Ryan Lister is a Winthrop Professor at the University of Western Australia, in the Centre for Plant Energy Biology and the School of Biochemistry and Chemistry. After receiving his PhD from the University of Western Australia, Ryan joined Joseph Ecker’s laboratory at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies in 2006. In Joe Ecker’s lab he developed methodologies for utilising high-throughput DNA sequencing technology to generate base-resolution maps of DNA methylation and transcriptional activity throughout plant and mammalian genomes. Integration of these reference methylation and transcriptome maps with chromatin modification profiles has yielded new insights into the composition and function of DNA methylation in plants, people and pluripotency. Having returned to UWA in 2012 with the award of an ARC Future Fellowship, the research in Ryan’s laboratory is focussed upon understanding how these complex epigenomic patterns are established and altered, and how they affect the readout of underlying genetic information.