Dr David Godler
Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne and Group leader of Diagnosis and Development Laboratory at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI).
Dr Godler is an Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne and Group leader of Diagnosis and Development Laboratory at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI). His research combines the power of genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, population-scale cohort studies and deep clinical phenotyping aiming to improve outcomes for children and families with inherited rare diseases associated with intellectual disability, autism, life threatening obesity and seizures. He has demonstrated strong evidence of innovation and research translation, being named as an inventor on 6 patent families (with more than 40 patent filings), including 16 granted patents, related to different components of the technology developed for different diagnostic and screening applications. In collaboration with PWRFA and FAST (AUS) he has established Australian first Chromosome 15 imprinting Disorders national biobank. He also leads Epi-Genomic Newborn screening (EpiGNs) program supported by the Genomics Health Futures Mission, the MRFF. This program assesses benefits of extended genomic newborn screening workflow developed by his group for a number of conditions including Prader Willi syndrome (PWS) tested on 100,000 infants from $55 million funded whole-of-state birth cohort called Generation Victoria. He also leads several NHMRC and FPWR (USA) funded studies aiming to define: (i) genetic pathways dysregulated in Prader Willi syndrome in blood and brain; (ii) medications used for other conditions to target these pathways in future PWS clinical trials. His productivity is evidenced by 60 publications; 43 as 1st or last author; 81.5% in the top 10% of all journals in the medical sciences field, in such quality journals as Genet Med, Clin Chem, Neurol, JAMA Neurol, JAMA netw open and Mol Autism.
