Draft:Lucy R. Forrest

Lucy Rachel Forrest is a researcher and Senior Investigator at National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). During her undergraduate years, she performed research with both Eli Lilly and Mark Sansom in the area of biochemistry. As a postgraduate, she worked with Tom Woolf, John E. Walker and Barry Honig before moving on to perform independent research on transport mechanisms. As Section Chief and Investigator for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), she hosts a lab focusing on “questions relating to membrane proteins, spanning specific mechanisms of individual proteins through to general biophysical principles.” She was granted the Margaret Oakley Dayhoff Award from the Biophysical Society in 2012 for her work in biophysics, and has attended conferences to present her findings since 2013.

Educational Career
Forrest studied chemistry at the University of Surrey, UK, with a minor in computing and received her Bachelor of Science degree. She moved to Oxford in 1997, and received her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Oxford in 2000. Forrest was a grantee for the Fulbright Visiting Scholar Program, and was awarded the Fulbright or Royal Society Fellowship. She moved to New York City, NY, USA in 2003 to work at Columbia University Medical School.

In 2007, Forrest was designated the Max Planck Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysics in Frankfurt, Germany. In 2012, she was a recipient of the Margaret Oakley Dayhoff Award for her research on “conformational changes of membrane proteins related to their function, and her impact on the field of computational structural biology”. Forrest has been an Investigator and Section Chief for the NIH in Bethesda, MD, USA since 2013, and hosts a lab where she conducts her research. In August 2013, she was granted tenure for her current organization, NINDS, and in 2017 was promoted to Senior Investigator. Forrest is also a mentor for the National Research Mentoring Network, where she aims to increase accessibility and inclusivity of science.

Research
Forrest participated in Eli Lilly’s research site in Windlesham, Surrey, attempting to identify replacements for the popular antidepressant, Prozac. After moving to Oxford, the research she performed was supervised by Mark Sansom: she simulated and modeled membrane proteins in lipid bilayers, and further studied proton channels and predicted numbers of subunits in the ATP-synthase c-ring.

Forrest performed postdoctoral research at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine under Tom Woolf’s laboratory, focusing on methods to model protein structures. She had a second brief postdoctoral research period with John E. Walker at the Medical Research Council Dunn Human Nutrition Unit in Cambridge, UK. Forrest then moved to New York City, NY, USA, to work at Columbia University with Barry Honig, focusing on predicting the protein structure of membranes. Since 2005, she has been conducting independent research on secondary transport mechanisms. After joining NINDS and hosting her laboratory in NIH in 2013, Forrest has conducted with an interest in the role of pseudo-symmetry in transport mechanisms, using computational modeling and simulation methods to address questions related to secondary transport.

Forrest has published her research in NIH, the Journal of Neuroscience, the EncoMPASS online database, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of Biological Chemistry, the Biophysical Journal, the Wiley Online Library, Nature, Science, and more. She has been cited by Sandra National Laboratories with the topic of understanding the dynamics of the membrane protein rhodopsin.

Conferences
Forrest has attended several academic conferences throughout her career, including the annual Gordon Research Conference and the Biophysical Society meetings.

Forrest was the vice chair and discussion leader for the Sugar Transport section of the Gordon Research Conference’s Mechanisms of Membrane Transport conference in 2013 in Mount Holyoke College, MA, USA. In 2015, she traveled to Bates College to present once again in Mechanisms of Membrane Transport: Integrating Structure, Function and Dynamics. In 2023, Forrest returned to present for the subsection Structure, Dynamics and Allosteric Regulation.

In 2017, Forrest traveled to New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, to present in the Transporters and Exchangers sections I and II for the Biophysical Society. She returned to the society in 2018 in San Francisco, CA, USA, to speak in the platform Membrane Pumps, Transporters, and Exchangers.