Dr Lyndal Henden

Dr Lyndal Henden, Early Career Postdoctoral Reseach Fellow, Macquarie University.

Lyndal is an Early Career Postdoctoral Researcher in the Genomics and Bioinformatic Team within the Centre for Motor Neuron Disease Research at Macquarie University. She completed her PhD in 2017 at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, where she developed statistical methods to identify cryptic relatedness in the human genome and the genomes of microorganisms that cause disease. Her methods have been successfully used to discover and quantify unknown or misspecified familial relatedness, and to identify loci containing disease susceptibility genes in disorders such as Autism, Epilepsy and Intellectual Disability.

Lyndal’s current research is focused on understanding the genetic basis of Motor Neuron Disease (MND) and Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD). Her expertise in cryptic relatedness analysis is being applied to large MND/FTD patient cohorts to identify candidate disease loci for gene screening in the hopes of identifying novel gene mutations that are causing disease.

Forefront Group:

  • Macquarie University Centre for MND Research Genetics and Genomics Research Group

Neurodegeneration of interest:

MND and FTD

Expertise:

  • Bioinformatics
  • Statistics
  • Genomics

Affiliate Organisations

Macquarie Neurology

Specific Skills:

  • R programming
  • Data processing
  • Method development
  • Statistical genetics