Rory Johnson, PhD is Associate Professor, University College Dublin (UCD), School of Biology and Environmental Science. Dr. Johnson received his PhD from the University of Leeds. He conducted his post-doctoral research at the Genomic Institute of Singapore, where he applied next-generation sequencing methods to mapping gene regulatory networks in embryonic stem cells. He completed a fellowship in Roderic Guigo’s lab at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, where he helped create maps of lncRNA genes with the GENCODE consortium. As a Junior Group Leader with the Swiss National Centre for Competence in Research (NCCR) in RNA & Disease, Dr. Johnson established the laboratory for Genomics of Long noncoding RNAs in Disease (GOLD Lab). Dr. Johnson was appointed the NCCR’s Co-Delegate for Knowledge and Technology Transfer, responsible for securing funding for the annual Bench2Biz workshop and fostering industry-academic partnerships with Swiss RNA laboratories. GOLD Lab participated in the International Cancer Genome Consortium’s “PanCancer Analysis of Whole Genomes” (PCAWG) project, culminating in a landmark map of cancer driver mutations in the human genome.
In December 2019 GOLD Lab relocated to UCD, where Dr. Johnson and his team continue the quest to understand the noncoding genome in cancer.