Christopher Carl Goodnow

Professor Christopher Carl Goodnow is Executive Director of the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and holds the Bill and Patricia Ritchie Foundation Chair as Head of the Immunogenomics Laboratory at Garvan. He is also Professor and Director of the Cellular Genomics Futures Institute at UNSW Sydney. His academic qualifications include a BVSc (Hons 1), BSc(Vet) with a University Medal, and a PhD from the University of Sydney, followed by postdoctoral training at Stanford University.

Goodnow is internationally renowned for discovering immune tolerance checkpoints that prevent self-attack while enabling pathogen defense, foundational to checkpoint inhibitor therapies. His research pioneered mammalian genome sequencing to link genotype with phenotype ('phenomics'), and recent work uses single-cell genomics to study rogue immune cells in autoimmune diseases and lymphoma. His lab has revealed mutation pathways shared between autoimmune diseases and blood cancers.

Research Interests: Autoimmune diseases, immunogenomics, lymphoma, somatic mutations in immune cells, single-cell sequencing technologies, and translational therapies targeting disease-driving cells. His group focuses on identifying therapeutic targets through genomic analysis of rogue B cells in conditions like Sjögren's syndrome and lupus.

Awards & Honors:

• AAI Pharmingen Investigator Award (1998)
• Gottschalk Medal (2001)
• Fellow of Australian Academy of Science (2002)
• Fellow of the Royal Society (2009)
• Member of the US National Academy of Sciences (2013)
• William E. Paul Memorial Award (2018)

Labs & Teams: Leads the Immunogenomics Laboratory at Garvan and directs the Cellular Genomics Futures Institute, integrating genomic technologies to study immune cell dysfunction. Collaborates on projects involving single-cell RNA sequencing, antibody engineering, and translational medicine.