Rate My Professor James Davies

Professor James Davies is Professor of Genomics at the University of Oxford and an honorary consultant haematologist with the allogeneic transplant service in Oxford. He is a clinician scientist based at the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine in the Radcliffe Department of Medicine. His work centres on haemopoietic stem cell transplantation, genome editing, genomics and bioinformatics.

Professor Davies develops next-generation sequencing-based methods to study genome function, with a focus on defining the physical structure of DNA in the nucleus and understanding how chromatin folding influences gene expression. His research leverages these insights to create novel genome editing strategies for blood and bone marrow-derived cells to treat human disease, including methods to assess off-target effects of editing. He holds a DPhil and MRCP. Key publications include Mapping chromatin structure at base-pair resolution unveils a unified model of cis-regulatory element interactions (Cell, 2025), Direct correction of haemoglobin E β-thalassaemia using base editors (Nature Communications, 2023), Analysis of sub-kilobase chromatin topology reveals nano-scale regulatory interactions with variable dependence on cohesin and CTCF (Nature Communications, 2022), Identification of LZTFL1 as a candidate effector gene at a COVID-19 risk locus (Nature Genetics, 2021), and Defining genome architecture at base-pair resolution (Nature, 2021). In 2025 he was awarded a professorship at the University of Oxford for his contributions to genome research.