MacArthur completed his undergraduate and PhD in biomedical science at the
University of Sydney before moving to postdoctoral studies at the
Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in
Cambridge, UK. He then took up a faculty position at
Harvard Medical School,
Massachusetts General Hospital, and the
Broad Institute of
MIT and
Harvard in
Boston to build a new research team in a recently established department led by
Mark Daly. During his time at the Broad Institute, led the development of the Exome Aggregation Consortium (ExAC) - later known as The Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD) - in 2014. gnomAD is now the world's largest publicly available collection of
human DNA variation, spanning over 800,000 individuals. MacArthur left the Broad Institute as he moved to Australia to lead the CPG, a joint initiative between the
Garvan Institute of Medical Research and the
Murdoch Children's Research Institute, in 2020. == Awards ==