Projects

Research projects and supervisions undertaken by Dr Joe Rainger (Research Fellow) in the Rainger Lab:

  • Medical Research Foundation and Moorfields Eye Charity Child and Adolescent Eye Health Research Grant: Bridging the causal gap for families affected with severe birth eye defects. £299,882 (2025-2028)
  • Fight for Sight PhD studentship: Just out of sight: determining gene regulatory loci to improve coloboma diagnoses. £133,923 (2025-2028)
  • ISP pump-priming grant: Micro-CT soft tissue analysis of chicken organ development – establishing a basis for high-throughput phenotype screening. £2863 (2025-2026)
  • UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship: Novel approaches to define tissue fusion mechanisms in embryonic development.  £1.82 M (2019-2026)
  • BBSRC Capital Equipment Bid: “Integrated Tissue Phenotyping Platform” £4.2 M (2020)
  • Fight For Sight Early Career Fellowship: Elucidating the genetic and molecular causes of ocular coloboma.  £199,998 (2015-2018)
  • DDI Innovative Models for Medicine: ForSight: The generation of biomedically-relevant chicken models of human sight loss to prime for therapy and intervention £111,998 (2024-2025)
  • BBSRC Institute Strategic Programme Grant: Named investigator
  • Academic Lead: Roslin Early Career Researcher pump-prime grant scheme (2018-present; Funded >58 projects totalling >£200,00)
  • Meeting organiser:
    • BSDB Autumn short format meeting Septation and Tissue Fusion in Embryonic Development and Disease (King’s College London, 2024);
    • College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine Inaugural Post-doc symposium (Edinburgh, 2024);
    • Avian Research Symposium (Online, 2024);
    • BSDB Autumn meeting (Karolinska, Sweden, 2017)
  • Chair: CMVM College Research Staff Committee (representing Early Career Researchers across CVMV).
  • Visiting students and undergraduate projects: Typically 2x UoE UG Honour’s projects per year (since 2018), hosted ERASMUS+ students, Funded Vacation Projects (Wellcome, Gurdon/Company of Biologists, World Poultry Association,  Betty Iggo R(D)SVS scholarships, and non-funded international students (Barcelona, 2025), and PG visitors (Company of Biologists funded).
  • Direct supervision of >20 staff or students since 2015.
  • PhD Examinations: University of Edinburgh (2019, internal); University of Aberdeen Institute of Medical Sciences (2021, 2025), University College London (2022), University of East Anglia (2024), University of Edinburgh (2024)

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