The Institute’s new Division of Genetics and Health was formed in 2007 when Professor Jenefer Blackwell and her team were recruited from Cambridge in the UK.   The team includes Senior Research Fellow Christopher Peacock, Research Fellow Sarra Jamieson, and Bioinformatician Richard Francis.  For Jenefer, a graduate of UWA, the return to Perth fulfils a long-held dream to come home.  For Christopher, Sarra and Richard, the move to Australia is an exciting new adventure.  
The primary aim of the new Division is to build capacity to enable genetics to be applied as a tool in epidemiological studies that underpin much of the research of the Institute.  Following the human genome project, genome-wide approaches to measuring human genetic variation has emerged as a powerful tool in understanding both genetic and modifiable environmental risk factors for disease.  Specific projects in the new Division will build initially on the groups previous interests in genetic susceptibility to infectious diseases.  
Jenefer completed her PhD in Population Genetics at UWA in 1974, then headed overseas for postdoctoral research at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.  There she established a career in tropical medical research, focusing largely on genetic studies of susceptibility to infections such as toxoplasmosis (a parasitic infection that can cause stillbirth or miscarriage in pregnant women as well as eye or brain disease in congenitally infected babies) and leishmaniasis (a major parasitic disease of the tropics that is transmitted by the bite of the sandfly).  It was during her time in London that Jenefer first began working with Christopher to undertake studies of Leishmania parasites in the sandfly.
In 1991, Jenefer was recruited to the Glaxo Chair of Molecular Parasitology at the University of Cambridge and went on to become the Founding Director of the new Cambridge Institute for Medical Research.  Christopher was lured to Cambridge to head up a field project in Brazil to study genetic susceptibility to tuberculosis, leprosy and leishmaniasis.  He studied leishmaniasis families for his PhD research, while Sarra was recruited as a student to study tuberculosis and leprosy families.  Both continued in postdoctoral research in the Blackwell lab, and over the succeeding years the team established numerous international research projects on these infectious diseases that still include projects running in Brazil, pan-Europe, Hong Kong, India, Sudan, USA and Vietnam.  Richard has played a major role in developing databases and providing bioinformatics support to underpin this human genetics research.  
Today, Jenefer retains a position at the Cambridge Institute of Medical Research as an Honorary Senior Scientist and Affiliated Principal Investigator, to continue work on the analysis of DNA from 2000 Indian and 3000 Brazilian individuals in the visceral leishmaniasis study.  This position has the added bonus of allowing Jenefer regular visits to the UK to see her children and grandchild.  
At the Telethon Institute, major new projects have been initiated by Jenefer and her team including a study of otitis media in Western Australian children, which is cross-cultural and includes Indigenous and non-Indigenous family-based sampling.  
“As part of this study, we are working in partnership with the Ngangganawili Aboriginal Medical Service in Wiluna and the Karalundi School in Meekatharra to map complex diseases onto the family trees of the major lineages of Indigenous people in this region of WA,” says Jenefer.  
“Building capacity in Indigenous populations that will allow Indigenous researchers to play a major role in the research is an important aim of this study.”  
A particular interest in studying Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations is the interplay between different diseases, especially between infectious disease and non-infectious diseases like Type 2 diabetes.  This forms the basis to an emerging collaboration with researchers in Thailand, which will use genetics to help to understand why Type 2 diabetes is a major risk factor for bacterial diseases like melioidosis (an infectious disease caused by bacteria found in soil and water) and tuberculosis (an infectious bacterial disease transmitted through the air that mainly affects the lungs).  Jenefer says her team also hopes that many new collaborations will develop within the Institute.
“Sarra has recently linked up with Natasha Nassar in the Division of Population Sciences to assist in her research looking for gene by environment interactions that determine rising rates of hypospadias in Western Australia,” says Jenefer.
“We will continue our research initiated in Cambridge looking at toxoplasmosis, and this will form the basis to expanding research on congenital diseases, building on the Institute’s strong history of analysis of birth defects.”
Overall, the team hopes that understanding genetic risk, and its interaction with environment, will contribute to the development of better therapies for both communicable and non-communicable disease.