Professor Joseph Powell

Professor Joseph Powell obtained his PhD in statistical genetics at the University of Edinburgh (2010), and postdoctoral training at the University of Queensland. He established an independent research group at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience in 2016, and in 2018 was recruited as the inaugural Director of the Garvan-Weizmann Centre for Cellular Genomics. Joseph has significantly contributed to understanding the nature and architecture of genetic control of regulatory variation and its role in disease susceptibility. His research showcases how genetic differences between people functionally act at the level of individual cells in various diseases and how this information can be transitioned into clinical practice to improve patient outcomes (his perspectives are outlined in papers in Nature Review Genetics (Lin et al. 2023; Cuomo et al. 2023) and Nature Genetics (Farbehi, Neavin et al. 2024). His research on how genetic effects impact disease at the level of individual cells has translated into funded clinical trials and active development of early-stage mRNA therapies. The basic research from this laboratory has been published in a series of papers in Science, Genome Biology, Nature Genetics, Cell Stem Cell, and Nature Communications. His team have developed numerous highly used new methods and data assets, accessed an average of 20,000 times per month.