Dr Lyndal Henden is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Lecturer in the Genomics and Bioinformatic Team within the Centre for Motor Neuron Disease Research at Macquarie University. She completed her PhD in 2017 at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, where she developed statistical methods to identify cryptic relatedness in the human genome and the genomes of microorganisms that cause disease. Her methods have been successfully used to discover and quantify unknown or misspecified familial relatedness, and to identify loci containing disease susceptibility genes in disorders such as Autism, Epilepsy and Intellectual Disability. She has also identified loci under positive selection that are suspected of being associated with antimalarial drug resistance in a global Plasmodium falciparum cohort.

Dr Henden’s current research is focused on understanding the genetic basis of Motor Neuron Disease (MND) and Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD). Her expertise in cryptic relatedness analysis is being applied to large MND/FTD patient cohorts to identify candidate disease loci for gene screening in the hopes of identifying novel gene mutations that are causing disease. Her research findings will have significant genetic counselling implications for MND/FTD patients and their family members.

MEDI2201, MEDI3200, MEDI3401, MEDI2400

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