Vanessa Chong

My overarching goal as a researcher is to decode the syntax underpinning our genetic blueprint. A common theme in my research interests is to understand how genes interact with one another, and therefore link seemingly disconnected biological pathways into one or more common networks. A major hurdle to this effort is that biological systems are inherently noisy and tolerant of significant diversity and/or variation within their parameters. Embryonic development, however, is an intricate process honed by evolution to produce consistent outcomes from one generation to the next. The embryo is also generalist by nature; the underlying genetic and molecular mechanisms that drive its development constantly recur in health and disease.

I have early foundations as an experimental molecular biologist with complementary training in RNA-seq bioinformatics. This was followed by doctorate and postdoctoral research experience within diverse fields of developmental biology. Using the zebrafish vertebrate model, I adopted multi-modal -omics approaches (RNA, ATAC, ChIP) in parallel with building experimental techniques e.g. CRISPR/Cas to characterise pure populations of cells from embryonic tissue. More recently, I leveraged single cell and spatial transcriptomics to tackle a decades-unanswered question to identify the early signalling events driving establishment of brain left/right asymmetry.

I envision a “molecular genomics” approach where the combination of these methods, at scale and hand-in-hand with machine learning, could illuminate principles of molecular genetics previously uncharted and/or lacked robustness due to technical limitations of their time. Ultimately, I hope to learn how the building blocks of the genome i.e. genes function in a unified manner, with a particular interest in non-coding RNAs.