Rate My Professor Zandra Jenkins

Dr Zandra Jenkins serves as a Research Fellow in the Department of Paediatrics and Child Health within the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Otago's Dunedin School of Medicine. She obtained her BSc (Hons) and PhD from the University of Otago in 1998, with her doctoral thesis on the molecular genetics of wool conducted at the AgResearch Molecular Biology Unit. Following her PhD, she pursued postdoctoral research on protein translation at Uppsala University in Sweden from 1998 to 2000, then continued this work and investigated iron homeostasis regulation in sickle cell anemia and β-thalassemia patients at the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute in the USA until 2003.

Returning to New Zealand in 2003, Jenkins joined Professor Stephen Robertson's Clinical Genetics Group at the University of Otago as a Research Fellow. Her research focuses on human genetics of skeletal development and congenital malformation, particularly disorders involving Filamin family gene mutations, exploring their cellular consequences and mechanisms to advance understanding of skeletogenesis. She has co-authored influential publications including "Germline mutations in WTX cause a sclerosing skeletal dysplasia but do not predispose to tumorigenesis" (Nature Genetics, 2009), "Mutations in genes encoding the cadherin receptor-ligand pair DCHS1 and FAT4 disrupt cerebral cortical development" (Nature Genetics, 2013), "RefilinB (FAM101B) targets FilaminA to organize perinuclear actin networks and regulates nuclear shape" (PNAS, 2011), "Clustered de novo start-loss variants in GLUL result in a neurodevelopmental disorder" (American Journal of Human Genetics, 2024), and studies on Menke-Hennekam syndrome subtypes (2024). With over 1,300 citations, her work impacts genetic research on skeletal dysplasias. She supervises PhD students in genetics.