About
Joseph Powell is the Director of Cellular Science, at the Garvan Institute for Medical Research, and Director of the University of New South Wales Cellular Genomics Futures Institute. 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 PhD from The Roslin Institute, University of Edinburgh, in 2010. Following his PhD he joined Prof Peter Visscher’s (FAA) group at the University of Queensland. 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).
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.