Prof Geoffrey Faulkner

Professor Geoff Faulkner is a Professorial Research Fellow, jointly appointed at Mater Research and the Queensland Brain Institute (QBI). He leads the Genome Plasticity and Disease research group at Mater with a team of 12 researchers. Prof Faulkner describes himself as a computational and molecular biologist with research interests in mobile DNA, cancer and neuroscience.

Prof Faulkner has authored more than 110 scientific publications and has been successful in obtaining scientific funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Australian Research Council (ARC), Cancer Australia, and many other organisations as lead investigator.
Prof Faulkner and his lab’s core research are focused on the role of L1 retrotransposons, a type of “mobile DNA”, in common diseases associated with ageing, including cancer and neurodegeneration. Prof Faulkner’s most important work to date has shown that L1 elements are active in the developing and adult brain. L1 is hyperactive in Parkinson’s disease (PD) and may drive the hallmark loss of dopaminergic neurons that causes motor symptoms in PD.

Prof Faulkner's lab also works extensively on L1 in cancer, with a particular emphasis on long-read DNA sequencing and lung cancer, where L1 activity is the highest of any cancer type. As L1 is not active in normal lung cells, Prof Faulkner's team is pursuing ways to use L1 as a cancer biomarker and as a new approach to make lung cancers more vulnerable to therapies.

Prof Faulkner’s work has been recognised by numerous awards, including an Australian Society for Medical Research (ASMR) Queensland Premier’s Award, the Lorne Genome Millennium Science Award, the Centenary Institute Lawrence Creative Prize, the Australian Academy of Science Ruth Stephens Gani Medal, ongoing NHMRC fellowship support since 2009, and a CSL (Commonwealth Serum Laboratories) Centenary Fellowship in 2017. Prof Faulkner is heavily involved in national and international peer review and has served on the Editorial Boards of two international journals, Genome Biology and Mobile DNA.

‘The rapid development of genomic technologies in recent years has changed how we study biology. My work is concentrated on “frontier” challenges in medical research, for example sequencing the genomes of single cells, identifying new explanations for why some cells die and some don’t in the ageing brain, and developing new tools to detect and treat cancers where prognosis is typically poor.’