Rate My Professor Nicole Warrington

Dr Nicole Warrington is a NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow at the University of Queensland Institute for Molecular Bioscience. She holds a Bachelor of Science from Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, with majors in Mathematical Statistics and Psychology, and completed an honours degree at the University of Western Australia. She was awarded an Australian Postgraduate Award for her PhD in statistical genetics and life-course epidemiology at the University of Western Australia, during which she spent time at the University of Toronto developing expertise in statistical modelling of longitudinal growth trajectories and conducted the first genome-wide association study of such trajectories in childhood.

After her PhD, Dr Warrington joined the University of Queensland, where her research has centred on using genetics to examine the relationship between birth weight and cardio-metabolic diseases in later life. She developed a statistical method to partition genetic effects on birth weight into maternal and fetal components and applied it with Mendelian randomization to show that the association between birth weight and adult hypertension is genetically driven. Her work has expanded to investigate whether rapid weight growth in early life causally influences cardio-metabolic disease risk and to identify optimal intervention windows across the life course. Dr Warrington is a leading member of the Early Growth Genetics consortium and has contributed to large-scale genome-wide association studies of growth phenotypes published in high-impact journals. In 2026 she received the Ruth Stephens Gani Medal for outstanding research in human genetics.