Sally Lowell is Personal Chair of Stem Cell Biology and Early Development at the University of Edinburgh. Her research helps us understand how cells exchange information with each other in order to coordinate the construction of tissues and organs during embryonic development.
Her major contributions include developing quantitative computational tools to measure cell behaviour in fine detail, and synthetic biology systems to manipulate cell interactions in order to control cell behaviour in useful ways. She has also found that cells determine their position relative to neighbouring cells and use this information to avoid mistakes when building the embryo. These findings have implications for understanding why cell behaviour goes awry during diseases such as cancer, where normal cell communication and tissue organisation can break down.