Dr Justin Wong
President 2024-25, BoD member; NSW
Dr Justin Wong is a Senior Lecturer and Head of the Epigenetics and RNA Biology Laboratory at the School of Medical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine and Health, University of Sydney.
Dr Wong completed his PhD in Cancer Epigenetics with Professor Robyn Ward at UNSW before undertaking postdoctoral training with Professor John Rasko at the Centenary Institute. There, he made the seminal discovery that intron retention, long considered transcriptional noise, plays a regulated and conserved role in granulocyte differentiation
(Cell, 2013), with follow-up studies demonstrating its evolutionary conservation (Genome Biology, 2017) and control by epigenetic changes (Nature Communications, 2017, Nucleic Acids Research, 2022). His contributions were recognised with the prestigious Ruth Stephens Gani Medal from the Australian Academy of Science in 2019.
In 2018, Dr Wong established his independent research program, which now focuses on RNA regulation in human disease. His team investigates how alternative splicing and RNA modifications such as m 6 A shape gene expression in cancer and autoinflammatory disorders. By integrating genomics, long-read sequencing, and CRISPR-based epitranscriptome editing tools, his research aims at defining how disease-associated genetic variants disrupt transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulatory networks, revealing novel mechanisms and opportunities for precision medicine.