Maude Phipps goes from cosmos to genomes

Kids of the Orang Selatar enjoying a moment for the lenses when researches stopped by to study the communitys intricacies.

While other girls her age were preoccupied with the pop culture of the day, Professor Maude Phipps was riveted to the Carl Sagan-hosted American documentary TV series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. So, it’s no wonder that science was her guiding light from a young age, and she’s now arguably the leading geneticist in the country.

The subject of genomics might be alien to the uninitiated, but Phipps, professor of Human Molecular Genetics at the Jeffrey Cheah School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Monash University Malaysia, has a simple way of breaking it down for the common man, revealing that genes and genomics give us a glimpse into our blueprint.