8th Biennial ACSPRI Social Science Methodology Conference

Dr Richard Saffery is a Professor and molecular and cellular biologist and Principle Research Fellow at MCRI. He is also Deputy Director (Biosciences) for the Generation Victoria (GenV) initiative. His 'Early Origins of Chronic Disease' agenda spans pregnancy to adolescence and includes conditions such as childhood allergy, obesity and predictors of adult cardiovascular health and diabetes. Dr Saffery has over 250 publications in the field of early life programming and epigenetics. This includes novel discoveries on the factors that regulate the early life human epigenome and the role epigenetics in childhood allergy and immune development. His team have an overarching goal to understand how the modern environment interacts with underlying genetic variation to impact health, particularly in early life. Having led numerous longitudinal pregnancy cohorts in Australia, the EU and more recently China, Dr Saffery has a strong interest in understanding why young Aboriginal populations appear overrepresented in diabetes and chronic kidney disease, particularly via parental transmission of risk across generations.