Dr Benjamin Mullin is a postdoctoral research scientist specialising in genetics, bioinformatics and molecular biology. He completed his PhD studies in the genetic epidemiology of osteoporosis at Curtin University in 2011. Dr Mullin worked as a Medical Scientist in the Molecular Genetics Department at PathWest Laboratory Medicine (2010 – 2012). He returned to research in 2012, taking up the position of Research Associate at the University of Western Australia. He currently leads the osteoclast unit in the Molecular Endocrinology laboratory at QEII Medical Centre.

Dr Mullin’s primary research interests focus on investigating the genetics of complex disease, particularly diseases of the skeleton and reproductive endocrinology. He has worked on several genome-wide association studies (GWAS), including one of the first performed for osteoporosis traits that was published in The Lancet, the success of which helped fuel the GWAS revolution. Since then, he has had a leadership role in three international GWAS meta-analyses for bone structural traits, including the first performed for bone mineral density of the skull (a GEnetic Factors for Osteoporosis (GEFOS) Consortium project). Dr Mullin also recently led a project that generated a unique osteoclast-specific expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) resource for study of the genetics of bone disease. This dataset has successfully been used to identify genetic regulatory effects underlying susceptibility to osteoporosis, osteoarthritis and Paget’s disease of bone.

Dr Mullin has publications in several top-tier journals, including The Lancet, Nature Genetics, Annals of Internal Medicine, Genome Biology (first author), Nature Communications, the American Journal of Human Genetics (first author), PLoS Genetics, Human Molecular Genetics (first author), the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research (leading international bone journal) (first author) and Communications Biology (co-first author). He has been listed as a Chief Investigator on two National Health & Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Ideas Grants and received a prestigious fellowship from the Raine Medical Research Foundation. He is an active reviewer for the NHMRC and several scientific journals, including Nature Communications, the American Journal of Human Genetics, the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research and The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism. Dr Mullin’s work has been the subject of two media releases and he is named as a co-inventor in four provisional patent applications.