Management Committee

Adele Marston

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Adele Marston is Professor of Cell Biology at the University of Edinburgh, and a Wellcome Investigator. She is Director of the Discovery Research Platform for Hidden Cell Biology.

Adele investigates the fundamental mechanisms by which cells reproduce themselves and transmit their genome to the next generation. She has a particular interest in meiosis, the cell division that generates eggs and sperm. Using budding yeast as a model system, she has defined key concepts of chromosome segregation and investigated how errors in these pathways could account for the high error rates observed in human oocytes.

Adele was the Genetics Society Promega Young Life Scientist of the Year (1999) and an EMBO Young Investigator (2010). She was elected to EMBO membership in 2019 and to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2022. In 2024, Adele was awarded the Mary Lyon Medal from the Genetics Society.

Marston Lab

Robin Allshire

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Robin Allshire is Professor of Chromosome Biology at the University of Edinburgh. His group first demonstrated that fission yeast centromeres contain heterochromatin that silences embedded genes and subsequently showed that this heterochromatin is crucial for ensuring sister-centromere cohesion, promoting CENP-A chromatin, and thus, kinetochore assembly. His team discovered that histone H3 lysine 9 methylation acts as a genuine epigenetic mark, enabling the transmission of information through cell division. Recently, they found that this epigenetic mechanism allows fungi to develop resistance to antifungal drugs without DNA alterations. This finding may have revealed an important, hidden cellular mechanism through which pathogenic fungi become resistant to the limited number of available antifungal agents in both clinical and agricultural settings. Currently, his group aims to understand the rare events that drive fungal adaptation to environmental insults, such as fungicides and antifungal drugs, through epigenetic processes.

Awards: Elected EMBO member 1998; Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 2005. Elected Fellow of the Royal Society, London 2011. Genetics Society Medal 2013. Elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences 2020.

Allshire Lab

Donal O’Carroll

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After graduating in biochemistry from Trinity College Dublin, Dónal O’Carroll performed his PhD studies in the laboratory of Thomas Jenuwein at the Research Institute for Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna. Thereafter he joined The Rockefeller University as a postdoctoral fellow and research associate with Alexander Tarakhovsky. In 2007, Dónal moved to the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Rome as a group leader. He joined the University of Edinburgh in 2015 as the Chair of Stem Cell Biology. Between 2015 and 2020, he was the Head of the Institute for Stem Cell Research and Associate Director of the Centre for Regenerative Medicine. In 2018 he also became a group leader at the Wellcome Centre for Cell Biology. The O’Carroll laboratory studies the mammalian germline from an RNA perspective. His laboratory couples advanced mouse genetics with state-of-the-art sequencing and proteomic approaches to explore the PIWI-interacting RNA (piRNA) pathway, RNA modification and germ cell ageing. He has made discoveries that have contributed to the understanding of transcriptional and post-transcriptional mechanisms that regulate gene and transposon expression.

O'Carroll Lab

Meriem El Karoui

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Professor Meriem El Karoui received her PhD in Microbiology in 1998 from the University René Descartes (Paris), where she focused on understanding DNA repair in bacteria under the supervision of Dr. A. Gruss (INRA). For her post-doctoral training she moved to the University of Oxford (in Prof. J. Errington’s group), and then started her group at INRA (France) to study chromosome organization in bacteria. In 2009, as a visiting professor at Harvard Medical School, she developed stochastic models of DNA repair. In 2013, she was awarded a Chancellor’s Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh, where she has established a group with merged expertise in mathematics, microbiology and biophysics. Her research focuses on the integration of bacterial physiology in the understanding of antibiotic tolerance. Meriem became Chair of Bacterial Systems Biology in 2019 and is a Wellcome Trust Investigator. She has also been director of the Centre for Engineering Biology, a community of more than 50 research groups that takes synthetic biology concepts and translates them into real-world solutions, from 2019 until December 2023. From January 2024, Meriem has been Director of Research at ENS-Paris-Saclay (France).

El Karoui Lab

Owen Davies

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Owen Davies is a Wellcome Senior Research Fellow at the Wellcome Centre for Cell Biology. After graduating from the University of St. Andrews with a BSc (Hons) in Medical Science in 2003, he studied for a PhD at the University of Cambridge with Prof. Sir Tom Blundell and Prof. Luca Pellegrini. Upon completion in 2007, he was awarded a Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 Research Fellowship for postdoctoral study at the University of Edinburgh with Prof. Sally Lowell. He then returned to the University of Cambridge in 2010, where he established his career research interest in the meiotic synaptonemal complex in Prof. Luca Pellegrini’s laboratory. He was awarded a Wellcome Sir Henry Dale Fellowship in 2014 to establish his independent laboratory to study the synaptonemal complex at the University of Newcastle. In 2021, he moved to the Wellcome Centre for Cell Biology at the University of Edinburgh as a Wellcome Senior Research Fellow to study the structural biology of synaptonemal complex, recombination and chromosomal dynamics in meiosis.

Davies Lab

Juri Rappsilber

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Juri Rappsilber studied chemistry at the Technische Universität Berlin (Germany), Strathclyde University, Glasgow (UK) and with Tom Rapoport, Harvard Medical School, Boston (USA).  In 2001,  he earned his Ph.D. jointly from EMBL Heidelberg and the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt (Germany) working in the laboratory of Matthias Mann on the mass spectrometric analysis of protein complexes. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense before starting his independent career at IFOM, Milan (Italy) in 2003.

