Naomi Wray
Naomi Ruth Wray is an Australian statistical geneticist at the University of Queensland, where she is a Professorial Research Fellow at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience and an Affiliate Professor in the Queensland Brain Institute. She is also a National Health and Medical Research Council Principal Research Fellow and, along with Peter Visscher and Jian Yang, is one of the three executive team members of the NHMRC-funded Program in Complex Trait Genomics. She is also the Michael Davys Chair of Psychiatric Genetics at Oxford University. Naomi pioneered the use of polygenic scores in human genetics, and has made significant contributions to both the development of methods and their clinical use.
Education and career
Wray has a B.Sc. in Agricultural Science from the University of Edinburgh, and an M.S. in livestock genetics and statistics from Cornell University in 1986. She earned her Ph.D. in 1989 from the University of Edinburgh where she worked on population genetics. Her first academic career was in livestock genetics, before she transitioned her research to human genetics following the development of technology that allowed the direct study of DNA variation at scale. Now, she primarily focusses on disorders of the brain, addressing the fundamental questions about why only certain people get common diseases, and why only certain people respond to treatment. Wray joined the University of Queensland Brain Institute in 2011, prior to moving to the Institute of Molecular Bioscience in 2015. From 2018-2023 she was the Head of the Centre for Population and Disease Genomics within IMB. Wray is now appointed at the University of Oxford as the Michael Davys Professor in the Department of Psychiatry.Her research primarily focuses on the development and application of quantitative genetics and genomics methodologies across complex diseases, disorders and traits, specifically psychiatric-related traits.
Wray was one of the scientists who helped discover three new genes that increase the risk of sporadically developing motor neuron disease, funding for which was raised through videos of "the ice bucket challenge" in 2014. She stated that researchers are "very hopeful that in the next phase of discovery, as sample sizes with measured DNA increase, that we'll discover more genes associated with MND".
Wray directed the Program in Complex Trait Genomics which was funded as an NHMRC Program Grant from 2017-2022, and contributes to the International Psychiatric Genomics Consortium. She is a co-investigator on the Australian Genetics of Depression Study, and is currently launching the AGDS-Cello project which focusses on establishing a cell line resource from participant with a detailed history of anti-depressant use and response measures.