05 May 2020 Congratulations to Dr Sally Lowell, Group Leader at the Centre for Regenerative Medicine, who has been awarded a Wellcome Trust Senior Fellowship. Senior Research Fellowships support independent researchers who are emerging as global leaders in their field and want to tackle the most important questions in science. Image Dr Lowell started her own group at the University of Edinburgh in 2007. The aim of her research is to understand how pluripotent cells (stem cells with the ability to generate all the specialised cell types of an organism) steer a path towards lineage commitment (the decision to differentiate and become specialised). She is interested in how local communication between individual cells influences these decisions. Her lab have identified transcription factors that control the first steps towards differentiation, and which can be exploited as markers of early primed or committed states. They are also investigating how events outside the nucleus, particularly cell adhesion and tissue morphology, may influence the way that pluripotent cells receive and interpret differentiation cues. By uncovering the interplay between transcription, signalling, and morphogenesis, they hope to discover the hidden rules behind the apparent unpredictability of the differentiation response. The Wellcome Trust Senior Fellowship award will support the salaries of three lab members as well as research costs for five years, allowing Dr Lowell and her team to continue their important work. “I’m very grateful to all the brilliant members of my lab who have worked so hard to build up our research programme, and delighted to get funding from Wellcome to fund this programme for five more years. I look forward to celebrating with everyone once we are out of lockdown!” Dr Sally Lowell, Group Leader, Centre for Regenerative Medicine Dr Sally Lowell research group This article was published on 2024-02-26
