PAG Asia 2014

May 19 - 21, 2014

Plenary Lecture: Jenny Graves - "Sex and Genomics"

Jenny 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.