Joseph E Powell

Joseph Powell is the Director of Cellular Science, and a Senior Principal Research Fellow at the Garvan Institute for Medical Research, and Deputy Director of the University of New South Wales Cellular Genomics Futures Institute. He currently holds a NHMRC Leadership Investigator Grant (2020-2024); was awarded an NHMRC Research Excellence Award (2015), the prestigious 2016 Commonwealth Health Minister’s Medal for Excellence in Medical Research, and the Ruth Stephen’s Gani Medal from the Australian Academy of Science. His research is focused on understanding the functional mechanisms by which genetic variants contribute to disease susceptibility at a cellular level, and ultimately achieve therapeutic and diagnostic outcomes. Prof Powell obtained his Ph.D. from The Roslin Institute, University of Edinburgh, in 2010. Following his Ph.D. he accepted a position in Prof Peter Visscher’s (FAA) group and in January 2014, promoted to Team Leader in Centre for Statistical Genomics, at the University of Queensland (UQ). During this time, he was instrumental in forming and leading a large international consortium to study the genetic control of gene expression, the Consortium for the Architecture of Gene Expression (CAGE), funded through an NHMRC grant (1046880). In 2015, he was recruited as an independent group leader by the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, where he pioneered scRNA-Seq; building a comprehensive team consisting of robust molecular wet-lab, cutting edge technology, end-to-end bioinformatics pipelines for multiple single cell systems, and new R-packages for analysis of large-scale single cell RNA data cohorts. He is the founding director of SeqBio, a company developing single cell diagnostic methods for lung diseases. Prof. Powell has made significant contributions to understanding the nature and architecture of genetic control of regulatory variation and its role in disease susceptibility. Of his 112 publications authored to date, 62 have been published in 2016 or later. He is (co)first or senior author on 50% of his papers, with all appearing in high-quality journals including Science, Nature (x4), Nature Genetics (x9), Nature Communications (x4), Nature Reviews Genetics (x1), Genome Research (x4), Genome Biology (x4) and American Journal of Human Genetics (x2), Cell Stem Cell (x1). His publication rate is increasing each year, with 48 papers cited more than 48 times, and collectively greater than 19,500 times in the past five years, with greater than 6,000 cites in 2021 alone. Five of his papers are also listed by Thomas Reuters as a top 0.1% most highly cited in their academic field.