Austin Smith | |
---|---|
Born | Austin Gerard Smith 1960 (age 61–62) Merseyside, UK [1] |
Alma mater | University of Edinburgh |
Awards | Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine (2010) [2] |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Stem Cells |
Institutions | University of Exeter |
Thesis | (1986) |
Doctoral advisor | Martin Hooper[ citation needed ] |
Website | www.exeter.ac.uk [3] |
Austin Gerard Smith (born 1960) is a professor at the University of Exeter and director of its Living Systems Institute. [3] He is notable for his pioneering work on the biology of embryonic stem cells. [4] [5]
Austin Smith obtained his doctoral degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1986. [6] [7]
He then carried out postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford, before joining the Centre for Genome Research at the University of Edinburgh as a group leader. [6] In 1996, he was appointed director of the centre, which became the Institute for Stem Cell Research under his leadership. [6] He remained as director of the Institute until his move to Cambridge in 2006. [8] Here, he became a director of the Welcome Trust Centre for Stem Cell Research [9] and later was the director of the new Wellcome Trust-MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute at the University of Cambridge, which was established with 8 million pounds ($12.5 million) awarded by the Wellcome Trust and Medical Research Council (UK) in 2012. [10]
In 2019, he was appointed as the new Director of the University of Exeter's Living Systems Institute. [3]
In 2003, Smith was awarded an MRC Research Professorship [6] and elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. [11] And in 2006, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. [12] In 2010, he was co-recipient of the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine along with French cardiologist Michel Haissaguerre. [2]
In February 2010, together with 13 other leading stem cell researchers, he wrote an open letter to journal editors to voice the opinion that obstructive reviews by a small number of researchers in the field were hindering publication of novel stem cell research. [13] [14]
The Medical Research Council (MRC) is responsible for co-coordinating and funding medical research in the United Kingdom. It is part of United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI), which came into operation 1 April 2018, and brings together the UK's seven research councils, Innovate UK and Research England. UK Research and Innovation is answerable to, although politically independent from, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.
Sir Martin John Evans is an English biologist who, with Matthew Kaufman, was the first to culture mice embryonic stem cells and cultivate them in a laboratory in 1981. He is also known, along with Mario Capecchi and Oliver Smithies, for his work in the development of the knockout mouse and the related technology of gene targeting, a method of using embryonic stem cells to create specific gene modifications in mice. In 2007, the three shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in recognition of their discovery and contribution to the efforts to develop new treatments for illnesses in humans.
Richard Henderson is a Scottish molecular biologist and biophysicist and pioneer in the field of electron microscopy of biological molecules. Henderson shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2017 with Jacques Dubochet and Joachim Frank.
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Sir Philip Cohen is a British researcher, academic and Royal Medal winner based at the Medical Research Council Protein Phosphorylation and Ubiquitylation Unit, School of Life Sciences at the University of Dundee. During the 1990s he was the world's third most cited professor and has been described by Professor Garry Taylor of the University of St Andrews as "one of the world’s top scientists". and by Professor Sir Peter Downes as "arguably the UK's leading biochemist and an iconic figure in UK science". As of 2008 he has written over 470 peer-reviewed papers and given over 250 invited lectures in 33 countries, and has been repeatedly linked to a move of biotechnology companies to Dundee and the economic regeneration that came with it, to the point where 15% of the local economy is derived from biotech companies and their employees. His work has also seen Dundee attracting some of the world's best scientists, with over 1% of the world's most cited scientists residing in Dundee and fundraising of more than £35 million over the last 10 years to help attract them.
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Fiona Watt, is a British scientist who is internationally known for her contributions to the field of stem cell biology. In the 1980s, when the field was in its infancy, she highlighted key characteristics of stem cells and their environment that laid the foundation for much present day research. She is currently director of the Centre for Stem Cells & Regenerative Medicine at King's College London, and Executive Chair of the Medical Research Council (MRC), the first woman to lead the MRC since its foundation in 1913. On 13 July 2021 she was appointed as the new Director of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO).
Sir Adrian Peter Bird, is a British geneticist and Buchanan Professor of Genetics at the University of Edinburgh. Bird has spent much of his academic career in Edinburgh, from receiving his PhD in 1970 to working at the MRC Mammalian Genome Unit and later serving as director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology. His research focuses on understanding DNA methylation and CpG islands, and their role in diseases such as Rett syndrome.
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Andrea Hilary Brand is the Herchel Smith Professor of Molecular Biology and a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. She heads a lab investigating nervous system development at the Gurdon Institute and the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience. She developed the GAL4/UAS system with Norbert Perrimon which has been described as “a fly geneticist's Swiss army knife”.
Peter Nigel Tripp Unwin FRS is a British scientist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, where he was Head of the Neurobiology Division from 1992 until 2008. He is currently also Emeritus Professor of Cell Biology at the Scripps Research Institute.
Allan Bradley FRS is a British geneticist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.
Ronald Alfred Laskey is a British cell biologist and cancer researcher.
Richard Olding Hynes FRS is a British biologist, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, and the Daniel K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research focuses on cell adhesion and the interactions between cells and the extracellular matrix, with a particular interest in understanding molecular mechanisms of cancer metastasis. He is well known as a co-discoverer of fibronectin molecules, a discovery that has been listed by Thomson Reuters ScienceWatch as a Nobel Prize candidate.
The Centre for Regenerative Medicine (CRM) is a stem cell research centre at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, dedicated to the study and development of new regenerative treatments for human diseases. The centre forms part of the university's Institute for Regeneration and Repair and is part of the BioQuarter cluster at Little France.
Sir Peter John Ratcliffe, FRS, FMedSci is a British Nobel Laureate physician-scientist who is trained as a nephrologist. He was a practising clinician at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford and Nuffield Professor of Clinical Medicine and head of the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine at the University of Oxford from 2004 to 2016. He has been a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford since 2004. In 2016 he became Clinical Research Director at the Francis Crick Institute, retaining a position at Oxford as member of the Ludwig Institute of Cancer Research and Director of the Target Discovery Institute, University of Oxford.
Sir James Cuthbert Smith is Director of Science at the Wellcome Trust and Senior Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute.
David Chaim Rubinsztein FRS FMedSci is the Deputy Director of the Cambridge Institute of Medical Research (CIMR), Professor of Molecular Neurogenetics at the University of Cambridge and a UK Dementia Research Institute Professor.
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Kate Gillian Storey is a developmental biologist and head of Division of Cell & Developmental Biology at University of Dundee.
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