DrRory Johnson

Rory Johnson is Associate Professor at University College Dublin, where he leads the Laboratory for Genomics of Long Noncoding RNA and Disease. His research focuses on the "Dark Matter" of the human genome, the long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) that make up much of our DNA but do not code for proteins, and on how these genes can be targeted to treat cancer and other diseases. Since establishing his independent group he has secured over €8M in funding across three countries, including the Science Foundation Ireland Future Research Leaders Award, the Research Ireland Frontiers Award and the Irish Research Council Laureate Award.

Prof Johnson graduated with an MSci in Physics from Imperial College London (2000) and completed a PhD (2007) at the University of Leeds on a Wellcome Trust scholarship. Before joining UCD he held positions at leading international institutions: postdoctoral researcher at the Genome Institute of Singapore, Ramon y Cajal Fellow at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, and Junior Group Leader at the Swiss National Centre for RNA and Disease, where he was also elected Privatdozent of the Medical Faculty at the University of Bern.

Prof Johnson has led much of the effort to map long noncoding RNAs. As a longstanding member of the GENCODE consortium he co-led the work to build the reference maps of human lncRNA genes that researchers worldwide now use to find and study them. He is an active member of the FANTOM consortium and of Genomics England, and was a contributing PI to the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) consortium. His work has been published in journals including Nature, Nature Genetics, Nature Reviews Genetics and Nature Communications, and has gathered over 57,000 citations and an h-index of 55.

His group combines computational and experimental methods to understand the biology of lncRNAs. He developed widely used CRISPR-Cas9 tools, including the DECKO method, to identify disease-promoting lncRNAs at scale. He also proposed the RIDL hypothesis, that transposable elements have been repurposed as functional domains within lncRNAs, since supported by work from several groups.

In cancer, his team built the first software pipeline dedicated to finding mutated lncRNAs in tumours (ExInAtor), and went on to show for the first time that these "driver lncRNAs" can promote tumour formation and be blocked with RNA therapeutics. He serves as Academic Lead for Lung Cancer at the Cancer Centre Research Committee of St Vincent's University Hospital.

Prof Johnson works actively to bring research toward the clinic. He co-founded Linn Therapeutics, a startup developing RNA therapeutics for cancer, where he was Chief Scientific Officer, and he holds patents for RNA-based therapeutics. He holds a Diploma in Management from IE Business School and co-founded the Bench2Biz workshop to train young scientists in entrepreneurship.