Professor Jenny GravesJenny Graves is an evolutionary geneticist who works on Australian animals, including kangaroos and platypus, devils (Tasmanian) and dragons (lizards). Her group uses their distant relationship to humans to discover how genes and chromosomes and regulatory systems evolved, and how they work in all animals including us. Her laboratory uses this unique perspective to explore the origin, function and fate of human sex genes and chromosomes, (in)famously predicting that the Y chromosome will disappear.
Jenny graduated (BSc, MSc) from the University of Adelaide, then a Fulbright Travel grant took her to the University of California at Berkeley for a PhD in Molecular Biology. She lectured at La Trobe for many years, then headed a department at ANU before returning to La Trobe as Distinguished Professor; she is also Professor Emeritus at ANU, Thinker-in-Residence at the University of Canberra and Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. She has produced three books and more than 400 research articles.
Jenny has received many honours and awards, including the Academy’s Macfarlane Burnet medal in 2006 and an AO in 2010. She is 2006 L’Oreal-UNESCO Laureate for Women in Science. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, and as the secretary for Education and Public Affairs oversees the Academy's school science education projects.
Dr Ken OngKen Ong leads the Child Growth and Development programme at the MRC Epidemiology Unit, University of Cambridge, UK. His research has identified trajectories of childhood growth, weight gain and pubertal timing as determinants of obesity and related disease, and aims to understand the genetic, epigenetic and endocrine mechanisms that underlie these links. He works closely with the Unit’s other research areas in the aetiology of obesity and type 2 diabetes, and the development and testing of interventions to prevent childhood obesity. As well as his research work, Ken is a consultant paediatric endocrinologist and the clinical lead for childhood obesity at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Trust. He obtained his PhD following research at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, where he studied gene-environment interactions in fetal and early childhood growth in large birth cohort studies.
Elks CE*, Perry JR*, Sulem P*, …… Murabito JM*^, Ong KK*^, Murray A*^. Thirty new loci for age at menarche identified by a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies. Nature Genetics. 2010; 42: 1077-85. PMID: 21102462 *joint contributions and ^corresponding authors
Lakshman R, Elks CE, Ong KK. Childhood obesity. Circulation. 2012;126(14): 1770-9. PMID:23027812
Ong KK, Hardy R, Shah I, Kuh D. Childhood stunting and mortality between 36-64 years: the British 1946 Birth Cohort Study. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2013; 98: 2070-7. PMID: 23533234
Professor George Werther
Professor George Werther is Director of the Centre for Hormone Research at the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute at the Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH) in Melbourne, where he is also Director of Endocrinology. At RCH, he oversees a busy clinical practice in childhood diabetes and endocrine disorders. He has been involved in clinical and basic research on growth and development for some 30 years, focussing on growth hormone (GH) and the insulin-like growth factor (IGF) system and mechanisms of regulation of the linear growth in both short and tall stature. His recent work examines roles of the IGF system in abnormal growth and cancer, as well as in metabolism and obesity. He was a founding Director of Antisense Therapeutics Limited, a publicly listed biotech company with a strong focus on therapeutic regulation of the GH/IGF system, whose original lead drug came from research in his laboratory. Outside his medical/scientific pursuits, George is active in the theatrical world, having played a variety of characters, both real (Sigmund Freud, CS Lewis, Ludwig Van Beethoven), and imaginary.
Dr Phil Zeitler, USA
Dr. Zeitler is Professor of Pediatrics and Head of the Section of Pediatric Endocrinology at the University of Colorado. He is also Medical Director of the Children’s Hospital Colorado Clinical Translational Research Center of the Colorado Clinical Translational Science Institute, Chair of the Department of Endocrinology at Children’s Hospital Colorado, and director of the Type 2 diabetes and Metabolic Syndrome Programs.
Dr. Zeitler’s research group is interested in understanding the physiologic and psychological aspects of obesity and insulin resistance disorders in adolescents, as well as in type 1 and type 2 diabetes. Dr. Zeitler is Chair of TODAY, an NIH-funded, multi-center trial examining treatment options for adolescents with type 2 diabetes, as well as the TODAY Genetics Study. He is also Co-investigator in RISE, an NIH consortium exploring ways to improve beta cell function in adolescents with prediabetes or recent onset type 2 diabetes.
