Professor Nigel Laing AO, obtained his PhD from Edinburgh University in 1979. After a one-year postdoc at Oslo University in 1980, he joined the University of Western Australia in 1981. From his PhD until 1987, Professor Laing was a developmental neurobiologist, studying motor neuron and muscle development. He retrained in human molecular genetics at Duke University in 1987-88 and has researched human genetic disease ever since. His Group has identified genes for more than thirty diseases. Professor Laing currently has three major themes in his research: population-based reproductive carrier screening for severe recessive diseases, development of improved molecular diagnostics and development of therapies for genetic muscle diseases.  He is one of the three co-leads of Mackenzie’s Mission, the $20m Medical Research Future Fund, Australian Reproductive Carrier Screening Project. Mackenzie’s Mission aims to screen 10,000 couples from the full geographic extent of Australia for 1,300 genes, associated with 750 recessive diseases. This is to research how to deliver carrier screening free to any couple in Australia who might want to use it. He collaborates with Dr Gina Ravenscroft on continuing disease gene discovery.

Professor Laing was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2015. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences (FAHMS), the Faculty of Science of the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia (FFSc(RCPA)) and the Human Genetics Society of Australasia (FHGSA). He has been an NH&MRC Fellow since 1997, an NH&MRC Principal Research Fellow since 2006.