Dr Dagmar Wilhelm - Researcher Profile

Dagmar Wilhelm received her B.Sc. in Biology in Karlsruhe, Germany in 1992 and her Ph.D. in Cancer Biology at the German Cancer Research Centre (DKFZ), Heidelberg, Germany in 1997. Dr Wilhelm completed her postdoctoral training with Prof Christoph Englert at the Research Centre Karlsruhe, Germany and Prof Peter Koopman at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, Brisbane. She received a Career Development Award level II from the NHMRC in 2007, and became a Laboratory head in the Institute for Molecular Bioscience at the University of Queensland at the end of 2008, before moving to Monash University in 2012. Dr Wilhelm was awarded an ARC Future Fellowship and a UQ Vice Chancellor Senior Research Fellowship in 2011 and the 2011 Young Investigator Award from the Australian and New Zealand Society of Cell & Developmental Biology.

Throughout her career Dagmar Wilhelm has been interested in different aspects of gene regulation in cell differentiation and development. Her aim now is to discover the mechanisms of gene regulation and the in vivo function of non-coding RNAs in development using mouse gonad development as the experimental system. Her laboratory has identified small and long non-coding RNAs that are sexually dimorphic expressed during gonad development and started to unravel molecular pathways that are controlled by these non-coding RNAs. The tools that have been developed will provide additional avenues with which to dissect early gonad development and therefore will play important roles in efforts to understand the etiology of human disorders of sex development, male and female infertility as well as ovarian and testicular cancer.