Rate My Professor Geoff Faulkner

Professor Geoff Faulkner is a Professorial Research Fellow and Group Leader at the Queensland Brain Institute, University of Queensland, with a joint appointment at Mater Research Institute-UQ. He is a Professor in Neuroscience and an NHMRC Leadership Fellow. Faulkner obtained his Bachelor of Science (Advanced Honours) and Doctor of Philosophy in computational biology from the University of Queensland in 2009. Following his PhD, he established his laboratory at the University of Edinburgh in 2009, funded by an NHMRC CJ Martin Overseas Biomedical Fellowship, before relocating to the University of Queensland in 2012 and achieving promotion to full Professor in 2016.

Faulkner's research investigates retrotransposons, particularly LINE-1 elements, and their contributions to somatic genome mosaicism, neural development, brain function, and diseases including Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia, Rett syndrome, and cancers such as ovarian and hepatocellular carcinoma. Seminal findings from his laboratory include ubiquitous L1 retrotransposition in human hippocampal neurons (Cell, 2015), heritable L1 retrotransposition in the mouse primordial germline and early embryo (Genome Research, 2017), and LINE-1 retrotransposons' role in mouse parvalbumin interneuron development (Nature Neuroscience, 2024). Additional key publications encompass 'Locus-resolution analysis of L1 regulation and retrotransposition potential in mouse embryonic development' (Genome Research, 2023), 'Retrotransposon instability dominates the acquired mutation landscape of mouse induced pluripotent stem cells' (Nature Communications, 2022), 'Nanopore sequencing enables comprehensive transposable element epigenomic profiling' (Molecular Cell, 2020), and 'No evidence of human genome integration of SARS-CoV-2 found by long-read DNA sequencing' (Cell Reports, 2021). His achievements include the 2017 CSL Centenary Fellowship valued at AUD 1.25 million for research on neuronal L1 retrotransposition in learning and neurodegeneration, the 2016 Australian Academy of Science Ruth Stephens Gani Medal, multiple NHMRC Investigator Grants (e.g., 2025-2029 on mobile DNA in the human brain), ARC Discovery Projects, and an NIH grant on somatic mutations in Alzheimer's disease brain. Faulkner's extensive funding supports projects on genome plasticity in development and disease, and he has supervised numerous PhD completions in retrotransposon biology.