The Non-coding RNA Journal Webinar Series | Mighty Non-coding RNAs: Key Players in Understanding Inter-disease Crosstalk

Dr. Rory Johnson

Conway Institute for Biomolecular and Biomedical Research, University College Dublin, Dublin, D04 V1W8, Ireland, Department of Medical Oncology, Inselspital, Bern University Hospital, University of Bern, 3010, Bern, Switzerland;
Rory Johnson is Associate Professor at University College Dublin (Ireland) and Adjunct Faculty at the University Hospital of Bern (Switzerland). His research program focuses on long noncoding RNAs, their basic biology and their potential as targets for RNA therapeutics, using an interdisciplinary experimental / bioinformatic approach. He received his MSc in Physics from Imperial College, London, in 2000. He won a Wellcome Trust PhD scholarship at the University of Leeds (UK), where he wrote a thesis on regulation of gene expression in the healthy and diseased nervous system (2007). His growing interest in lncRNAs led him first to the Genome Institute of Singapore, then to Roderic Guigo’s lab at the Centre for Genomic Regulation, Barcelona. Here, supported by a Ramon y Cajal fellowship, he worked with the GENCODE consortium on methods to catalogue lncRNAs in the human and mouse genomes. During this period, Johnson became interested in the potential of new CRISPR-Cas9 technology in lncRNA research. He leads the Laboratory for Genomics of LncRNAs (GOLD Lab), composed of 10 experimental and bioinformatic researchers. The lab has created CRISPR-powered target discovery pipelines for RNA therapeutics in oncology and participate in GENCODE and Genomics England consortia. Rory Johnson has also been active in scientific commercialisation, holding patents on lncRNA therapeutic targets and as a founder of the successful ‘Bench2biz’ startup workshop.