Dr. Housden is an Associate Professor at the University of Exeter in the School of Clinical and Biological Sciences, heading the Institute of Living Systems. After an MA in Genetics at Cambridge, he began his research career in the laboratory of Professor Sarah Bray at the University of Cambridge. There, he studied the direct transcriptional outputs of Notch signalling and crosstalk with the EGFR pathway using Drosophila as a model system. For his postdoctoral work, he joined Professor Norbert Perrimon’s laboratory at Harvard Medical School. Here, his interest in gene networks led him to develop new genetic screening methods to identify genes that could be targeted to treat human diseases. Since joining the Living Systems Institute in 2017, Dr. Housden’s laboratory has focused on developing new methods to enhance their ability to identify new therapeutic targets for disease and applying these methods for drug discovery. His research is focused on using interdisciplinary methods to study how genetic mutations lead to disease. This involves a combination of new technology development and high-throughput genetic screening to analyse gene functions and to identify and characterise candidate drugs to treat diseases. The development of new methods to identify effective drugs is vitally important because current methods suffer from a high failure rate that slows the development of new therapies.