Summary
Job Title: Professor and Head of Section of Cell Biology and Functional Genomics
Research: Signal transduction in the pancreatic β-cell in health and disease - my chief focus is in using functional genomics at the cellular and whole organism level to dissect the role of genes associated with Type 2 diabetes.
Brief Biosketch: After studying for a PhD in Bristol with Dick Denton FRS on mitochondrial Ca2+ signalling, I subsequently worked on the pancreatic β-cell as an MRC travelling Fellow with Claes Wollheim in Geneva. There, working collaboratively with Tullio Pozzan and Rosario Rizzuto in Padua, I established new approaches to exploring the control of insulin release at the single cell level through the use of recombinant target probes and other techniques. I then returned to Bristol, becoming a full Professor of Biochemistry in 2002, and moved to Imperial College in 2006.
My current research is supported by Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator and Royal Society Wolfson Merit Awards, by UK Research Council and Diabetes UK grants, as well as by the European Commission Innovative Medicines Initiative in Diabetes (IMIDIA).
Prizes and Awards: I was awarded the Minkowski Prize of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes in 2004, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation's Mary Jane Krugel Award (2005), a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award (2011), a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award (2012) and the Dorothy Hodgkin Lecturehip of Diabetes UK (2014).
Research Support. Supported by Programme and other grants from the Wellcome Trust, MRC, DUK, JDRF, BBSRC, NIH, BHF and EU.
Related links to Section of Cell Biology and Functional Genomics and Imperial Beta Cell Consortium
Publications
Journals
Jaafar R, Tran S, Shah A, et al., 2019, mTORC1 to AMPK switching underlies β-cell metabolic plasticity during maturation and diabetes., J Clin Invest, Vol:130
Buenaventura T, Bitsi S, Laughlin WE, et al., 2019, Agonist-induced membrane nanodomain clustering drives GLP-1 receptor responses in pancreatic beta cells., Plos Biology, Vol:17, ISSN:1544-9173, Pages:1-40
Da Silva Xavier G, Rutter GA, 2019, Metabolic and Functional Heterogeneity in Pancreatic β Cells., J Mol Biol
Davis SPX, Kumar S, Alexandrov Y, et al., 2019, Convolutional neural networks for reconstruction of undersampled optical projection tomography data applied to in vivo imaging of zebrafish., Journal of Biophotonics, ISSN:1864-063X
Salem V, Delgadillo Silva L, Suba K, et al., 2019, Leader β cells coordinate Ca2+ dynamics across pancreatic islets in vivo, Nature Metabolism, Vol:1, ISSN:2522-5812, Pages:615-629