Anna Philpott, Head of the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Cambridge, is a leading developmental biologist with a long-standing interest in the co-ordination of division and differentiation in embryonic development, and its implications in treatment of paediatric cancer and in cellular reprogramming for tissue regeneration.
Pioneering work in her laboratory has uncovered conserved mechanisms that allow co-ordination of the cell cycle and differentiation in early development. She was the first to show that CDK inhibitors act beyond their role in cells cycle control to promote neuronal differentiation directly, revealing unexpected multi-layer controls co-ordinating cell cycle and differentiation. These studies exemplify her versatility in identifying key commonalities in molecular controls in different tissues.