Prof Joseph Powell is a leading biomedical researcher and statistical geneticist. He completed his postgraduate degrees at Edinburgh University under the tutelage of renowned quantitative geneticists Prof Brian Charlesworth FRS and Chris Haley. During his PhD, he was a consultant at Aviagen, the world's largest poultry breeding company, and a member of their international scientific advisory team. Following his PhD in 2010, Prof Powell was recruited to Brisbane to work with Prof Peter Visscher FRS. During the following five years, Prof Powell published research on new mathematical theories in population genetics and led one of the world's largest research programs into the relationship between genetic variation, the expression of genes, and their impact on disease.

In 2015 he founded his group at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience. He pioneered single-cell sequencing, bringing the first high-throughput systems to Australia and co-leading Australia’s contribution to the Human Cell Atlas. In 2018 Prof Powell was recruited to head the newly launched Garvan-Weizmann Centre for Cellular Genomics, where he established fundamental and translational research programs across oncology, immunology, stem cells, and lung disease. More recently, Prof Powell has taken on a role as the Director of Cellular Science at the Garvan Institute and Deputy Director of the UNSW Cellular Genomics Futures Institute.

Prof Powell's research has been published in the highest impact journals, with first and senior author papers in Science, Nature, Nature Genetics, Cell Stem Cell, Nature Reviews Genetics, Genome Research, Genome Biology, Nature Communications, and the American Journal of Human Genetics. Prof Powell's contributions have been recognised with numerous awards, including the youngest ever recipient of the Commonwealth Health Minister's Medal, NHMRC Research Excellence Medal, and the Ruth Stephens Gani Medal from the Australian Academy of Science. He is also a founding co-director of SeqBio, a company developing new diagnostic technology for lung diseases using liquid biopsies and single cell sequencing. He has expertise in statistical genetics, single-cell sequencing, machine learning, and medical genomics will be of value to this project.