Dr Joanne Voisey

Biography

Joanne Voisey is a Senior Research Fellow within the School of Biomedical Sciences and the Centre for Genomics and Personalised Health at QUT. Her teaching background includes designing and delivering lectures at QUT, Bond University and UQ in the areas of medical biotechnology and genetics. She also has many years of experience supervising HDR students and is currently supervising 3 PhD students.

She has made significant contributions in the field of human genetics and co-authored over 60 peer reviewed research papers. For the last 15 years she has been investigating risk factors and treatment response of mental illness. In recent years she has used epigenetics to gain a richer understanding of complex human disorders and the role of environmental risk factors such as stress and trauma. Of particular significance is her research with Vietnam veterans, uncovering epigenetic markers that are associated with PTSD, resilience and physical activity following combat exposure.  She has addressed challenging problems in schizophrenia research and her group were the first to identify epigenetic risk markers across the entire genome in brain samples.

Working in the Cooperative Research Centre for DNA Diagnostics for 5 years, she gained valuable commercial experience, and was involved in three patent applications with one commercialised to Qiagen. She is also an active volunteer in the professionals in schools’ program with QUT and CSIRO which encourages the participation and engagement of children and teachers in science.  Joanne is a member of the Indigenous Health committee  and has recently developed a project evaluating a culturally safe mental health therapy program for Indigenous peoples.