Justin M. O’Sullivan, PhD, is a professor and deputy director at the Liggins Institute, University of Auckland. He was awarded the 2010 Life Technologies Life Science Award for Emerging Excellence in Molecular biology in New Zealand. Dr. O’Sullivan trained as a molecular microbiologist, before completing postdoctoral research on the genetic code in Candida albicans and transcription control in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. He has developed expertise that allows him to follow structural clues to understand how the spatial organization of a genome adds to the information that is hard-coded in the linear sequence of its DNA. His focus is on interpreting how disease-associated mutations in noncoding DNA affect Parkinson’s disease (PD) and other multigenic diseases. His group’s approach is providing new hypotheses that connect the genetic and biological understandings of PD, and he and his colleagues are testing these hypotheses in the hope of advancing PD research towards a cure.