Rate My Professor Lyndal Henden

Dr. Lyndal Henden serves as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer in the Advanced Gene Discovery Team within the Macquarie University Motor Neuron Disease Research Centre at Macquarie Medical School. Her research is dedicated to revealing the genetic causes of Motor Neuron Disease (MND) and Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD). Leveraging her proficiency in cryptic relatedness analysis, she analyzes large international MND/FTD cohorts to identify candidate disease loci for mutation screening. She specializes in detecting challenging genetic alterations, such as short tandem repeat expansions and somatic mutations detectable in brain tissue but absent in blood. These efforts seek to refine gene screening strategies, illuminate disease biology, and support therapeutic target identification and genetic counseling for affected individuals and families. Henden completed her BSc (Honours I) in Mathematics and Statistics at Massey University in 2012 and her PhD at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in 2017. During her PhD and subsequent postdoctoral position at WEHI until March 2018, she developed statistical methods to detect cryptic relatedness in human and microbial genomes. These innovations have identified unknown familial relationships and disease susceptibility loci in autism, epilepsy, intellectual disability, and Plasmodium falciparum populations exhibiting antimalarial drug resistance.

At Macquarie University, Henden has secured multiple grants as Chief Investigator, including 'When sporadic disease is not sporadic - exploiting cryptic relatedness to unravel MND genetics' (2022-2026), 'MND 24: Investigating the molecular origin of a “C9orf72-like” patient subgroup of sporadic ALS' (2025), and 'FightMND IMPACT: Delving deep into the ALS genome to reveal somatic mosaicism' (2024-2026). Her notable publications encompass 'Short tandem repeat expansions in sporadic amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and frontotemporal dementia' (2023), 'Identity by descent analysis identifies founder events and links SOD1 familial and sporadic ALS cases' (2020), 'Genetic characterisation of ATXN2 in Australian amyotrophic lateral sclerosis' (2026), 'Multi-region brain transcriptomic analysis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis reveals widespread RNA alterations and substantial cerebellum involvement' (2025), and 'Hippocampal aggregation signatures of pathogenic UBQLN2 in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and frontotemporal dementia' (2024). She previously held an Adjunct Fellowship at the University of Queensland (2022-2024) and is scheduled as a Visiting Scholar at University Medical Center Utrecht (February-March 2025). Additionally, she contributes to teaching Clinical Bioinformatics and Biostatistics.