Profile of Jennifer Marshall Graves

Abstract

“Sometimes when you ask a functional question, you get an evolutionary answer,” says Jennifer Marshall Graves, a leader in the field of epigenetics and comparative genomics. Her team’s vast body of research on Australian fauna has helped the distinguished professor at Melbourne’s La Trobe University (LTU) uncover fundamental insights into mammalian sex chromosomes and sex-determining genes. Elected as an International Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019, Graves compared DNA sequences across widely divergent animals and demonstrates in her Inaugural Article (1) that bird and reptile microchromosomes, once thought to be insignificant, are ancient and highly conserved and represent the original building blocks of vertebrate genomes. Graves was born in Adelaide, Australia. Her father, the soil physicist T. J. Marshall, formulated the Marshall equation, which describes the movement of fluids in soil. Her mother, Ann Marshall, was a geologist and urban geographer whose activism concerning overdevelopment in Adelaide left a mark on the city. Graves recalls being “turned onto genetics” when high school biology teacher Doreen McCarthy used colorful images of budgerigars to demonstrate Mendel’s laws of genetics. Graves says, “I was hooked and enrolled in science at Adelaide University in 1960.” Shortly thereafter, during her mother’s sabbatical, she spent a semester at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied cell biology taught by Daniel Mazia. Returning to Adelaide, she received the Sir Ronald A. Fisher Award for Genetics in 1962 and conducted honors research on X chromosome inactivation in kangaroo females with advisor David Hayman. At Adelaide, she earned both an undergraduate degree in genetics and physical chemistry and a Master’s degree in genetics. Jennifer Marshall Graves. Image credit: GAMMA/Micheline Pelletier. The Fisher Award, a £10 book token, was followed by a Fulbright Travel Grant, which enabled doctoral studies at Berkeley under Mazia and cell geneticist …