Balfour Lecture 2025 Dr Nicky Whiffin

The Genetics Society is delighted to announce Dr Nicky Whiffin, the University of Oxford, as the winner of the 2025 Balfour Lecture.

Nicky Whiffin is an Associate Professor and Sir Henry Dale Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Big Data Institute and Centre for Human Genetics. She is also a member of St Anne’s College and a visiting scholar at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Nicky’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.

Nicky’s 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, Nicky 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. Nicky has recently been awarded a 2024 Lister Institute Research Prize and a Wellcome Career Development Award.