Speakers
Theme one, day 1
Brave new world? What is Darwin’s legacy in the era of modern medicine and technology-based societies?
Speaker: Professor John Mattick, The University of Queensland, Australia: A new understanding of the human genomeJohn Mattick AO FAA FRCPA
John Mattick is currently the Professor of Molecular Biology and Australian Research Council Federation Fellow at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.
Professor Mattick undertook his undergraduate training at the University of Sydney and his PhD at Monash University. He has subsequently worked at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, the CSIRO Division of Molecular Biology in Sydney, and the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Cologne, Strasbourg and Queensland, where he has been based since 1988. He was the Foundation Director of the Australian Genome Research Facility and the Institute for Molecular Bioscience. His research focuses on the hidden layer of regulatory RNA in human evolution, development and cognition, and suggests that the nature of our genetic programming has been fundamentally misunderstood.
Professor Mattick has been awarded the Pharmacia-LKB Biotechnology Medal by the Australian Biochemical Society (1989), an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia (2002), the Centenary Medal of the Australian Government (2003), the CSIRO Eureka Prize for Leadership in Science (2006), the inaugural Gutenberg Professorship of the University of Strasbourg (2008), and the Julian Wells Medal of the Lorne Genome Society (2009). He was elected an Associate Member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (2007) and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science (2008). He was appointed an Officer in the Order of Australia in 2001.
