Phillippa Taberlay

Biography

Phillippa grew up in Hobart, Tasmania where she attended school before receiving a Bachelor of Science majoring in Biochemistry, Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Tasmania in 2002, and graduating with a Bachelor of Science with First Class Honours in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 2003. She then joined the laboratory of Dr Adele Holloway where they sought to understand how leukaemic fusion proteins disrupt epigenetic mechanisms in Acute Myeloid Leukaemia and was awarded her PhD for this work from the Menzies Research Institute of the University of Tasmania in 2008. After a chance meeting with world-renowned Epigeneticist, Professor Peter A Jones, she joined his lab at the Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center of the University of Southern California as a post-doctoral fellow in 2008. She returned to Australia after almost four years in the USA to establish her own group at the end of 2011; joining the Epigenetics Research Program directed by Professor Susan J Clark. She is secretary of the Workplace Equity Committee at the Garvan Institute. Phillippa’s early-career work has directly answered many unresolved questions, some of which have remained unanswered for over 30 years. These findings impact the multi-disciplinary fields of epigenetics, developmental gene regulation, embryonic stem cell biology and cellular reprogramming. The core of her post-doctoral work was selected by the editorial board of Cell as the sole video highlight of the publication issue (Taberlay et al. Cell 2011). In addition, she was a member of the team that discovered how OCT4 maintains control of its targets (You et al., PNAS 2011), which received a prestigious Faculty of 1000 Article Factor (FFa) score of 8 – a “must read”. Phillippa has also contributed technological advancement, including development of the NOMe-seq technique whilst at the University of Southern California. 

Research Interest

Long-range interactions and temporal regulation of the genome Global epigenetic signatures of reprogrammed distal regulatory elements Understanding the important role of the three-dimensional genome in normal and cancer biology Neuroepigenetics