Jennifer A. Graves
La Trobe University
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Primary Section: 61, Animal, Nutritional, and Applied Microbial Sciences Membership Type:
International Member
(elected 2019)
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Biosketch
Jenny Graves is Distinguished Professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. She works on Australian animals; kangaroos and platypus, devils (Tasmanian) and dragons (lizards). She uses genome comparisons to explore the origin, function and fate of human sex genes and chromosomes, (in)famously predicting the disappearance of the human Y chromosome and the extinction – or speciation – of humans. Jenny has produced four books and more than 400 research articles, and also writes science articles and columns – on sex, evolution, and women in science – for the public. She has been honoured by the Academy’s Macfarlane Burnet medal and is an Officer in the Order of Australia. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and the US National Academy of Science, 2006 L’Oreal-UNESCO Laureate for Women in Science, and she won the 2017 Australian Prime Minister’s Prize for Science (the first woman to win solo).
Research Interests
Jenny Graves is an evolutionary geneticist who works on Australian animals, including kangaroos and platypus, emus and snakes, even devils (Tasmanian) and dragons (lizards). Her group uses their distant relationship to humans to discover how genes and chromosomes and regulatory systems evolved, and how they work in all animals including humans. She used this unique perspective to explore the origin, function and fate of human sex genes and chromosomes, (in)famously predicting the disappearance of the human Y chromosome. She has recently climbed across the evolutionary tree to discover how genes and temperature interact to determine sex in some Australian reptiles. In early work, she explored epigenetic silencing of the X chromosome; she was first to demonstrate that the inactive X is transcriptionally silent, and that DNA methylation contributes to silencing in the mammalian embryo. Jenny was one of the international pioneers of comparative gene mapping, and was an early organizer and champion of genome sequencing of Australian mammals, starting with the kangaroo and platypus. She is involved with ambitious projects to sequence the genomes of all complex life on earth.
