding student projects (Honours/Masters/PhD) please contact [email protected]
Contact details
Phone: +61 7 3443 7587
Email: [email protected]
Publications
Key publications
Schauer, S.N., Carreira, P.E., Shukla, R., Gerhardt, D.J., Gerdes, P., Sanchez-Luque, F.-J., Nicoli, P., Kindlova, M., Ghesletti, S., Santos, A.D., Faivre, J., Ewing, A.D., Richardson, S.R., Faulkner, G.J. L1 retrotransposition is a common feature of mammalian hepatocarcinogenesis. Genome Research 28 639-653 (2018)
Nguyen, T.H.M., Carreira, P.E., Sanchez-Luque, F.J., Schauer, S.N., Fagg, A.C., Richardson, S.R., Davies, C.M., Jesuadian, J.S., Kempen, M-J.H.C., Troskie, R-L., James, C., Beaven, E.A., Wallis, T.P., Coward, J.I.G., Chetty, N.P., Crandon, A.J., Venter, D.J., Armes, J.E., Perrin, L.C., Hooper, J.D., Ewing, A.D., Upton, K.R., Faulkner, G.J. L1 retrotransposon heterogeneity in ovarian tumor cell evolution. Cell Reports 23 3730-3740 (2018)
Richardson, S.R., Gerdes, P., Gerhardt, D.J., Sanchez-Luque, F.J., Bodea, G.O., Munoz-Lopez, M., Jesuadian, J.S., Kempen, M.-J.H.C., Carreira, P.E., Jeddeloh, J.A., Garcia-Perez, J.L., Kazazian, H.H., Ewing, A.D., Faulkner, G.J., Heritable L1 retrotransposition in the mouse primordial germline and early embryo. Genome Research 27 1395-1405 (2017)
Klawitter, S., Fuchs, N.V., Upton, K.R., Muñoz-Lopez, M., Shukla, R., Wang, J., Garcia-Canadas, M., Lopez-Ruiz, C., Gerhardt, D.J., Sebe, A., Grabundzija, I., Merkert, S., Gerdes, P., Pulgarin, J.A., Bock, A., Held, U., Witthuhn, A., Haase, A., Sarkadi, B., Löwer, J., Wolvetang, E.J., Martin, U., Ivics, Z., Izsvák, Z., Garcia-Perez, J.L*, Faulkner, G.J.* and Schumann, G.G.*, Reprogramming triggers endogenous L1 and Alu retrotransposition in human induced pluripotent stem cells. Nature Communications 7 10286 (2016).
Upton, K.R., Gerhardt, D.J., Jesuadian, J.S., Richardson, S.R., Sanchez-Luque, F.J., Bodea, G.O., Salvador-Palomeque, C., van der Knaap, M.S., Brennan, P.M., Vanderver, A., Faulkner, G.J., Ubiquitous L1 mosaicism in hippocampal neurons. Cell 161, 228-239 (2015).
Shukla, R., Upton, K.R., Muñoz-Lopez, M., Gerhardt, D.J., Fisher, M.E., Nguyen, T., Brennan P.M., Baillie, J.K., Collino, A., Ghisletti, S., Sinha, S., Iannelli, F., Radaelli, E., Dos Santos, A., Rapoud, D., Guettier, C., Samuel, D., Natoli, G., Carninci, P., Ciccarelli, F.D., Garcia-Perez, J.L., Faivre, J., Faulkner, G.J. Endogenous retrotransposition activates oncogenic pathways in hepatocellular carcinoma. Cell 153, 101-111 (2013)
Baillie, J.K., Barnett, M.W., Upton, K.R., Gerhardt, D.J., Richmond, T., de Sapio, F., Brennan, P., Rizzu, P., Smith, S., Fell, M., Talbot, R.T., Gustincich, S., Freeman, T.C., Mattick., J.S., Hume, D.A., Heutink, P., Carninci, P., Jeddeloh, J.A., Faulkner, G.J. Somatic retrotransposition alters the genetic landscape of the human brain. Nature 479, 534-537 (2011)
Faulkner, G.J., Kimura, Y., Daub, C.O., Wani, S., Plessy, C., Irvine, K.M., Schroder, K., Cloonan, N., Steptoe, A.L., Lassmann, T., Waki, K., Hornig, N., Arakawa, T., Takahashi, H., Kawai, J., Forrest, A.R.R., Suzuki, H., Hayashizaki, Y., Hume, D.A., Orlando, V., Grimmond, S.M., Carninci, P. The regulated retrotransposon transcriptome of mammalian cells. Nature Genetics 41, 563-71 (2009)
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