Rate My Professor Greg Ngo

Dr Greg Ngo is a Research Fellow in the School of Medicine at Cardiff University, where he leads the R-loops & Genome Stability Lab. His research focuses on the formation of R-loops at DNA double-strand breaks and their impact on genome stability, with a particular emphasis on the pathogenesis of neurodevelopmental disorders such as intellectual disability, autism spectrum disorder, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. He holds a Wellcome Trust Career Development Award to support this work. Ngo has a long-standing interest in DNA repair mechanisms, having contributed to understanding repair of double-strand breaks and dysfunctional telomeres across model organisms including budding yeast, archaea, and bacteria, as well as human cells.

Ngo completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Nottingham, where he investigated DNA repair mutants in E. coli. He then worked as a research assistant at the same institution on genetic tools for homologous recombination in the archaeon Haloferax volcanii. He pursued his D.Phil. at the University of Oxford under Prof. Ian Hickson, characterizing genes interacting with the Bloom helicase in budding yeast and identifying Esc2 as a factor in homologous recombination at stalled replication forks. Following this, he joined Prof. David Lydall’s laboratory at Newcastle University to study DNA repair at uncapped telomeres. At Cardiff University, working with Prof. Duncan Baird, he demonstrated that PARP inhibitors can selectively eliminate cells during telomere crisis and made the key discovery of R-loops at DNA double-strand breaks, showing their stimulation by UPF1 to aid repair. His publications include papers in Nature Communications on UPF1 and R-loops in DNA repair (2021) and mitotic microhomology-mediated break-induced replication promoting chromoanasynthesis (2026), as well as earlier works in Nucleic Acids Research on the 9-1-1 checkpoint clamp and resection at double-strand breaks (2014, 2015). Ngo is available for postgraduate supervision in genome stability, DNA repair, and neurodevelopmental disorders.