Balfour Lecture 2026 – Dr Hilary Martin

The Genetics Society is delighted to announce Dr Hilary Martin, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, as the winner of the 2026 Balfour Lecture.

Hilary Martin is a Group Leader at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. Her group’s research involves computational analyses of large-scale genetic datasets to understand the genetic basis of rare and common diseases. Their main focus is on the genetic architecture of rare neurodevelopmental conditions and related traits using data from clinical and population-based cohorts. They have made important contributions in revealing the genetic overlap between intellectual disability and cognitive and mental health traits in the general population. Her group’s research also explores the genetics of complex disease in populations with high consanguinity (in particular in demonstrating causal effects of autozygosity), primarily using data from the Genes & Health study, as well as genetic and other factors influencing de novo mutation rates and patterns.

Hilary’s PhD at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics in Oxford included work on rare epilepsy syndromes, human recombination patterns, and platypus population genetics. From there, she moved to the Wellcome Sanger Institute in 2018 as a postdoc, funded by a research fellowship from St John’s College, Cambridge. Her postdoc work focused on recessive and common variation in the Deciphering Developmental Disorders study. She started her own group at the Sanger in 2018.