Owen is a clinician-scientist and leads the Genomic Medicine team. He is a Strategic Program co-lead and Snow Fellow with a career focus on the clinical impact of inherited and acquired genetic variation.
Owen trained in science and clinical medicine in Adelaide, in immunology and genomics at the John Curtin School of Medical Research with Professor Chris Goodnow, as a John Monash Scholar at The Scripps Research Institute in California with Nobel Laureate Professor Bruce Beutler, and at the University of Oxford with the Nuffield Professor of Medicine Richard Cornall. He was then a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, and a Visiting Fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
His research career has spanned the use of large-scale genome-wide mutagenesis to discover the function of genes essential for immunity, to the use of exome and genome sequencing to diagnose severe inherited diseases. Current interests include the use of large population and disease cohorts to understand the impact of germline and somatic genetic variation, and pathways to apply this information in clinical practice.
The Centre for Population Genomics is a national initiative, jointly housed at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute. We work all across the country and collaborate with partners internationally and in Australia.
At CPG, we celebrate and respect diversity in our team and our work. We believe that including all human diversity in genomic research will empower medical care that benefits everyone.
We acknowledge the First Australian peoples on whose traditional lands we live and work across the country and pay our respects to their elders past, present and emerging. We gratefully accept the invitation in the Uluru Statement from the Heart “to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future”.
