News

1 October 2025

We are delighted to announce that James Thaventhiran has been appointed as Professor in the Department of Biochemistry.Over the past year, each of the six Research Themes within the School of Biological Sciences conducted an international search to identify outstanding individuals who would strengthen and enrich our research programmes. James was s…

23 September 2025

Many congratulations to Claudia Bonfio, who is one of the 77 early-career researchers to be awarded a total of £120 million to lead vital research, collaborate with innovators and develop their careers as the research and innovation leaders of the future. The UKRI Future Leader Fellowship provides up to seven years of support to enable award holder…

23 September 2025

In this Postdoc Appreciation Week we want to say a big thank you to all our postdocs for the brilliant contributions they make to the Department!We are very pleased that three of our postdocs have been recognised by the Cambridge Postdoc Academy. David Russell (Bonfio Group, pictured left) and Lisa Breckels (Lilley Group) are winners of the Level-U…

3 September 2025

Congratulations to Pankti Vaishnav on the selection of her research by the Molecular Biology of the Cell (MBoC) Editorial Board as the winner of the 2025 MBoC Early Career Paper Award. MBoC is the journal of the American Society for Cell Biology.The paper ‘Membrane composition and curvature in SNX9-mediated actin polymerization’ was the culmination…

2 September 2025

Congratulations to our associate Brian Hendrich on his appointment as Professor at the Living Systems Institute, University of Exeter. Brian moved to the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute from Edinburgh in 2008, and was recently Principal Research Associate and Director of the PhD Programme in Stem Cell Biology and Medicine. His group researches transc…

20 August 2025

Congratulations to Ioakeim 'Makis' Ampartzidis, who has been awarded the Pete Coffey Prize for the best submitted abstract to the 2025 UK Stem Cell Network Inaugural Meeting. He is a postdoc in the Hollfelder lab, studying planar cell polarity signalling during early embryotic development. Makis carried out the work for the submitted paper during h…

21 July 2025

In a new paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Joshua Lawrence and colleagues from the research groups of Chris Howe (Biochemistry) and Jenny Zhang (Chemistry) present a novel method for investigating complex bioelectrical pathways using electrodes.Electron transfer reactions are fundamental to life, powering essential pr…

18 July 2025

Mike Deery, who is the facility manager at the Cambridge Centre for Proteomics (CCP), has been awarded a grant from the BBSRC ALERT 24 mid-range equipment for biosciences research. The grant application was titled ‘Increasing mass spectrometry functionality and capacity for the Cambridge biological sciences community’.  The award will be supplement…

18 July 2025

Congratulations to Jessica Corry, who has won the Cancer Research Horizons Early Career Entrepreneur Award! Jessica was a PhD student with Darerca Owen, graduating in 2022. She co-founded xterna, a company using enhanced nucleic acids to revolutionise targeted drug delivery.The award recognises ‘a PhD or Postdoctoral early-career cancer researcher …

14 July 2025

The Lowe Syndrome Trust UK, Dent Disease Foundation USA and The Lowe Syndrome Association USA have each awarded grants of €20,000 towards a pilot clinical study led Professor Francesco Emma, Head of the Nephrology unit at the Bambino Gesù Children’s hospital in Rome, Italy. The first patients were enrolled into this Phase 2 clinical trial of alpeli…

13 July 2025

Our Professor of Molecular Systems Biology, Kiran Patil, and his colleagues in the MRC Toxicology unit and at EMBL, Imperial College, King's College, London and Tübingen, have published an article in Nature Microbiology. The paper examines how certain species of microbe found in the human gut can absorb PFAS - the toxic and long-lasting ‘forever ch…

4 July 2025

Jeanne Salje and her group based at CIMR have published two papers on Orientia tsutsugamushi, the bacterium that causes the vector-bourne human disease, scrub typhus. The first paper appears in PLOS Pathogens andis a collaboration with colleagues in Bangkok, Irvine and Oxford. It is an analysis of seven diverse strains of Orientia tsutsugamushi tha…

3 July 2025

A University feature article to highlight a new research network in the School of Biological Sciences focused on Women’s Health includes the Twigger Group's work on breastfeeding through the Cambridge Lactation Lab and CAMB MOM study. Read the ‘Putting women’s health in the spotlight’ feature.

2 July 2025

The Dupree Group has been selected to be part of one of the thirteen flagship, main exhibits at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition this week. Their exhibit is HAPPYMAT: Materials Inspired by Nature and comes out of the Dupree Group's EPSRC project with Imperial College.

2 July 2025

The University has published a new article on the Cambridge Microscopy Bioscience Platform, featuring research from groups using the platform across the School of Biological Sciences and including the Machesky Group's work on better treatments for pancreatic cancer and images by Roberta Palmulli and Lisa Dobson (pictured).