Rate My Professor Seth Cheetham

Associate Professor Seth Cheetham is an ARC Future Fellow and Group Leader at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology at the University of Queensland. He serves as Director of the National Biologics Facility, Australia's leading bio-manufacturing hub, and Deputy Director of the BASE mRNA Facility. A molecular biologist and geneticist, Cheetham focuses on biotherapeutics, mRNA technologies, synthetic biology, RNA medicines, epigenetics, and bio-manufacturing. His Cheetham Group develops next-generation RNA vaccines and therapeutics using approaches such as modified nucleotides, RNA structural elements, high-throughput screening, circularisation, and transcriptomics to treat intractable diseases including cancer through personalised mRNA vaccines and onco-immunology.

Cheetham holds a Bachelor of Science with Honours from the University of Queensland and a PhD from the University of Cambridge, funded by the Herchel Smith Research Studentship. His career features an NHMRC Early Career Fellowship, eleven years of continuous NHMRC and ARC fellowships, and over $85 million in competitive funding attracted by his work. Awards include the Genetics Society of Australasia Alan Wilton Early Career Award (2021). He has authored more than 30 publications in journals such as Science, Molecular Cell, Nature Reviews Genetics, Nature Protocols, Genome Biology, and Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, with over 2,500 citations. Key publications are 'Long noncoding RNAs and the genetics of cancer' (2013, British Journal of Cancer), 'Overcoming challenges and dogmas to understand the functions of pseudogenes' (2020, Nature Reviews Genetics), 'Nanopore sequencing enables comprehensive transposable element epigenomic profiling' (2020, Molecular Cell), 'mRNA vaccine quality analysis using RNA sequencing' (2023, Nature Communications), and 'The design, manufacture and LNP formulation of mRNA for research use' (2025, Nature Protocols).