22 Facts About Jemma Geoghegan

Jemma Geoghegan's research has contributed to the discussion about the likely cause of COVID-19 and the challenges around predicting pandemics.

Jemma Geoghegan was a recipient of the Young Tall Poppy Award in 2017, a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship in 2020, and the 2021 Prime Minister's Emerging Scientist Prize.

Jemma Geoghegan was accepted into the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, but in 2004 took a year off school before starting her university studies to work as a volunteer teacher in Baddegama, Sri Lanka.

Jemma Geoghegan received a scholarship to do a doctorate at the University of Otago and moved to New Zealand.

Jemma Geoghegan worked as a lecturer at Macquarie University from 2017 to 2020.

Since 2020 Jemma Geoghegan has been a senior lecturer in the University of Otago's microbiology and immunology department and an associate senior scientist at the Institute of Environmental Science and Research.

When Britain decided in July 2021 to lift all public health restrictions following lockdowns during COVID-19 despite only half of the population being vaccinated, Jemma Geoghegan shared the concerns of Siouxsie Wiles, Ashley Bloomfield and Julie Anne Genter that this was likely to lead to more dangerous virus variants circulating worldwide, undermining vaccination programmes.

Jemma Geoghegan said this was "[training] the virus to escape vaccine-induced immunity", and the country needed a higher threshold of vaccination to deal with the Delta variant.

Early 2020 when questions were being asked about the causes of the coronavirus pandemic, Jemma Geoghegan was asked on 7 News, as a scientist whose "expertise focuses on the area where animals and humans meet", if and how COVID-19 had jumped from animals to humans.

Jemma Geoghegan explained that bats do contain viruses similar to COVID-19, but to confirm they were "genetically related", it was necessary to look at the "genetic signatures" in the virus.

In 2018 Jemma Geoghegan had participated in a research study that used a metagenomics lens to show by examination of the genome sequencing of viruses in fish as the ancestors of all vertebrates, how a virus can spread and evolve through time and space, confirming it exists in nature and not necessarily made by humans.

Jemma Geoghegan has noted that the genome of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is closely related to other viruses that are present in nature and that as a new SARS virus, the coronavirus was likely to have taken a similar route to that which caused the SARS outbreak in 2003 when it was spread from live animals to humans.

Jemma Geoghegan published an article in the Australasian Science Journal that researched the role of biological factors such as the size, structure and mode of transmission of viruses in predicting their risk of being transmissible amongst humans.

In May 2020 as a result of a collaboration between Otago University and the Institute of Environmental Science and Research, Jemma Geoghegan was allocated $600,000 from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment COVID-19 Innovation Acceleration Fund.

Jemma Geoghegan's role was to lead an international team of scientists to sequence the genomes of all of New Zealand's positive COVID-19 cases and track how the virus spread across New Zealand.

In November 2020, when an aircrew member who had arrived in New Zealand from overseas tested positive, Jemma Geoghegan reiterated the importance of genome sequencing to establish whether the virus related to local or global infections and the likelihood that transmission of the cases occurred during the flight.

On 22 October 2020, the Royal Society Te Aparangi announced that Jemma Geoghegan was awarded the government-funded Rutherford Discovery Fellowship.

In 2021, Jemma Geoghegan's work continued and was focused initially on the UK virus variant that had broken out in New Zealand.

In 2017 Jemma Geoghegan gained The Young Tall Poppy Award run by the Australian Institute of Policy and Science.

Jemma Geoghegan said that she was very passionate about communicating research findings to the wider community and the award was an opportunity for her to become more skilled in this area.

Jemma Geoghegan received the Genetics Society of Australia Alan Wilton Award to recognise outstanding contributions to the field of genetics research by Australasian scientists early in their career in 2017.

In May 2022 Jemma Geoghegan was awarded the 2021 Prime Minister's Emerging Scientist prize, worth $200,000.