Our vision is to understand the early cellular and molecular origins of childhood health and disease, with a focus on immune and inflammatory conditions.

To do this, we are integrating environmental, genetic, other ‘omics and phenotypic data to:

  • Understand aetiology of complex childhood inflammatory diseases’
  • Identify biomarkers with clinical utility for improved prediction, diagnosis, effective treatment targeting and monitoring of interventions.

Our collective work has generated highly influential papers that contributed to an explosion of interest in understanding the molecular processes that mediate the effects of the early life programming of human non-communicable disease.

We played a key role in the establishment of several internationally unique cohorts with detailed environmental and phenotype data, plus biospecimens amenable to state-of-the-art molecular and cellular profiling.

Together, these have attracted more than $50M in research funding. We have more than 300 publications and 20,000 citations of our work in the last 10 years, with over 100 invitations to present at both local and international meetings (including several plenary and keynote presentations).

We have authored many book chapters and an Epigenetics training course (Early Nutrition eAcademy) and have developed advanced experimental pipelines, including high dimensional flow cytometry, DNA methylation, chromatin immunoprecipitation, and single-cell sequencing.

Our research aims to understand the early cellular and molecular origins of childhood immune-related health and disease.

Our aim is to understand disease mechanisms and identify clinically relevant biomarkers for improved diagnosis and risk stratification.

We focus on understanding how early life exposures interact with underlying genetic variation to ‘program’ later health, via cellular and molecular mediators, including epigenetics.

Our focus is on immune and inflammatory conditions and we are applying a state-of-the-art analysis pipeline to a series of unique, mostly longitudinal, cohorts with extensive exposure and outcome data, plus biospecimens amenable to a range of biological measures