Director's Seminar: Dr Irene Gallego Romero | St Vincent's Institute of Medical Research

Abstract Human genetics has consistently failed to provide a comprehensive representation of human genetic and environmental diversity. These biases and deficits threaten the successful adoption of precision medicine, and portend worsening healthcare inequalities worldwide. Redressing these gaps requires significant investment in resource generation and regional capacity building. I will present published and unpublished work using multiple orthogonal approaches from pharmacogenetic variant interpretation using in vitro and in silico approaches to the generation and analysis of a large single cell RNA-seq datasets from whole blood in populations in Indonesia. These datasets provide complementary insights into the interplay between genetic, lifestyle and environmental forces in the broader Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) region, a place of long-standing importance in human evolutionary history, and the birth place of over 2% of Australia's population.

Bio: Associate Professor Irene Gallego Romero studies the contributions of gene regulation to human diversity and evolution, and its implications for personalised medicine. She is currently a principal research fellow at St Vincent's Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia, where she leads the Human Evolutionary Genomics group, and was previously Senior Lecturer in Systems Genomics at the University of Melbourne, and Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. As a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago she established non-human primate iPSC lines as model systems for comparative genomics and studies of human evolution. Since moving to Australia in 2017 her research has focused on underserved populations from Island Southeast Asia, with a particular focus on the peopling of the Indonesian archipelago and the interactions between Homo sapiens and other, now extinct, regional hominins.