This prestigious annual lecture, named after the Genetics Society’s first President, is an award to mark the contributions to genetics of an outstanding young investigator. The Balfour Lecturer is elected by the Society’s Committee on the basis of nominations made by any individual member of the Society.
Dr Whiffin's research uses computational approaches to interpret the role of genetic variants in rare diseases. She has a particular interest in variants that impact gene regulation and understanding how modulating gene regulation can be used to treat rare disease. She is an expert in the annotation and interpretation of variants in non-coding regions of the genome, for which she has led the creation of clinical guidelines.
Her PhD work at the Institute of Cancer Research focussed on the genetics of colorectal cancer during which she used genome-wide association studies to uncover multiple genetic risk loci. Following this, she moved to Imperial College London as a postdoc where she developed multiple tools to aid clinical interpretation of variants involved in inherited heart conditions. Since establishing her independent research team in Oxford in 2020, Dr Whiffin has used the Genomics England 100,000 genomes project dataset to decipher the role of variants in untranslated regions in rare disease. Further, her team recently uncovered a striking role for the non-coding small nuclear RNA RNU4-2 in neurodevelopmental disorders.
Dr Whiffin has also recently been awarded the 2024 Lister Institute Research Prize and a Wellcome Career Development Award.