Birgit Lane 2014 Cutaneous Biology Meeting

Birgit Lane

Birgit Lane is Executive Director of the Institute of Medical Biology, A*STAR, Singapore, where she also leads the Epithelial Biology Lab, and also heads the Biomedical Research Council’s Skin Biology Cluster platform. She came to Singapore from Scotland, where she held the Cox Chair of Anatomy & Cell Biology at the University of Dundee from 1991-2009. Prof Lane obtained her BSc and PhD from University College London and then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Imperial College and at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York, where she generated the first monoclonal antibodies targeted at keratin intermediate filament proteins. On returning to the UK she joined Joyce Taylor’s lab at ICRF, London, and established her own independent lab in 1985. At ICRF (now Cancer Research UK) she expanded the antibody work with pioneering studies on the application of monoclonal antibodies to keratins in diagnostic pathology, epithelial differentiation and keratin filament biology. In 1991 she moved to the University of Dundee, where her team made breakthrough discoveries on the causal role of keratin mutations in in many inherited skin fragility disorders. Her current research interests focus on genetic skin diseases and skin cancer susceptibility, and on the mechanistic role of the cytoskeleton in stress and wound healing in the epidermis and potential applications for new therapeutics. Birgit Lane has over 250 scientific publications and is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the UK’s Academy of Medical Sciences. She has played a central role in the planning and development of new institutions and laboratories at least four times in her career, and has organized many scientific meetings in the UK and Singapore.