In 2006, Juri joined the Wellcome Centre for Cell Biology, University of Edinburgh, twice obtaining Senior Research Fellowships of the Wellcome Trust and since 2010 being Professor of Proteomics. Since 2011, he is Professor of Bioanalytics at the Technische Universität Berlin. Juri combines organic chemistry and computational sciences with advanced mass spectrometry, to expand the frontiers of our understanding of the structural and mechanistic basis of how cells work.

Rappsilber Lab

Susan Rosser

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Susan is Professor of Synthetic Biology and Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) Chair in Emerging Technologies at the University of Edinburgh.  She is Director of the UK Centre for 

Mammalian Synthetic Biology and Co-director of the Edinburgh Genome Foundry for synthetic DNA synthesis and assembly.  In 2022, her work was recognised by the national academies of both Scotland and Wales, being elected as a Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) Fellow and to the Learned Society of Wales.

Her research focuses on developing tools for synthetic biology approaches for pathway and genome engineering in bacteria, yeast and mammalian cell systems. The applications of her work include engineering CHO cell lines for biologic therapeutic protein production, developing genetic control circuits for advanced therapeutics, rapid strain engineering for production of high value secondary metabolites, and developing genetic tools for bio-computation: engineering cells to sense, process and memorise information. 

Rosser Lab

Georg Kustatscher

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Georg Kustatscher is an MRC Career Development Fellow at the Wellcome Centre for Cell Biology (WCB).

He studied Molecular Biology at the University of Salzburg, Austria, and obtained a PhD from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, working on epigenetics in the lab of Andreas Ladurner. From 2008 to 2020 he was a Postdoc in Juri Rappsilber’s group at the WCB. In September 2020, with the help of an MRC Career Development Award, he joined the Institute for Quantitative Biology, Biochemistry and Biotechnology (IQB3) in Edinburgh as an independent group leader, before returning to the WCB in 2022.

His lab combines proteomics and computational approaches to understand how cells regulate mRNA and protein levels from a systems perspective.

Kustatscher Lab

Shaun Webb

Shaun Webb studied Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of Glasgow where he subsequently obtained an MSc in Bioinformatics. In 2009 he joined the Wellcome Centre for Cell Biology at the University of Edinburgh as part of the bioinformatics core facility to collaborate on epigenetics research projects and develop new methods for analysing high throughput sequencing data. In 2019 he was appointed manager of the facility and oversaw bioinformatics research and data analysis within the centre.

Shaun now manages the Bioinformatics Core for the Discovery Research Platform for Hidden Cell Biology.

David Kelly

David obtained his PhD in 1998 from University College London (Royal Free Hospital) where he studied intestinal blood flow changes in response to NSAIDs. He then moved to the Institute of Child Health (UCL) where he studied pulmonary hypertension in the neonate before moving to the Rayne Institute (UCL) in 2001 to manage a new imaging facility. In 2003 David moved to Edinburgh to manage the imaging facility in the Institute for Stem Cell Research, then in 2004, he took over the management of the imaging facility in the Wellcome Centre for Cell Biology, where it grew from a small local facility into a large imaging facility supporting the imaging needs of the School of Biological Sciences.

David now manages the Light Microscopy Core or the Discovery Research Platform for Hidden Cell Biology, where he maintains all the Core equipment, providing training in both microscopy, image analysis and writing bespoke analysis/acquisition scripts.

Christos Spanos

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Christos completed his BSc in Medical Microbiology at the University of Surrey in UK in 2008. He started his PhD at the same University in 2008, applying quantitative proteomics on Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease models, looking for biomarkers of disease progression. Following the completion of his PhD study, he moved to Cambridge where he was employed by Thermo Scientific as an Applications Specialist on Nitrogen and Sulphur Analysers and on ICP-OES instruments, from 2012 until 2014. In June 2014 he moved to Edinburgh, where he joined the Wellcome Centre for Cell Biology as a Proteomics Facility manager.

Christos now manages the Proteomics Core for the Discovery Research Platform for Hidden Cell Biology.

Martin Singleton

Martin did his undergraduate studies in Biological and Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Exeter and stayed on to do a Ph.D. in biocatalysis and protein crystallography. He then carried out post-doctoral research at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, Oxford and subsequently the ICRF Clare Hall laboratory working in the field of DNA replication and repair. In 2006 he moved to the Cancer Research UK labs in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and then the Francis Crick Institute to work on chromosome segregation. He moved to the Wellcome Centre for Cell Biology in Edinburgh in 2021 to manage the Cryo-EM facility.

Martin now manages the Structural Biology Core for the Discovery Research Platform for Hidden Cell Biology..

Karen May

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Karen did her undergraduate studies in Genetics at Leeds University, then studied for a PhD at University College London working on the mechanism of cell division in fission yeast. She then moved to the Wellcome Centre for Cell biology (WCB) in Edinburgh to work on chromosome segregation. In 2021 she became the WCB Centre Manager and took over management of the new Wellcome 4 year PhD programme in Integrative Cell Mechanisms (iCM).

Karen is now the Project Manager and main point of contact for the Discovery Research Platform for Hidden Cell Biology.

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Following a 20 year career in a variety of HR environments, Carolyn joined the Wellcome Centre for Cell Biology in 2014 as a part-time Administrative Assistant.  She continues to work part-time to provide support to the Centre and the Wellcome 4 year PhD Programme in Integrative Cell Mechanisms.

Carolyn is the Communications Officer for the Discovery Research Platform for Hidden Cell Biology.