Rowena Lavery

Doctor

Calculated based on number of publications stored in Pure and citations from Scopus
20022018

Research activity per year

Personal profile

Research Biography

I worked as a researcher in the field of reproductive biology since 2000. Following my PhD research into the molecular genetic basis for Male Infertility at the National Diagnostics Centre in the National University of Ireland Galway, I took up postdoctoral research positions at the Centre for Stem Cell Research Siena University Hospital in Italy, INSERM U636 National Institute of Health and Medical Research in France, and the Hudson Institute at Monash Medical Centre Melbourne, Australia.

This work resulted in 1st author publications in Nucleic Acids Research, Developmental Biology and PLOS Genetics. Over the following decade my investigations into key testicular and ovarian genes; Sox9 and Rspo1, carried out at French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) and Hudson Institute at Monash Medical Centre lead to two significant discoveries:

-Female sex differentiation is not the default pathway but rather actively induced by Rspo1 (Lavery et al., 2012 PLOS Genetics). This discovery overturned the dogma that female differentiation is a default pathway.

-Sox9 not only regulates transcription of its target genes but also influences their RNA splicing (Lavery et al., 2017 Nucleic Acid Research). Using RNAseq transcriptomics I generated coding and putative long non coding targets of Sox9. I discovered that absence of Sox9 affected the splicing of genes important for sex determination and differentiation.

Subsequently, I accepted education focused roles and since 2016 I have been involved with the teaching, learning design, delivery and evaluation of 18 Topics across 7 Higher Education & Vocational Education Programs in the Biotechnology / Pathology / Applied Science streams at Holmesglen Institute and RMIT University in Victoria, as well as here in Flinders University, South Australia.

 

Professional Memberships

Member of Australian Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (SBMB) – Current

Member of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) - Current

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