The Genetics Society is pleased to announce that the 2012 Balfour Lecture will be awarded to Örjan Carlborg. The Balfour Lecture, named after the Genetics Society’s first President, is an award to mark the contributions to genetics of an outstanding young investigator.

Örjan Carlborg received his PhD in 2002 at the department of Animal Breeding and Genetics of The Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in Uppsala, Sweden. With a grant from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg foundation he did his post-doctoral research at The Roslin Institute in Scotland and subsequently was a lecturer in Bioinformatics at the University of Uppsala.

In March 2008 he started his Computational Genetics group at SLU where he was promoted to professor in 2009. Örjan received his undergraduate training in animal breeding and genetics but has since made notable impact in the area of statistical and computational genetics. He has several high impact publications to his name and what makes them all the more impressive is that these are primarily the result of his own innovative research ideas. Faced with the same experimental data, many of his colleagues would settle for a standard analysis and publication in more specialist journals. His attention to detail and thorough statistical scrutiny make him a popular collaborator, even for groups that are already well versed in methodology. We are looking forward to a very exciting Balfour lecture at the ICQG4 conference in Edinburgh in 2012.