Dr. Archa Fox

Dr. Archa Fox is a Professor within the School of Human Sciences at the University of Western Australia (WA) in Perth.  She is a recognized leader in RNA Biology and was awarded the Marshall Medal of the Harry Perkins Institute in 2012, the emerging leader award of the Australian/NZ Society of Cell and Developmental Biology in 2017 and the University of WA Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Award in 2023. She was a Director of the RNA Society for 2020 and 2021 and has been the Chair of the RNA Network of Australia since 2015.

Dr. Fox earned her Bachelor of Science degree at the University of New South Wales and completed her PhD studies at the University of Sydney (both in Sydney, Australia) under the mentorship of Dr. Merlin Crossley. She was drawn to Dr. Crossley’s research into transcription factors since it aligned with her own interest in better understanding how genes were regulated. After her PhD, Dr. Fox left Australia to join Dr. Angus Lamond’s lab at the University of Dundee in Scotland. "I was intrigued by Dr. Lamond’s research as he had such an interesting mix of methods, from proteomics to microscopy. I felt that expanding my interests from a pure molecular approach looking at transcription factors to the broader context of the whole cell nucleus would be really exciting. I didn’t quite appreciate how much this move from transcription to nuclear cell biology would bring me into the world of RNA, but I am glad it did.” This was when “I stumbled upon paraspeckles – and it was by accident – actually, I was part of a project looking to profile the proteome of the nucleolus. My aim was to clone different candidate nucleolar proteins, then express GFP fusions of them and characterize their sub-nucleolar localization patterns. One of the RNA binding proteins stubbornly refused to go to the nucleolus, but instead was found in nuclear puncta. Because our lab had antibodies to many nuclear bodies, I could show that these puncta were different [from all other] known nuclear bodies. I am really grateful that Angus was open-minded enough to encourage me on this non-nucleolar path, even though it went against the flow of the main project. I’ve spent the rest of my career studying paraspeckle structure and function.“

"I put my ego aside, work together with others, and achieve much more together than we can on our own."

Dr. Fox moved back to Australia in 2006 and opened her lab with the goal of figuring out how and why paraspeckles formed. Because RNase treatment dissolved paraspeckles, she knew that RNA was necessary for their formation, but the identity of the RNA (or class of RNAs) was unknown.  “Then one day I got an email from Christine Clemson, a post-doc in Jeanne Lawrence’s lab in the USA. I had sent her some antibody to my paraspeckle protein a few months prior and not thought much more about it. (As an aside, being generous with requests for published reagents is something my postdoctoral mentor taught me, and this generosity has always brought returns for me, one way or another – it’s a scientific form of karma!). Christine shared the exciting results with me that she was working on a long noncoding RNA, NEAT1, and she saw that my antibody perfectly overlapped the fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) signal for NEAT1 RNA. She was reaching out to see if I wanted to collaborate with her and investigate NEAT1 together.”    

“To be honest I was quite devastated that the puzzle of the paraspeckle RNA had been solved by someone else. Also, as a junior PI with limited resources, I knew that if I took on this collaboration, it would be at the expense of my other projects, and I would not be senior author on the final study. But I just knew that this was going to be such an important discovery and I really wanted to be a part of making that happen. So, I took the gamble of putting a lot of our time and energy into quite a few different experiments to figure out what was going on with NEAT1. In the end I think the gamble paid off, I am so proud to have been part of the team that discovered NEAT1 as the architectural backbone for paraspeckles and I think this actually typifies my approach since then. I had to put my ego aside, work together with others, and achieve much more together than we could on our own. It has come at some cost to my CV – not enough senior author papers and too many co-authorships - but it is just the way I love doing science and I am not going to change that.”

Dr. Fox also recalls how difficult it was to run her new lab with two small children. “When I was a mum with little kids, I felt I was treading water all the time, doing just enough to stay afloat career-wise.”  She recalls sharing the complex emotions she felt as she travelled to Banff, to attend her first RNA Society’s annual meeting shortly after having her daughter. “I was speaking to a senior female colleague about my worry and anxiety about travelling without my baby, and wondering if I would make it in science, juggling parenthood and research. She looked me squarely in the eye and said ‘It is really important that society makes it possible for clever people to have children and also thrive. The world needs those genes!’”

"We are gradually making things better for women as a whole but there is still so much inequity that we need to ‘fix the system’ and not try to ‘fix women’."

Perhaps because of her experiences and that advice, she dedicates effort to supporting gender equity initiatives at her university.  She helped establish a grassroots committee to raise awareness about inequity which ultimately helped the University form a strategy to achieve accreditation in the Science in Australia Gender Equality (SAGE) Athena Swan program. A big focus of the committee is now intersectional challenges experienced by women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, or with disability. She feels that “we are gradually making things better for women as a whole but there is still so much inequity that we need to ‘fix the system’ and not try to ‘fix women’.”

In addition to her leadership on gender equity initiatives, as the Head of the RNA Network of Australia, Dr. Fox has been one of the key drivers in helping create a broader and more interactive RNA community in Australia. Her efforts paid off with the first dedicated Australian RNA meeting (held in 2022) and an official society, A-RNA, to be launched in 2024 with the goal of creating the infrastructure to make a dedicated Australian RNA meeting into a regular recurring event. Dr. Fox is also a founding member of the Australian RNA Production Consortium. The Consortium was very active during the pandemic in explaining mRNA vaccine science and promoting RNA technology to the public and Government. The group’s efforts have paid huge dividends as, Dr. Fox explains: “We now have a vibrant and flourishing RNA biotech and pharma sector in Australia as a result and I am so excited that my students now have many more job opportunities.” Finally, Dr. Fox is about to launch the Australian Centre for RNA therapeutics in Cancer at the University of Western Australia to feed into their growing RNA research and technology ecosystem.

As for Dr. Fox’s favorite RNA, “This one is easy: NEAT1 of course (long 23kb isoform, to be specific)”.  She cites Dr. Joan Stietz as one of her scientific inspirations. Not only does Dr. Fox recognize Dr. Stietz’s many discoveries and her many successful mentees, both of which have left a lasting mark on RNA science, but she also points out all the time and effort that were spent on helping the RNA community develop into the welcoming scientific powerhouse that it has become. Perhaps it’s not a surprise that her favorite paper in RNA is also one from the Stietz lab. In her opinion, the paper “so elegantly showed [that] spurious RNA-protein interactions occurred in lysates. As an RNA cell biologist, I love that it teaches you the importance of profiling interactions when your molecules are in their proper cellular compartments and not floating randomly in a chaotic soup.”

You can reach out to Dr. Fox via X: @Afox_Perth or through LinkedIN.